Common Ground/Mapping the Archive: Daniel Eisenberg & Shelly Silver

08.06.2023 / 19:00 – 22:00
With Daniel Eisenberg, Shelly Silver

7 pm Screening Persistence & conversation between Daniel Eisenberg & Shelly Silver

Daniel Eisenberg, Persistence (1997), 83 min., Germany/USA, OV

Free admission
daadgalerie

On 8 June 2023 at daadgalerie, following the screening of Persistence, Daniel Eisenberg and Shelly Silver will talk about their experiences in the years immediately after the German reunification, the impossibility of collective (non-)remembrance and working with archives.

“Persistence was shot in 1991-92 in Berlin, and edited with films by U.S. Signal Corps cameramen in 1945-46, obtained from Department of Defense archives. Interspersed through these materials are filmic quotations from Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1946). A meditation on the time just after a great historical event, about what is common to moments such as these—the continuous and discontinuous threads of history—and our attachment to cinematic modes of observation that, by necessity, shape our view of events. It also reconsiders the nature of the archive, the document, and historical time.
The texts are drawn from the notebooks of Max Frisch, Stig Dagerman, and Janet Flanner—just after World War II—and my own journals from my stay in Berlin in 1991-92. Most often, their journal entries appear over contemporary footage, often my own entries are over the archival materials. Sometimes a date clues the viewer to the displacement, sometimes not.” Daniel Eisenberg

Shelly Silver is a New York-based artist working with still and moving image. In the framework of the DAAD Artists-Program, she spent several months in Berlin in 1992 when she conducted hundreds of interviews with people from East and West-German districts, both in the city center and peripheral areas of the reunified metropolis.

The resulting documentary Former East / Former West (1994) was digitized by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and can be viewed on the website Mapping the Archive.