For the last screening of 2014, the Cinema Dynamo at the Centre d’Art Contemporain presents Neue Brüder by the German-French duo Sylvie Boisseau and Frank Westermeyer. This experimental documentary looks at colonial issues through ideological assumptions embodied in the landscape.

Neue Brüderis staged in the south of Chile, a territory which was settled by European immigrants in the late 19th century, and has since been intensively exploited by various industries and infrastructures at the expense of the indigenous Mapuche people.

The film emblematizes landscape itself as the protagonist of some carefully chosen single shots. Through the weaving of interviews conducted with a variety of people from those regions – which convey a plurality of visions and a polyphony of discourses –, the viewer is eventually brought to perceive a critical deconstruction of the landscape. Freed from any naturalism, the landscape becomes a medium.

The contemporary perspective that Neue Brüder casts over the Chilean landscape is the starting point for an artistic research project. Which contributes – through different discourses coming from diverse disciplines such as anthropology, ethno-history, history of art and artistic practice – to the emergence of a postcolonial concept of landscape. This research project has been developed at Geneva University of Art and Design – HEAD – and funded by the Competence Network in Art and Design of HES-SO.

Sylvie Boisseau and Frank Westermeyer live in Berlin and Geneva. They produce video works and interventions in public space questioning ideological assumptions and offer artistic research focusing on forms of “mise en abyme” between reality and virtuality. Their films have been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions such as at Experimental Film and Video Festival, Seoul, South Korea; Transmediale, Berlin, or at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival.