Synopsis: Le Pingpong d'Amour # 1-3

 

 

The preceding first four episodes: Style : Work : Money : Love

 

Le Pingpong d'Amour - WG: WohnGemeinschaft (flat-sharing community)

 

Friends sharing a flat between subsistence and le subjonctif: “Il faut un jour que vous viviez de votre travail”. But how to find a balance between life and workand yet punctually transfer the rent to the landlord? The flat became the site of rather unusual measures of job-creation and other complications - in issues of love, friendship and good style.The efforts to accomplish a secure existence all happened behind the closed doors, in reckless home-working. The passage of time was as static as the camera.Moving out of each other’s way and coming together again, only to stay – more or less the same.  "Au revoir ŕ Paris!"

 

 

Episodes five to nine:

 

Le PingPong d'Amour - ISA: Ideological State Apparatus

 

"Salut Paris!"

After loosing each other from sight for a while, the tenants pick up again on the cover-version of their old lives - yet under different circumstances. Richer in experience and most of them financially, they actualize a brand new outline: living in a museum. And: living in Paris. The city comes into play. City as a filmed replica of itself – once again captured and conjured. One stays in good neighborhoods and hangs around in cafes of a European capital rich in traditions, as they tend to be. The suburbs never come into sight. The funeral of an old acquaintance offers an opportunity to leave the city behind. The ceremony takes place on a volcanic island, whose peculiar petrified forms and magnetic fields do not fall short of affecting the distorted city dwellers. The insular conditions and the contamination with the idea of death bring about personal conflicts. Partly due to political changes in Paris the group moves back – yet without regaining common ground. It turns out that the joint venture of free and jolly living accumulated questionable individual workings inconsistent with the project itself. The renounced sway of power relations returns in individually internalized forms: a disturbing displacement and the very last trick of Power. After the utopia of virtuous living in a community initially seen as subversive melts away in futility, the group moves on to the process of separation – and political engagement.

 

 

Episodes ten to sixteen:

 

Le PingPong d'Amour - TM: The Mission (Der Auftrag)
 

"Au revoir Post Colonial World!"
The tenants have reached a junction, and the mission that they have appointed themselves with could be summed up as follows: reach the World. No longer take note only of oneself but experience the World. The calling is for everyone one and the same, and yet the goals are very different. After entering the huge sci-fi elevator at the end of the ninth episode, small groups get launched to diverse places: Cameroon, Togo, Istanbul, Damaskus and Guadeloupe.

This multiplication of sceneries could be considered as an exercise in decentralizing the perspective and exposing oneself to lifestyles that might seem inadmissible in the West; and that is despite the innate misperceptions of euro-centric (or better yet West German) outlook. The central question concerns the accurate form of representation under the post-colonial conditions, which implies scrutinizing the ethnographic gaze as archetype of measurement as well as exploring the political conditions of representation and the possibility of agency. Needless to say, each mission is an evaluation – yet the system of values itself has to be adjusted to the local situation.