#156: Caspar Stracke

Friday, 23 January 2026, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Caspar Stracke is a German Berlin/Mexico-based interdisciplinary artist, primarily working with moving image, either producing or curating, and sometimes doing both in tandem. In his moving image practice, he traces peculiar cultural phenomena often with deep socio-political entanglements, occasionally with subliminal humor. As the son of an architect—breaking four generations of builders and architects—his sociological research seems to always return to housing, architectural design, and urbanism at large. In addition, cinema as a reconfigured performative space of reflexivity, as well as the societal impacts of moving image culture, also belong to recurring topics in his work.

This program consists of an unusual experiment: six selected works representing specific phases in 2 1/2 decades of filmmaking are communicating in pairs. From observations on manual labor studies to a re-staging of a Japanese avant-garde theater; from the remnants of colonial architecture to the power of copy architecture; ultimately, from past-century modes of knowledge preservation to the (literal) meltdown of AI data centers.

The latest work (in-progress) will be accompanied live by three musicians, including getting their hands on the live organ of the Babylon cinema.

PROXIMITY, 2002, 11:20  min
Scenes compiled from eight feature films that were crudely pixelated and re-photographed while turning the lens extremely out of focus. Despite the low resolution and extreme blur of the moving images, the viewer can still recognize movements and objects, even faces.The original sound of the scenes is audible. All selected excerpts deal with blindness and partial dysfunctions of seeing. Protagonists are either fully blind or in the state of losing or regaining sight. They describe objects that they cannot clearly recognize.A perceptual experiment of sensing oneself as a viewer in a cinema with limited perceptual abilities, provoking the liminal space between what is trusted to be perceived as reality and hallucination.The original version was a site-specific video installation at THE THING’s office in the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, NYC, on a 32 x 21 foot industrial-style window.

KEGAWA NO MARI, 1997/2025, 9:51 min           
A rehearsal of a Japanese avant-garde theater scene from the play Kegawa No Mari (Mink Mary) by Shuji Terayama, starring Akihiro Miwa.The play is about the life of a trans prostitute, Mari, who has raised a beautiful young boy, Kinya, as their own. He has never seen the outside world. Into this home steps Ishu, a friend who finds a domestic utopia in which gender-based identity is fully neutralized.The scene is played in its original Japanese version, for which the three featured non-Japanese actors had to memorize the entire Japanese dialogue, as the scene was filmed without a single cut.It is a re-assemblage of the camera original of the feature film Circle’s Short Circuit (1998). With Richard Move (as Akihito Mira), Ismael Houston-Jones, Keiko Uenishi, Taka Akayama.

LOCKED GROOVE, 1999, 7:50 min
A virtuosic work of digital editing, Locked Groove by Caspar Stracke gives us images that begin as shots of people doing repetitive labour, and, through the elimination of frames, merges their actions into a single sustained image. Lurch into the simulacra realm of the morph. Stracke is using digitization rhetorically, to compare rationalized labor to the rationality of the database: suggesting that not only the medium but people’s behavior itself is becoming more digital. Interestingly “Locked groove” is a term from the analog days of vinyl records, where a groove in a record could be made to circle back on itself, producing a sound loop. It is ironic that repetition in this case is a property of an analog medium characterized by linear temporality, while the digital medium must appear to have temporal continuity rather than reveal its fundamentally nonlinear, database form. (Laura U. Marks)

RONG XIANG, 2007, 8:30 min
“Rong Xiang” is the closest phonetic translation in Mandarin for the French name of the Le Corbusier chapel, informally known as Ronchamp, in France. But Stracke also gives it an English translation; ”Easy Thought’. Ronchamp, the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, was completed in 1955 and is considered one of the most important examples of 20th century religious architecture and one of the architect’s finest works. Stracke became aware of the copy of Ronchamp, that was created in Zhengzhou, China, in 1994 and was inspired to create this work. For him it raised questions of who is actually copying who. Le Corbusier’s ambition was to pioneer a new kind of architecture, rejecting the existing academicism, choosing templates from distant sources. This included cultural influences from the orient. So much so, that close to his death, he cited Chinese architecture as an inspiration, what he referred to as the modest thing on a human scale.  In his video, Stracke addresses the situation with a fusion of East and West, of both French and Chinese imagery and iconography and sound.  Visuals of Corbusier’s texts, architectural drawings for Ronchamp, wiped to the creation of the simulacrum in China. Stracke further fuses the architectural feature of original and copy, the original thriving in clean well restored surfaces. the simulacrum now in a state of abandonment, near ruin.  These worlds collide and bleed into each other. However, this story had ultimately changed and became a political one, involving copyright issues which added additional source material for Stracke’s work. Ultimately, the building disappears. Under the pressure of the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, the Ronchamp Chinese twin was demolished in March 2006. This gives additional power to Stracke’s work, in fact, the second translation of  “Rong Xiang” is “What should not be done”  (Cathy Brew)

GREETINGS FROM KRAMERSDORF, 2022, 13:00 min
This work examines the notion of home – in the context of remnants of German colonial architecture in Swakopmund and Lüderitz. What does it mean to make a place one’s home within walls that carry a contested past, to live in houses built by colonizers erected on a soil on which  it never should have being built. “And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears. To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood. I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home ” (Mahmoud Darwesh)

IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS FUTURE OF THE BOOK, work-in-progress, 2026, 15:30min, accompanied live by three musicians
During the 1940 Blitz, a striking image of British propaganda circulated worldwide: three well-dressed men browsing bookshelves in the bombed-out ruins of Holland House, home to prestigious 16th and 17th century libraries. The photograph staged an uncanny scene—gentlemen calmly perusing books amid destruction, as if London had simply acquired a new open-air library. Most books had miraculously survived, and the British government used this image to embody wartime resilience in the spirit of “Keep Calm and Carry On.” As one citizen wrote on their damaged house after another bombing: “This was nothing yet.” How does this form of resistance through knowledge preservation translate into the AI era? The burned-out bookshelves of Holland House now echo the abandoned racks of illegal Bitcoin mining farms—an era that ended so quickly these facilities have already been repurposed as AI data centers. Digital piracy, once a form of resistance, has switched sides, joining forces with big tech’s proprietary data keepers and contributing to AI infrastructure—an ongoing, less visible form of damage.
While mechanical reproduction enabled decentralized information culture, wars, fires, and other forces majeure have always threatened the preservation and proliferation of knowledge. Or have they? To much of the planet, this Western-centric notion of knowledge preservation is itself narrow-minded.
A walk-thru that meditated between contrasting modes of resilience, preservation in light of global equality.
The title references P.D. Ouspensky and Bas Jan Ader in conversation with electronic publishing pioneer Bob Stein.
With Liz Allbee, Wolfgang Staehle, Marc Siegel, Bsarah Hendry, Go Wakiko, Sarath Kumar.

Caspar Stracke is an interdisciplinary artist, moving image curator from Germany, currently living and working between Berlin and Mexico City. The topics of Caspar’s films and installation works are rooted in sociology and the politics of housing, architecture, and urbanism. He has also addressed media technology and its archaeology as well as aspects of the societal impact of moving image cultures.

Caspar has exhibited internationally, including at MoMA Cineprobe, ZKM Germany, Yerba Buena SF, Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Museo Tamayo Mexico City, and ICC Tokyo. From 2005-2013 he was the co-director of video_dumbo, an annual international exhibition/festival for contemporary moving image in NYC.

From 2012-2017 he was Professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Kuvataideakatemia) in Helsinki, Finland. Along with Mexican artist Gabriela Monroy, he was the curator of the 60th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013 and subsequent screenings and seminars at MoMA NY, and Mexico City.

In 2014 Stracke organized the symposium “AfterGodard” on contemporary art practices influenced by the work of Jean-Luc Godard; and in 2015 the screening series “Unravelling Documentarism” on the shifting fields of contemporary documentary film.

He has published articles on filmmakers such as Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Subrin, Harun Farocki, Jeanne Finley, Gábor Csázáry, Ladislav Galeta, Almagul Menlibayeva, David Larcher, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, and others. He is the editor of “Godard – Boomerang,” the outcome publication of the 2014 symposium, and a publication at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, 2021. He is also the co-editor of THE CURRENT THING (the.current.thing.net), a new artist journal founded along with Keith Sanborn during the first months of the pandemic in New York.

Since 2023 he is collaborating with Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo on a larger film and installation project  called |Haru Oms which is currently in mid production.