Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd

This multi-channel film and video installation investigates the historical infrastructure project, “The Baghdad Railway”, at the beginning of the 20th century. Financed and realised by the German Empire, it became a strategic instrument of imperial expansion, nascent financial capitalism and colonial debt policy, implicating Germany in the genocides in the Ottoman Empire and the deportation of minorities in Eastern Anatolia. Industries of Denial addresses the 100-year-long politics of denial and the structural erasure of minority histories.
As a cartographic installation with archival photographs on 16 mm film and essayistic travelogues along the railway line, this 10th chapter of the project re-frames Franz Werfel’s novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh”, about the armed resistance of Armenian villagers and their rescue. The installation superimposes the history and the denialism of genocidal politics with the migration routes and museum narratives by the people in this last remaining Armenian village in Turkey.

Angela Melitopoulos’s artwork consists of video installations, video essays and sound pieces. Her film installations on mnemonic politics stand for resistant subjectivities and post-colonial alliances within historical contexts shaped by imperialist violence, fascism and nation-state oppression of migration in the 20th century. Her videos have been shown at festivals (including Berlinale), exhibitions and museums internationally. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has taught media art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and HfG Karlsruhe. Since 2019, she has collaborated with Kerstin Schroedinger on the music project Zonkey.

Kerstin Schroedinger works on long-term, research-based projects at the intersection of film, sound and performance, engaging with the social and political formations of time-based media through their historicity and materiality. She is currently a University Researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Schroedinger’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally. Since 2019, she has collaborated with Melitopoulos on the music project Zonkey. Following Rainbow’s Gravity (2014), Fugue (2015), Blueness (2016) and Songs of the Shirt (2020), this marks her fifth participation in Forum Expanded.

Directors Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger. Screenplay Kerstin Schroedinger, Angela Melitopoulos. Cinematography Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger. Editing Kerstin Schroedinger. Editing Angela Melitopoulos. Music Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger. Sound Design Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger, Nicholas Bussmann. Translators Alper Șen, Çiğdem Üçüncü. Producers Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger. Production company zonkey production (Berlin, Germany). With Joséphine Gallagher, Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger.

Films

Angela Melitopoulos: 2006: Corridor X (Forum 2006). 2007: Die Sprache der Dinge / The Language of Things. 2010: Möglichkeitsraum I-V, Assemblages (co-directed by Maurizio Lazzarato, Forum 2010). 2011: Deconnage (co-directed by Maurizio Lazzarato). 2013: The Life of Particles (co-directed by Maurizio Lazzarato, Forum Expanded 2013). 2016: The Refrain (Forum Expanded 2016). 2017: Crossings. 2021: Matri Linear B: Surfacing Earth. 2022: Matri Linear B: Revisionen / Matri Linear B: Revisions. 2026: Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd.

Kerstin Schroedinger: 2014: Rainbow’s Gravity (co-directed by Mareike Bernien, Forum Expanded 2014). 2015: Fugue (Forum Expanded 2016). 2017: Bläue / Blueness (Forum Expanded 2018). 2020: The Song of the Shirt (Forum Expanded 2022). 2021: DNCB (co-directed by Oliver Husain). 2026: Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd.