#39: Bettina Nürnberg & Dirk Peuker

Bettina Nürnberg and Dirk Peuker present:

Flat Roofs for Mussolini, 2012, 20:00 min
Flat Roofs for Mussolini talks about the Italien Rationalism at Lake Como and the buildings by Guiseppe Terragni, who was an important pioneer of this style and tried to persuade the fascist regime to adopt his architecture as an official style. Terragni produced a body of work unique in terms of consistency and density. His buildings conform to the modern and are characterised by a reduction to elementary geometrical basic forms. While his buildings now serve as an important reference for architects such as Peter Eisenmann, they are also glorified and their political dimension is downplayed.

The American Houses, 2010, 20:00 min
The American Houses (shot on 16 mm) examines the buildings of the nearly forgotten German architect, Thilo Schoder. Schoder, was classified as an architect of “The New Objectivity” movement of the 1920s. Schoder built some modernist houses in the 8 years period, from 1923 to 1931, in small villages from eastern Germany to the Czech Republic. When the Nazis took power Schoder, accused of being a socialist, was refused any further building contracts, forcing him to emigrate to Norway. In The American Houses the condition of the buildings filmed range from highly renovated to abandoned and dilapidated. The surviving examples are not portrayed as technical depictions, but as subjective sensation.

Zement – working title (work in progress), 10:00 min
Zement extracts, with an personal introduction and statement by the artists, an insight in a production process: The film Zement/Cement grapples with the past and present of a residential development built in the aftermath of World War II on the site of a former concentration camp. The housing development retained the erstwhile camp’s water supply, sewage system, and roads, and reclaimed some of its materials. The arched gate to the camp still stands to this day, and leads into the housing development.

 

Dirk Peuker (b. 1970 in Friedrichroda, Germany) studied experimental filmmaking at the Universität der Künste Berlin and Fine Arts at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Since  2009 Peuker is artistic assistant at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee. Bettina Nürnberg (b.1976 in Mannheim, Germany) studied experimental filmmaking at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Both are working and living in Berlin.

Dirk Peuker’s web site: www.dirkpeuker.de