Elke Marhöfer

Lookin’out for Wachsamkeit
Erase You (Acéphale Mix)


lookin’out for Wachsamkeit

The video portrays a fictitious encounter between two people at the national library in Berlin. The disputants speak about the relation between law-upholding violence and the violence that sets the law, why the ordinary state of emergency is never an actual lawless state, and how we could possibly even think the idea of abandoning “the law” and “the biopolitic.”






lookin’out for Wachsamkeit, 2005

Video, 13 min., Berlin



Erase you (Acéphale mix)

The film is marked by timelessness and spacelessness. The camera moves through an indeterminate number of people. A horde-community of separation that does nothing tangible, except give itself up, move inside holes, move in the ground. It fades out the social, the society. It disaffirms society, rejects thoughts of society. Decollate the head of the community; decollate the head of the individual. The consequence is taciturnity, closelessness. A closelessness, that moves towards depression. If you attempt to emancipate yourself from the world, you have to distance yourself from yourself. Distance yourself especially, in the direction of how you believe you seem to be made. You distance yourself from the power that is “inside” you, but to what extent is the power (which is inside oneself) the negative power and to what extent is it “life” itself—that is what makes people so blissful.


Finding images for it, finding words for it. Finding ways to articulate the words to communicate not communicating. Deliberately blindfolded. One can call this a project for concepts for a life practice, eine Lebensform, or a lifestyle. But if life turns into a work of art, that doesn’t mean the construction of the own being as art, but it means a sort of disappropriation of self. At this point you feel your own being and yourself as a mode, as a construction. The subject is no longer present, no longer existent, neither in thinking nor in things. You can call it stripping of self. You probably get into a zone of indefinability or indifference, if the “I” and its disappropriation collapse into each other. At least we forget our own presence as subject and defend ourselves as a project against the author.






Erase you (Acéphale mix), 2005/2007

Video, 5 min., Berlin





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