“In a world of engineered and policed humankind, life itself becomes an act of sabotage, a life despite…”
The Song of the Shirt departs from the play Die Maschinenstürmer (1922) by Ernst Toller, but relocates the Luddites scene of England in the early 19th century along with the remnants and ruins of the cotton industry, in post-2011 Egypt and post-industrial Poland. Concerned with the actualisation of a criticism of technology the film is re-reading the Luddites movement for a contemporary body of the worker that is always already informed by the histories of technological progress. Filmed in one continuous shot, the movements of a seamstress, a projectionist, the screen maker, and the film crew as the choir seek to find ways to intervene in the cyclic structure, possible disruptions, torn between the historical continuity and an urge to deviate the progressive form. Slow down, stop, don’t proceed. They revolve around projections on off-white cotton screens that document certain production methods in the fields of cotton agriculture, weaving, processing, sewing, and storytelling, which can be understood as narrative structures that can tell us about complex social changes in everyday life experiences. And as a counter-narrative, the voices — an exchange of letters — seek for subverted forms of sabotage, for practices of weaving the stories and telling the textiles that may be (speaking with Haraway) “making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances”.
The Song of the Shirt
47 min, 2020
by Kerstin Schroedinger
with letters exchanged by Nawara Belal
and Kerstin Schroedinger
with
Maha Maamoun
Natalia Rolòn
Omnia Sabry
Kerstin Schroedinger
and the crew as choir
director of photography
Bernadette Paassen
focus / light
Svea Immel
sound recording
Manuela Schininà
set design / costume
Sophia Sylvester Röpcke
assistant director
Wibke Tiarks
production assistant
Nele Jäger
hands
Katherine MacBride
Andrea Thal
filmed at Flutgraben e.V. Berlin