Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger KOW ISSUE 2

Opening: March 18, 2009 5 - 9 PM “Working the historical fact, Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger’s films tell of war, the hypocrisy of social relationships, and the disenchanted desire of utopia. Using the indirect mode of fiction, the two video directors could make Jacques Rancière’s remark their own: ‘To think about the real, it needs to be fictionized’. For once the ‘fact’ is chosen, their work begins by writing a scenario based on a particularly documented study of the behaviors, attitudes, context and chain of events of the original event. Yet, they twist, rework, and replay it, creating a distance that paradoxically brings it closer to our means for judgment.” Françoise Ninghetto The installation presented at the gallery by Moser & Schwinger, Farewell letter to Swiss Workers (2006), questions the notion of social utopias beginning from a letter that Lenin addressed to Swiss workers in 1917 before leaving Zurich to engage in the Russian Revolution. A part of the installation, the film, Alles wird wieder gut, is a political fiction that prompts the debate of the following questions through a micro-society in a former East German, 21st century village: in what kind of society do we wish to live? Of what kind of society are we capable? Of what common way of life do we dream? The film is in echo to Tout va bien filmed in 1972 by Godard and Gorin. With a touch of asserted absurdity, the film presents a group of young people who get together to try to find a way out of their social isolation and precarious situation, and this, in opposition to their parents, who are stuck in a position that leads them to restage a picket line in front of their factory, abandoned for fifteen years before.