Martin Fischer↓

About the work

Planetary Scary Diary

#fable #ecosystem #narration #maps #geopolitics #outer space #waste #transformation #inequalities

What is your graduation work about?

I want to tell fables about heroines like snowflakes, blades of grass, a snail, or evil rolling tires. Such characters represent something magical for me at the moment. Due to the climatic crisis, they trump the fairy tales and creatures that used to lull me to sleep in my childhood. It worked out that the stories I have invented deal with how an extra-human nature might imagine the world works. How do blades of grass, for example, grasp the signs of human activity? I am continually piecing together individual stories, filming or animating footage with puppets, and assembling it into three videos. I do not aim to envisage a better world here; I try to present what I find essential and intense now. I want to extend the flat and linearly unfolding videos with a spatial installation incorporating the screens into an artificial ecosystem. I design the graduation work from the beginning to make it understandable despite all the chaos.

What do you do besides your graduation work?

I am involved in ecoactivism but stopped for a while due to my graduation work. I collect crap and take it home. Often it is leaves. I make up songs, recording them on my phone and transcribing them into an endless file. I also work a little bit at the daycare.

In what conditions would you like to work on your graduation work?

The conditions at the Academy, from the point of material and human resources, seem satisfactory to me. Otherwise, AVU is just another institution within this global system where everything is wrong, so it is hard to feel human while creating.

What would you imagine to be an alternative culmination of your studies at AVU, in place of the defense of your graduation work?

The diploma can be almost anything, but it reflects the years spent in the master studio system. Apart from the form of the final exam, it may be desirable to look for ways to change the course of the entire study, ideally toward more collectivity and permeability. Concerning the defense, it is a question of what entitles the evaluator to sit on the committee and pass judgments. I do not understand what precisely I am supposed to advocate to whom. Whether to myself that I have learned something (and that is probably fine), but even that does not have to be.