1 - “If People Want to Oppress You, They Make You Say ‘I’”: Hito Steyerl in Conversation

Summary

Hito steyerl is a filmmaker and cultural theorist whose work conceptualizes social issues pertaining to globalization, racism, and migration. She is professor of media practice at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany, and has also taught at Goldsmiths College, London, and Bard College, New York. Her films and installations have been featured in numerous exhibitions including Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art (2004), and documenta 12 (2007). In December 2012, she made her solo debut in New York at e-flex, and also had her work showcased at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This particular interview with Hito Steyerl was conducted a short time after the close of the documenta 12, where Steyerl’s film Lovely Andrea was exhibited as an installation and proved the subject of much discussion. In that film, Steyerl returns to Japan in search of some bondage photos taken of her nearly two decades earlier, when she was a visiting student abroad attending the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo. Motivated at that time both by the opportunity to earn money and as part of an ultimately abortive venture into investigative journalism, she kept her identity concealed under a pseudonym, borrowing the real name of her childhood friend Andrea Wolf. Wolf herself had died in 1998 in Kurdistan, where she had joined the Kurdish independence movement PKK. Our questions to Steyerl about Lovely Andrea ultimately served as a point of departure for a discussion of the notion of the self, a concept rarely explicitly taken up within her work. It is notable that Steyerl herself, who is of German and Japanese descent, almost never appeared on camera in her own work until quite recently. In the face of these dangers, the interview examines the possibilities made available via the visible body and its discourses as distinct from those of first-person narration.

The following transcribed conversation took place in the context of a visit to Toronto in April 2008 that was sponsored by the Goethe-Institut and included the North American debut of her film Journal No. 1 (2007) at symposium “Contemporary Autobiographical Non-Fiction: The German Context,” hosted by the German department and Joint Initiative in German and European Studies at the University of Toronto.