Between fiction and documentary, the work of Benjamin Ramírez Pérez explores questions of authenticity and identity as well as individual and collective relationships to history and geography.
Benjamin Ramírez Pérez was a participant at de Ateliers Amsterdam from 2016 – 2018. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 2009–2015 with Phil Collins, Matthias Müller and Julia Scher. His works have been screened at IFFR, Locarno, Edinburgh and Toronto International Film Festival, among others. He had recent Group and Solo shows at Artothek Cologne, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, de Ateliers, Amsterdam, and Alternative Space Loop, Seoul.
His works blur the line between fiction and reality while interrogating our political and social landscape and reflecting on processes of image making and their historical, political and technological implications. Staged narratives are intersected with essayistic and documentary material, drawing on cinematic, literary and theoretical references – such as in his film CONFLUENCE (2018, co-directed with Stefan Ramírez Pérez), which centers around Serbian pop singer and former child star Doris Bizetić.
DESPAIR
HD Video / 22:00 min / 2018
DESPAIR works with newly filmed 16mm footage of cinematic reenactments, which are connected in an associative collage-like layering, taking Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film of the same title from 1977 as its starting point.
Drawing on and digressing from various complementary sources such as Fassbinder’s contribution to „Germany in Autumn“, David Cronenberg’s „Dead Ringers“, the 1970s „Mission Impossible“ TV series as well as cel-animation, the theme of the cinematic double is explored and questions of identity, identification and alienation are raised alongside an inquiry into the political and cultural legacies of the German Autumn.
CONFLUENCE
HD Video / 21:00 min / 2017-18
CONFLUENCE centers around Serbian pop singer and former child star Doris Bizetić. In a mixture between pop and lecture performance Doris’ biography is conflated with histories of architectures in Belgrade.
As Doris recounts memories of her childhood in front of cameras and talks about war trauma, her biography is linked to the history of Belgrade’s CK Tower, in which her life stages as well as the transitions of political systems in Serbia are mirrored.