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Julian Charrière, 2022
4K color film, 16:9 aspect ratio,
4-5-1 ambisonics soundscape
32 minutes

Controlled Burn invites the viewer on a cosmic journey through deep time, soaring through an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks. Shot with a first-person drone, this disorienting voyage takes in open pit coal mines, decommissioned oil rigs, and rusting cooling towers. Throughout, amid whirling smoke and fire, implosions are intercut by flashing images of primordial unfurling ferns and fluttering moths – beings that evolved during the carboniferous geological period. Appearing at subliminal speed, Charrière offers these organisms as both spirit guides and living tokens for the vitality of fossil fuels. Additionally, as markers for how the agency of coal, oil, and tar has come to haunt our contemporary imagination – taking root in our dreamlife; infesting visions of the world to come. Linking celebratory pyrotechnics with extraction architectures, explosive momentum and technological obsolescence, Controlled Burn stages the fantasy of a dramatic return to sources of energy via implosion: a time before smoke.

Co-Director: Johannes Förster
Sound Composition and Design: Felix Deufel
Drone Operator: Per Jacob Blut
FPV Drone Pilots: Benno Knarr, Leon Knarr, Clemens Wronski
Pyrotechnicians: Felix Rausch, Felix Münch
Assistants to Pyrotechnicians: Vincent Schaack, Christian Kuhlmann
Camera Assistants: Aurel Salzer, Maxim Pechersky
Digital Imaging Technician: Phil Jungschlaeger
Production Assistants: Yasmin Balai, Carl Maria Kemper, Simon Mellnich, Alexander Paul Probst, Y-ul Suh, Cleo Wächter

Postproduktion: Studio Förster
Editor: Johannes Förster
Editing Assistant: Paloma Schnitzer
Sound Design: Matthias Schubert
VFX Editors: Sean Sams, Seb Caudron, Moritz Freudenberg, Neil Reynolds Motion Graphics: Anika Spereiter
Colorist: Julien von Schultzendorff
Post-Production Management: Yasmin Balai

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Julian Charrière, 2019
4K color film, 32:10 aspect ratio,
14.2 Ambisonics soundscape
104 minutes 30 seconds

Glacial landscapes have never before had such a strong visual presence in popular culture, where they serve
as prominent symbols of anthropogenic climate disturbance. Although few people have visited their remote
geographies, glacial regions loom large in the collective imagination, as a last stronghold and melting ideal
of a fantasized reality. Towards No Earthly Pole was conceived in 2017, when Julian Charrière was invited
aboard a Russian research ship as part of the first Antarctic Biennale, inspiring subsequent research and
expeditions to equally remote and hostile glacial regions.

Along with his Berlin-based team, he developed customized technological equipment, including drones
carrying spotlights and cameras. The video footage for the film was recorded at night, contrary to the
romantic image of a dazzling landscape of white snow and bright daylight that we generally see pictured.
The spotlight reveals the massive landscape in snippets, limiting the range of vision and heightening
its drama by the deep shadows the icebergs cast. Eerie sounds of cracking ice and water flowing remind us
that this frozen landscape is very much alive, breathing, moving and constantly evolving.
All of these elements combined underline an otherworldly presence and a scenario in which one begins to lose
all sense of grounding or scale, highlighting that the western man’s limited experience and, at times,
falsely constructed perception of the polar regions is both reinforced and challenged.
-juliancharriere.net

Director: Johannes Förster
Drone Pilots: Per Jacob Blut, Matt Cianfrani,
Anders Berthelsen
Production / Lighting: Carl Kemper
Production Assistance: Till Egen
Photography: Serena Acksel, Philipp Lee Heidrich
Technical engineering / Ground control:
Constantin Engelmann, Roman Kolbert

Editor / Postproduction Supervisior: Johannes Förster
Composer / Sound Designer: Robert Lippok
Spatial Sound Designer: Felix Deufel
Colorist: Jan Schöningh
Senior Compositing Artist: Tom Freeman, Neil Reynolds
Compositing Artist: André Roboredo, Christian Kaupert
Matchmover: Matthias Schiemann, Dragan Vujnic
Additional SFX: Omer Ben David, Karim Arnold Fuad
Postproducer: Julian Brinkmann
Postproduction Assistant: Yasmin Balai
VFX Technical Supervisor: Finn Jäger
Technician: Julian Link

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Malte Bartsch, 2017

Rakete is a 12-minute video that shows the launch and crash of 10 fireworks rockets in a loop one after the other.
What is special is that the rockets do not explode at the highest point as usual, but only when they are already on the descent - sometimes only shortly before the impact. The "false starts" of the rockets were artificially created by Bartsch and his team with the help of a rubber retractor and filmed on a wide field during twilight as well as in darkness. Here, the artist plays with the viewer's expectations by initially disappointing them, but subsequently rewarding them nonetheless. In addition, Rocket can be seen as an analogy to the life motto of a generation that permanently "celebrates itself" despite repeated failures, for example in environmental matters or in solving moral questions. The motif of the rocket appears frequently in Bartsch's works and plays with associations to the arms race, space travel, and visions of the future, but also with "setting out on a journey" and collective celebration.
-maltebartsch.de

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Documentary film
Ongoing project

Colombia is traumatized by a deadly conflict that has lasted for more than 50 years. Death is omnipresent in social discourse; likewise, corruption, poverty, and exodus continue to shape the daily lives of many Colombians. It is primarily the civilians that suffer from human rights violations. Between 2000 to 2014, there were over 6 million internally displaced people in Colombia, and 26,000 Colombians are still missing to date. Injustice continues even after death: bodies disappear into mass graves, and families are left without any information about their losses.

Artist Edinson Quinones Falla is one of Colombia´s many displaced people. Like most of them, he spent his childhood in a house illegally built by his parents in a "barrio invasion." Because he beat a friend to death with a machete, he is threatened with juvenile detention at the age of 12. Afraid of prison and fearing revenge against himself and his family, he fled from home and spends the following years alternately with friends, his family, and in prison. In prison, he encountered art for the first time. He found in it a medium to express his frustration, pain, and powerlessness. It helped him to redeem himself - to heal his wounds, as he says. In his art, Edinson confronts the crimes and injustice of his country. By chance, in 2008, information fell into his hands - reports, indictments, wanted posters, and interrogations related to the murder of civilians in the Cauca Department. The names and execution sites of countless innocent civilians who were murdered were noted. Among the information, there was an old friend of his who was executed as a 'falso positivo'. His mother had denounced his disappearance. Edinson, who has information about the location of the burial, seeks out the mother. He asks her to allow him to dig her son up, to bring him back. Together they go to dig up the son's bones. In the meantime, he has visited 3 more families and exhumed 3 more dead bodies. His goal is to bring together an entire human skeleton, from the bones of different people.

Johannes Förster (*1985) is a freelance filmmaker living and working in Berlin. Förster has been self-employed as a photographer and director since 2009.
Since 2012, he has increasingly focused on the production of art and documentary films.

His works deal with the visible and invisible roles of the individual in society and their engagement with the environment in the Anthropocene. In particular, his documentary works focus on contemporary socio-cultural issues, elaborated through historical juxtapositions. Förster questions the social status quo and invites viewers into imaginary and phantasmagorical spaces that challenge their viewers to reflect. His video works can be read as rhythmic, audiovisual collages that let viewers confront the surrounding realities by deconstructing them. He pursues a collaborative approach and has developed various video installations with artists presented in international museum contexts. In addition to collaborations with Julius von Bismarck, Malte Bartsch, and Andreas Greiner, he has worked for several years as director and editor with the conceptual artist Julian Charrière, such as: Iroojrilik, 2016 (Berlinische Galerie, MAMbo Bologna); An Invitation to Disappear, 2018 (Berghain Berlin, Taipei Biennale); Towards No Earthly Pole, 2019 (MASILugano, Dallas Museum of Art).
www.instagram.com/jo.foerster/

mail@johannesfoerster.com

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Co-Director and Editor
immersive video installation
excerpt, by Julian Charrière