Film Screening: Moving Objects: Biographies of Fragments

Canadian artists Vid Ingelevics and Blake Fitzpatrick recorded stories of how people acquired a piece or pieces of the Berlin Wall. Their oral history project, Freedom Rocks: the Everyday Life of the Wall, involves collecting stories about the Wall from people who own Wall sections and souvenirs in Los Angeles and California.

The website www.freedomrocks.ca is the intersection between the artists’ work and different registers of the continuing history of the Wall in its atomized and dispersed form. The charting of the Wall as a mobile ruin has revealed an object with shifting symbolic value and power. No longer activated by Cold War associations of fear and dread, the project has evolved to depict the everyday life of the Berlin Wall in a contemporary post–Cold War context in North America and in Berlin as it challenges assumptions that the Wall’s history ended when the Cold War did.

Fragments and stories will be recorded and uploaded on the website www.freedomrocks.ca under the title Biographies of Fragments.

This program is presented by the Wende Museum and the Goethe-Institut, with additional support from the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto.