Jonathan Guggenberger

Mainly coming from painting, I studied Fine Arts at UdK Berlin and quickly changed my main media to installation and video, often combining both into mixed media rooms trying to direct and alternate the perception of both the audiovisual and the spatial works. I then studied film studies and political science. There I found access to a – for me – quite unfamiliar medium of expression: writing. My writings since then include cultural/film critique; scientific papers mostly on political and philosophical dimensions of film historiography, but also on historical and contemporary forms of exile and the history of social movements and their cultural expressions; programmatic texts, letters and speeches for political organizations dealing mostly with antisemitism, patriarchal culture, and political economy; and finally, scripts and screenplays. I continued my filmic/video work with mostly research-based projects about e.g., conspiracy theorists (Schneewolf) or the historical layers of a former Zyklon-B production site in Dessau (Rattenkönig 1). Since almost two years I am working on my first feature film Rat King, a paranoia thriller and political parody, which will premiere in July 2022.

Besides my artistic practice, I am working as a researcher for academic research projects on the attention strategies of videoactivism on social media and about TikTok activism in the conflict between Israel/Palestine.

Bringing these contexts together, my work to date has been characterized by the complexity of dealing with different areas of artistic, filmic, but also political and academic activity. I am interested in the specific differences, but also in the interfaces between these different disciplines, which I also try to explore formally in my own filmic and research-based works. Therefore, the focal points of my cinematic/video work are open, experimental film-aesthetic forms and genre mixes, which in terms of content often deal with real social, historical, and psychological phenomena and alternate them in aesthetically accurate forms. With great knowledge and love for dark areas of film history, I am moved by the untapped potential of Spielfilm (meaning both feature films and filmic forms of play) in all its formal expressions. Especially where film is able to let hope arise in paranoia and vice versa, utopia in downfall, and to lay bare a connection between the individual, society and history that was believed to be lost.