Arsenal on Location – Closing Event!

It began in January at WOLF Kino and is ending in December in the Kuppelhalle at silent green: following a year without our own cinema that has been rich in impressions nonetheless, we are ending the Arsenal on Location project with a closing event. This is a way of thanking our unbelievable 58 (!) project partners. It was only supposed to be 36 to begin with and that so many others joined in along the way has been truly overwhelming for us: over the course of the year, more and more ideas and cooperation proposals emerged.

We would like to thank all the filmmakers, archives and distributors involved that made films available to us and all those who gave introductions or moderated discussions with audiences. And we’d also like to thank our audiences, who didn’t just accompany us from place to place in Berlin, but also appeared all over the world at one of the 350 events that took place during the period of time when the Arsenal cinema was closed: at nine cinemas and seven cultural institutions in Berlin, at 16 cinemas in Germany and at 26 cinemas and Goethe-Instituts across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa. They each present themselves with their own written contributions on the project website onlocation.arsenal-berlin.de. A map can also be found there which shows each location where Arsenal guested over the last twelve months.

We asked several of our partners what cinema can do. It can create memory cultures, visions, discourses and open experimentation. It can create space for being alone and for the collective. It can put together the world in different ways and open up spaces for thought. Cinema can do a lot to contribute to what is so very necessary for living together in society today more than ever before. It can do so because it consists of communities, friendships, connections based on solidarity, networks and a large, diverse audience. Arsenal on Location has proved that once again. An experience that turned the moments of doubt about building a new cinema during the current state of the world into a force that proved Wim Wenders right: at Schloss Bellevue, he recently said that if cinema hadn’t yet been invented, it would have to be invented right now.  

And Arsenal is reinventing itself. From April onwards, the cinema, festival, distributor, archive and campus will all be at the same place. Arsenal on Location has already laid the groundwork for this: it was teamwork in the very best sense of the word.
Before that, we are presenting one last cooperative event with a partner institution that hasn’t just hosted us for this last year, but will continue to do so for at least the next 20: silent green. Seven years ago, two 16mm short films that Shelly Silver shot to this end with stakeholders from her immediate cultural context were placed in a terrarium in the MARS restaurant as part of the silent green Film Feld Forschung project. The idea was to explore how warmth and humidity would slowly destroy the film material – and perhaps create something new in the process. The result will be presented on the big screen and compared with prints of the same films that were properly stored (7pm). From 8pm, the closing event begins: travelers and hosts will be talking about what they experienced in individual places as part of Arsenal on Location. With LINE DESCRIBING A CONE (Anthony McCall, 1973), we are showing a film that makes the cinema space tangible and is thus representative of all the cinemas of this world. And we will be awarding a prize.  (16.12.) (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)

Huge thanks go to the Federal Capital Cultural Fund and the Goethe-Institut with its local sites for their generous support.

At silent green, Gerichtstr. 35, Berlin-Wedding