I want to propose a performance lecture on the topic of emergency and digital screen culture. An exercise in producing futures by speculating pasts through the model of ‘faction’; the presentation will be a scripted dialogue with image/video material of narratives and counter-narratives. The starting point will be connecting points between avant garde and fascist streams in 1920-30s Europe.

Considering dominant cinema’s emergence at a time when nation building and propaganda film was working together to disseminate nationalist ideologies- the forerunner of today’s digital screen language perfected the construction of binaries between us and them, good and evil and the inside/ outside of national borders. How can we as producers of a/v-material today create resistance with the same medium that came about as a producer of ideological ‘truths’ funded on these very binaries? What strategies could potentially serve as tools to question manufactured truths working to forth nationalist visions and neo- liberal values, values that has situated us within this reality of crises? What strategies could potentially undo subjectivities and rather build new imaginaries breaking with canonised pasts pre-empting undesired futures? Considering these questions, the exercise will examine material of the pasts through counter-narratives, rethinking in particular audio-visual material from the 1920s in order to explore alternative relations between screens and humans.

Hito Steyerl writes in A Thing Like You and Me: ‘But what if the truth is neither in the represented nor in the representation? What if the truth is in the material configuration?’ Considering this, should we even think of the images of the past as material and rather search for methods of questioning truths outside images as representation, or possibly also images at all?