Oliver Ressler
The reduction of nature into an exploitable resource is one of the largest-scale abstractions performed by capitalist modernity. Oliver Ressler’s film Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Limity Jsme My leads us directly into the blockade of the Bílina coal mine in the Czech Republic. In June 2018, climate activists entered the mine in an attempt to stop all activity there and to insist on the need to shut down climate-destructive mining operations. The blockade followed an action consensus that rejected property damage and sought to avoid direct confrontation with the police. Nonetheless, 280 of approximately 400 activists taking part were detained. The camera follows a group of activists awaiting deportation inside a police kettle against the backdrop of a landscape defaced by lignite strip-mining. While the screen shows images filmed from inside a prisoner transport vehicle, we hear the voice of a semi-fictional character reflecting on mass civil disobedience.
The film Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Ende Gelände on the Ende Gelände (End of the Road) action documents a massive civil disobedience action at the Lusatia lignite coal fields near Berlin. 4,000 activists entered an open-cast mine, blocking the loading station and the rail connection to a coal-fired power plant. The blockades disrupted the coal supply and forced the Swedish proprietor, Vattenfall, to shut the power station down. The action was part of an international “global escalation” against the fossil fuel industry that called on the world to “Break Free from Fossil Fuels” and put that imperative directly into practice.
The film Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Code Rood highlights the civil disobedience action “Code Rood” in the port of Amsterdam in June 2017. The blockade of Europe’s second-largest coal port draws a red line against this important infrastructure facility for fossil capitalism. The largest single source of the coal shipments is Colombia, where coal is extracted under ecologically and socially devastating conditions. In the film we hear the activists exclaiming: “We are nature defending itself!” This perspective, which insists on seeing man as an integral part of nature rather than its greedy exploiter, seems to be the only hope left if life on the planet is to be maintained.
All three films are part of Oliver Ressler’s ongoing project Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart, which follows the struggles against a fossil fuel-dependent economy. Each GIBCA venue shows a different chapter from the project, underlining climate change as the most important issue of our times and its embeddedness in all other struggles and concerns.
Oliver Ressler (b.1970 in Knittelfeld, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. Ressler produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, migration, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has exhibited individually at MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest (2016), SALT Galata (2016) and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2014). He has participated in biennials in Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Venice (2013), Quebec (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017) and documenta 14 (2017).
Supported by Austrian Embassy in Sweden.
Artwork
Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Limity Jsme My
2019, 4K, 10 min
Courtesy the artist; àngels, Barcelona; The Gallery Apart, Rome
Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Ende Gelände
2016, 4K, 12 min
Courtesy the artist; àngels, Barcelona; The Gallery Apart, Rome
Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart: Code Rood
2018, 4K, 14 min
Courtesy the artist; àngels, Barcelona; The Gallery Apart, Rome
Venue
Göteborgs Konsthall: Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Limity Jsme My
Röda Sten Konsthall: Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Ende Gelände
Gothenburg Museum of Natural History: Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart: Code Rood
Image: Oliver Ressler, Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart Ende Gelände, 2016. Photo: Hendrik Zeitler