does life imitate art or art imitate life?

Le Bambole

Sophie Agnese Krause

Student

Sophie Agnese Krause

Academic staff

Giulia Cordin German A. Duarte Eva Leitolf

Course

Democracy in Distress? Manufacturing Majorities Through New Forms of Propaganda

Program

BA Major Art

Semester

2021/22 SS

11’52” video

What is it even all about? All the screenwriting, the need to stage, set up and film?
What if I just took all of those ideas, let them simmer, then just wrote down all that comes up to my mind, in one sitting?
And what if I then rehearsed acting it?

With the camera looking at me, carrying the sight of the audience.

Then I would just send this piece out and with it any ability to control and preserve it.

I watch it and want to edit it, censor it, destroy it.

But what if I stopped cutting and manipulating while still cutting and manipulating?

A project made in the course

Democracy in Distress? Manufacturing Majorities Through New Forms of Propaganda

“In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda, 1941 The term propaganda is derived from the Latin propagare (to spread, distribute) and today, in general understanding, describes targeted attempts to generate, manipulate and direct public opinions. A prominent, historical example of totalitarian propaganda is the story of a photograph from the early 1930s. This picture originally shows the smiling Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the Soviet secret police, next to Joseph Stalin on the Moscow Canal. Yezhov fell out of favor a few years later, was executed in 1940 and should then be forgotten: he was removed from the photo by analog retouching.

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