Topography of Terror (19.12.2016)
2017
Informed by a series of conversations with psychoanalysts and journalists from Reuters, the BBC, and the Freud Museum, the film tells the story of a news agency journalist who suffers from secondary traumatic stress disorder as a result of overexposure to violent imagery in the newsroom.
Through the fictive first-person account conveyed by actor and activist Khalid Abdalla’s voiceover, the work explores ways of constructing information in contemporary journalism, articulating a reflection on that role and on the value of images as tools for perpetuating terror and manipulating the perception of reality.
The film is set in the unrealised building of the “Topographie des Terrors” in Berlin, which was initially planned by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in 1993. Zumthor’s design won a competition for the construction of a Documentation Centre on the site where the Gestapo, the SS and the Reich Security headquarters were all located during the Nazi era, but the project was never realised.
Topography of Terror (19.12.2016), 2017
In collaboration with: Diego Tonus
Extract from the CGI Film, Full HD, Color/Surround sound, 31′
Narrator: Khalid Abdalla
Public collection: MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art
15 October, 2020 — Film and Book Launch, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Flash Art Italia no. 336 Dicembre 2017 — Gennaio 2018
FRIEZE: “A Year Full of Shadows”
by Barbara Casavecchia
ar/ge kunst Kunstverein pressrelease EN / ITA
Elisa Caldana and Diego Tonus on Topography of Terror (19.12.2016) in: Hessische Kulturstiftung Maecenas—summer edition 2017
Never Again
2020
Never Again is Caldana’s continuation of the first film of the cycle, Topography of Terror (19.12.2016). Both films are set in the unrealized building for Topographie des Terrors Foundation in Berlin, which serves as the virtual scenery and conceptual platform.
A silent film, Never Again uses camera movement to investigate this first iconic building deprived of its colors and material references, as if to deconstruct the essence of a voiceless character.
Adding new elements into the virtual scenery, it further complicates its empty spaces through the juxtaposition with a different architectural ghost, which occupied the same site during a previous historical period. This comprises the virtual reconstruction of the southern wing of the former Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, including a collapsed air-raid shelter, the “House Prison” yard, and other underground rooms from the archaeological site. The CGI reconstruction of the first unrealized building intersects with the virtually recreated ruins of the past in a ghostly landscape, and the two architectural settings blur into each other, collapsing in a suspended time and space.
Elisa Caldana, Never Again
Full HD, Colour/No Sound, 10’ (Loop), 2020
(*) Video fragment: 01 min. 29 sec.
Public collection: MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art – acquired thanks to the Italian Council – VII Edition (2020)
Topography of Terror (19.12.2016), 2017
Production drawings from CGIs and script (Page 3)
various dimensions
