Renzo Martens

Katalog der 6. Berlin Biennale, 10. Juni 2010

In Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty (2008) Renzo Martens shakes the very foundations of the self-image of the “First World”. The film collects pictures behind the familiar pictures of misery: a press photographer saying “Fantastic!” while taking pictures of an old, starving man; a plantation owner buying romanticizing pictures of his underfed workers in a gallery. Western photographers who produce images of misery, on Martens’s theory, double the exploitation of the people. Poverty is a resource. And, as with the goldmines of the eastern Congo, which are exploited by Western companies under the protection of UN troops, the real owners are denied all participation. To prove his thesis, Martens gives a group of indigenous photographers lessons in photographing dying children to help them enter the image market—in vain: they receive no photo permit.

The subjective narrative style, where the artist himself comes into frame with handheld camera and provokes new situations, undermines the documentary function of film reportage. With the eyes of the amateur posing the naïvest questions, Martens hits a self-perpetuating system at its weak points and, in the process, appropriates its logic. The cases that men carry through the jungle for him like the ship in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo contain not relief supplies but an illuminated sign: “Enjoy (please) Poverty.” Waiting for things to improve is senseless, he explains to the perplexed villagers. By making them actors in a performance whose images are not destined for them, the artist repeats yet again the double exploitation he exposes. And thus parodies the figures of the aid worker and the artist, who go out to create a better world and yet merely put on their own shows.

In Episode 1 (2003) Martens had already fractured the routines of Western image production by relating his lovesickness to the inmates of Chechen refugee camps. Apart from Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1899), the artist is here drawing on the tradition of political satire since Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” of 1729. Swift recommended using the children of the poor as food to alleviate famine supposedly caused by over-population.

By offering no solution to the moral dilemmas he unveils, but by driving the thorn deeper into the wound, Martens throws the viewer back on his own role. In doing so, he creates a new realism. Rather than reproduce reality, he enacts it practically so as to lay bare the conditions of its construction. Unlike Brecht’s didactic plays, he does not separate social space from the stage. He tears down the theater of misery’s fourth wall. Hence he exposes the humanistic prerequisite of an “exterior” that would make reality depictable and criticism exercisable. By controlling reality in the Congo, Europe is first and foremost protecting its own reality.

Translation: Christopher Jenkin-Jones

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