In Europe, the tradition of weather shooting has been documented for centuries. The danger of approaching thunderclouds is supposed to be banished by cannon fire. Internet, television and press are filled with weather similes: shitstorms, data floods, waves of refugees. Language, metaphors, images are instruments of control. They are used to dispel—and instill—fear. The social domain is imagined as an inevitable catastrophe by describing it with metaphors from nature. To what extent is this kind of image document, fiction, trophy, counterattack? How close are manipulation and prediction? Is the weather still real?
The Effect of Cannonry on Thunderclouds / Juliane Jaschnow (DE), Stefanie Schroeder (DE), Photo: Jaschnow, Schroeder
A film about the image of the storm and the storm as image: storm chasers chase storms with their cameras and turn them into photographic trophies. In front of the green screen of the television studio, the weather presenter points into the void. At the Max Planck Institute, birds fly against artificial wind. Lovestormpeople flood the Internet with skewed right-wing populist slogans. Escape games play with social fears. On fruit plantations anti-hail cannons fire sound waves of 130 decibels into the sky.
Credits
Produced in the framework of PMMC Lab, werkleitz Gesellschaft Halle (S.). / Funded by ESF—European Social Fund and MDM—Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung.
This project is presented in the context of the EMAP project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Juliane Jaschnow (DE)
Juliane Jaschnow (*1989) is an artist and filmmaker. Working with film, video, installation, object and print, she discusses contemporary and historical image politics as well as collective narratives, memory processes, and their identity-creating dimension. Her work has been shown in international festivals and exhibitions such as transmediale Berlin, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, National Gallery Prague, DOK Leipzig, steirischer Herbst Graz. She is part of the Filmic Initiative Leipzig FILZ, co-founder and co-curator of .mpeg art space and a member of Initiative Kino in Bewegung.
Stefanie Schroeder (DE)
Stefanie Schroeder works in photography and film. She tries to combine a documentary approach with strategies from conceptual art and is interested in social usages of photo and video, work / labor and their images, (mental) landscape transformation processes, East Germany, ghost pictures and spam mails. Stefanie studied photography at HGB Leipzig, participated in PMMC Masterclass/Lab by werkleitz e.V and in MDM pilot program for experimental film. She is a member of Filmische Initiative Leipzig and of artspace .mpeg.
