Possession 2021
2-channel video, 2K, 31:17 min, stereo sound
Shot in the open coal mines of the Ruhrgebiet in western Germany, its surrounding torn down ghost villages
and mountainous slagheaps, as well as subterranean karst caves in eastern Slovakia, Possession joins
contemporary panoramas, climate-fictional narratives, subtle body horror and analogue special effects.
A woman works as hand-pollinator at a fruit plantation in close proximity to the still operating coal mines.
On these premises she catches an environ-mental disease - a microbody, which is ingested and after brief adjustion
symptoms enables the growth of new sensoriums, attuned to the environment. We have never been individuals;
necessarily we become chimeric citizens.
Landscapes inscribed with unprecedented human activity shaping western economy as it is today as much as they
have been shaped by profit-oriented extraction, become sites where logics and thought patterns of extractive
politics, possessive enclosures and our notion of energy can be questioned and assembled anew.
Fossil fuels, substances which have no value to the capitalocene until they‘re burned, are cast as poetically
energized materials, an incredibly dense complex of former organisms and ecosystems that can be resurrected
anew.
with Johanna Käthe Michel
Fredi de Graft
Gesche Witte
DOP Mathias Reitz Zausinger
Aerial DOP Thomás da Silva
sound on site Florian Purschke
lighting Thomás da Silva
soundtrack Georg Paul
advisor Giulia Zabarella
director Laura Leppert
production
script
editing
locations
props & sets
costumes
additional footage
special thanks Tatiana Takáčová, Petra Housková, Anna Mária Trávničková,
Zuzana Kotiková, Igor Kopeč, Alisha Raissa Danscher,
Linda Schröer, Laila Schubert, Olaf Nicolai
