Catalogue > At random

The goal of this filmproject was to transgress cultural, linguistic and structural borders and to bring this experiment via improvisation into the shape of a movie. As point of origin and/or abstract storyboard served an interview which I conducted with Xian Min Zhan - a chinese filmcritic and curator of various chinese film festivals.  Our conversation did range from thoughts on independent cinema to the city of the future.  One of the main topics of this conversation - theories on postfordistic, neoliberal social utopias after paolo virno, forms as a conceptual pattern the dogma of the production of ?The North Capital?. We shot for about 5 days in Beijing with amateurs willing to participate in this truly improvised movie. Rarely scripted dialogues, no rehearsals and improvisations on the spot. A movie about an utopia: The North Capital. The movie`s language is mandarin chinese with english subtitles. ?So visually this utopia will be transparent, almost colorless, washed out? all the colours there are will be fabricated or fake and only for visual effect. all the buildings will be mostly ruins. if people dont procreate, they will talk or create. artist will make up the majority of the population and work under precarious circumstances - you know, minimal wages or unpaid labour, although the characteristics of their work would not really differ from the work of the privileged class. the privileged managing class will decide on who or what to support. they will say that the real support is your dream. they offer some kind of support for your dreams, you excercise yourself in these dreams and wake up with bigger muscels. in this kind of coming dictatorship of globalisation or pretended democratic system they will encourage people to commit suizide and use it for propaganda.?

Stephan Lugbauer born in Feldkirch Austria in 1976 now lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria. He studied Architecture at the Technical University Vienna, received his MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts, New Media Department, Vienna and was fellow of the MAK Schindler Residency, Los Angeles and of the BMUKK Studio Resicency in Mexico City. He is co-founder of Saprophyt, an independent conzeptual art space and project (www.saprophyt.net). His work has been featured in several international exhibitions and festivals such as Hors Pistes, Centre George Pompidou, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris, Madrid, Berlin, CAAM, Gran Canaria, Kunsthalle Wien, Secession, Vienna. His work is fundamentally critic and analytic, interrogating the role of creation and artists. It re-evaluates the porosity of art, which is pervaded with contemporary political and economical areas.