Oliver Ressler, 23 min.

Factors like “danger”, “risk” and “wilderness” are no longer considered only in the dark, suppressed underside of the globalisation dream. These possibly deterring factors have become a resistance to be overcome by, apparently, only the best and the strongest. Thus, to a certain extent, mastering these daunting elements have become standards for achievement in the economic discipline. The crisis regions’ growth markets make particularly clear that the law of market economics requires hardness and ruthlessness. This warlike character of market economics transforms life into a fight in which specific individuals face ever-higher demands for better performance.

In order to prepare for this competitive, social Darwinist, pecking order of global capitalism, privately-owned, security enterprises offer their self-developed, civilian training programs that simulate conflict-situations – in varying complexities up to war scenarios. One of these enterprises, the British AKE Group, promises, according to their web page, to provide “…clients the competitive advantage of engaging safely in areas that might otherwise have been closed to opportunity.”

The video “The Fittest Survive” is based on filming the five-day course “Surviving Hostile Regions” done in January 2006 in Wales, Great Britain by the AKE Group. The course instructors are British ex-special force soldiers. The participants are businessmen who are preparing for business in Iraq and other dangerous regions, government officials and mainstream journalists who, with their dishonest discourse of democracy and human rights, help to legitimise and secure the ideology of market-economics expansion.

The video, primarily filmed by hand camera, follows the survival-course participants as they experience the staged reality of live shell bombardments, an assault by armed guerrillas, the rescue of accident victims, and moving through mine fields. Above this training camp in Wales, low-flying British fighter planes hold manoeuvres and foreshadow the real war theatres in which the class participants will soon be.

The video “The Fittest Survive” is available in English, German and Spanish versions.

Starting June 6, 2006, the video will be shown regularly in the permanent exhibition “working_world.net” in the Museum Arbeitswelt in Steyr, Austria, and is part of the exhibition of the Steirischer Herbst “Traurig sicher, im Training” in the Grazer Kunstverein (21.09. – 31.10.2006).

• Concept, Film Editing, Production: Oliver Ressler
• Camera: Volkmar Geiblinger
• Image Editing: Markus Koessl
• Sound Editing: Rudi Gottsberger

Intervention by Oliver Ressler at the main train station in Zurich, eBoard, 2006

During the exhibition at the Shedhalle a new piece made for the electronic billboard of the Zurich main train station will be shown. The piece displays the foreign debts of Africa in relation to the damages which were caused by colonialism and slavery on this continent. If it is possible to elicit the foreign debts of Africa, which were tripled between 1980 and 2000, out of the World Banks databanks (235 billion dollars for the ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ 2004), then the calculations of the damages caused by colonialism and slavery represent a disparate and much more difficult undertaking. At the occasion of the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 the African World Reparations and Repatriations Truth Commission brought forward a calculation based on comprehensive research and announced the sum of 777 trillion dollars. The claims of the African states were calculated using the reparation numbers of Germany for the victims of the Nazi-Regime as a point of reference. Out of fear of amend claims the Western countries deny any responsibility for colonialism and its aftermath and decline a guilt confession.

The billboard text reads:

• 235 Billion Dollars
• Africa’s External Debt
• (Debt level of sub-Saharan Africa in 2004 according to the World Bank)
• 777 Trillion Dollars
• Damages from Slavery and Colonialism
• (Source: African World Reparations and Repatriations Truth Commission)
• Cancel the Debt + Compensate for Slavery

The intervention is carried out in the framework of the exhibition “for example S, F, N, G, L, B, C – A Matter of Demarcation”, Shedhalle, Zurich, 04.11.2006 – 28.01.2007

Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler, 81 min.

In their second film regarding political and social change in Venezuela, after “” (67 min., 2004), Azzellini and Ressler focus on the industrial sector in “5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela“. The changes in Venezuela’s productive sphere are demonstrated with five large companies in various regions: a textile company, aluminum works, a tomato factory, a cocoa factory, and a paper factory. In all, the workers are struggling for different forms of co- or self-management supported by credits from the government. “The assembly is basically governing the company”, says Rigoberto López from the textile factory “Textileros del Táchira” in front of steaming tubs. And coning machine operator Carmen Ortiz summarizes the experience as follows: “Working collectively is much better than working for another–working for another is like being a slave to that other”.

The protagonists portrayed at the five production locations present insights into ways of alternative organizing and models of workers’ control. Mechanisms and difficulties of self-organization are explained as well as the production processes. The portrayal of machine processes could be seen as a metaphor for the dream machine of the “Bolivarian process”, and the hopes and desires it inspires among the workers. The situation in the five factories varies, but they share the common search for better models of production and life. This not only means concrete improvements for the workers. Aury Arocha, laboratory analyst at the ketchup factory “Tomates Guárico”, emphasizes that the difference between “social production companies” (EPS) and capitalist corporations is that the EPS “work for the community and society”. Carlos Lanz, president of the second largest aluminum factory in Venezuela, Alcasa, coins the key question: “How does a company push toward socialism within a capitalist framework?”

The film ends with an extended sequence from a management meeting at Alcasa, a company with 2.700 workers, with discussions about co-management and the changes of production relations they aspire towards.

The film is originally in Spanish and available with German or English subtitles.

The English version “5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela” as an installation version with six video projections from March 26 to May 28, 2006 opened the MATRIX cycle “Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process” at the Berkeley Art Museum (U.S.A.), organized by Chris Gilbert.

• Concept, interviews, film editing, production: Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler
• Camera: Volkmar Geiblinger
• Production Assistant in Venezuela: Eduardo Daza
• Image editing and titles: Markus Koessl
• Sound Editor: Rudi Gottsberger
• Interviewees: José Luis Acosta, Luis Alfonso, Luis Alvarez, Aury Arocha, Zulay Boyer, Carolina Chacón, Eleuterio Córdova, Hugo Favero, Manrique Gonzales, Dulfo Guerrero, Rowan Jiménez, Carlos Lanz, Marivit Lopez, Rigoberto López, Willys Lugo, Gonzalo Maestre, Luis Mata Castillo, Domingo Meléndez, Edith Mendoza, José Gregorio Moy, Carmen Ortíz, Alexander Patiño, Santos Pérez, Juana Ruíz, Elio Sayago, José del Carmen Tapias, Leslie E. Turmero