Oliver Ressler and Zanny Beggs’s film The Right of Passage is exemplary, in my view. Today, in a world that – at least until Covid – has largely been globalized, though perhaps still retaining the new imperial form of the economy we have known for thirty years, it would be reasonable to expect borders to disappear. And yet, borders have never been so numerous, so cruel, so radically erect. … In Ressler’s and Begg’s video, my passport – fake, I must say: made up for the film – carries many visas, but so does the real one in my pocket. I was prevented from moving for a long time – first by jail, then by exile, and finally again by incarceration. But since 2003, I have gone around the world many times… I would like the front of my passport to carry the wording that features in the video, inspired by Magritte: “This is not a citizen”. I deserve it; I would be proud of it. But what about other people? Those who died in Melilla? The bodies in the Strait of Sicily? …If mesopolitics is the powerful politics of the milieu, if the common is radical democracy, new institutionality and subjectivation, then perhaps the time has come for a global citizenship, and passports that declare: “this is not a passport; this simply documents my belonging to the brotherhood and sisterhood of the living, whether human or not”.
Antoni Negri
Concept, film editing and production: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Animation and drawings: Zanny Begg
Camera and interviews of theorists: Oliver Ressler
Camera in Barcelona: Carlos Chang Cheng, Roberto Martín
Sound recording: Oliver Ressler
Sound design, mix and color correction: Rudi Gottsberger
Production assistance and translation: Daniela Ortiz, Xose Quiroga
Maybe the most capricious aspect of today’s capitalist societies is the persistence of the current form of the nation state, an artificial mechanism that creates and maintains zones of political, social and economic inequality. A key element of the functionality of the nation state is the granting – and denial – of citizenship. But can we imagine a world without borders, without the nation state and its monopoly on citizenship rights? In their third collaborative film Zanny Begg (Sydney) and Oliver Ressler (Vienna) focus on struggles to obtain citizenship, while at the same time questioning the implicitly exclusionary nature of this concept.
The Right of Passage is partially constructed through a series of interviews with theorists of migration: Ariella Azoulay, Antonio Negri and Sandro Mezzadra. These interviews form the starting point for a discussion in Barcelona, one of Europe’s most densely populated and multicultural cities, with a group of people living “without papers”. The film is set at night, against a city skyline, providing a dark void from which those marginalized and excluded can articulate their own relationship to the arbitrary nature of national identity and citizenship. Spain was chosen for this project as it is teetering on the brink of financial meltdown and is testing the limits of European cohesion.
Exhibited in: “To Have and Have Not”, HALLE 14, Leipzig (D), 04.05. – 07.07.2013, “The Sights/Sites of Cultural Studies”, ACS Summer Institute, Klagenfurt/Celovec (A), 25.07.2013, “Off Side – Video Pamphlet Review”, La Rada/Locarno Film Festival, Locarno (CH), 09.08. – 18.08.2013, “Have the wanderers of yesterday become today’s bag packers?”, Shiryaevo Biennale/Victoria Gallery, Samara (RU), 09.08. – 25.08.2013, “Unseen Cinema”, Foam/Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam (NL), 26.09. – 29.09.2013, “Citizenship, Orientalism and the Commons”, Oecumene Project and Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome, 28.09.2013, “Général Bordure”, Le Quartier, Centre d’art Contemporain de Quimper, Quimper (F), 03.10.2013 – 12.01.2014, Antenna Documentary Festival 2013, Sydney (AU), 10.10. – 14.10.2013, “Unstable Territory. Borders and identity in contemporary art”, Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (I), 11.10.2013 – 19.01.2014, Art Sheffield 2013 / Bloc Projects, Sheffield (GB), 16.10.2013, “Smuggling Anthologies”, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (HR), 22.10. – 04.12.2013, AC Institute, Film Series, New York (USA), 31.10. – 16.11.2013, “The Movement of Ideas” (film retrospective O. Ressler), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (CH), 19.11.2013, “To Have and Have Not”, ACC Galerie, Weimar (D), 07.12.2013 – 02.02.2014, “Silent University”, Le 116 – Centre d’art contemporain, Montreuil (F), 21.02.2014, 10.05.2014, “The Occidental Accident”, 5th Biennale of Marrakech, Marrakech (MA), 26.02 – 31.03.2014, “Fragile Hands (after Marker)”, University of Applied Arts/Heiligenkreuzerhof, Vienna (A), 12.03. – 10.04.2014, EMAF 2014 – 27. European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück (D), 24.04.2014, “Political Imaginaries: Making the World Anew”, Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk (PL), 30.04. – 15.06.2014 (solo-exhibition O. Ressler), “The Occidental Accident”, One Nest stand #17, Den Haag (NL), 17.07.2014, “Specters. A cinè-politics of haunting”, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (E), 26.11.2014, “Artists’ Cinema”, MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (HR), 10.04.2015; and Fotograf Festival, Prague (CZ), 02.10.2015
The Right of Passage is available for purchase as part of a collection Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power Vol 1, release through Facets Media and curated Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner.
If All Relations Were to Reach Equilibrium Then This Building Would Dissolve, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, 2016.
The project was funded partly through a grant of BMUKK the Barcelona Residency from the Australia Council for the Visual Arts.
