Sven Johne/ Sebastian Orlac, Weiße Gewalt / White Storm (Source Material), 2020

03. Verantwortungslose Bürger

„Irresponsible citizens.
There are still unteachable people who want to drive through the closed road. They get stuck in the snow and also hinder the clearance vehicles. Thus, two days ago, comrades of the People’s Police and their helpers had to work until 5:30 in the morning to dig up vehicles on the F194 Grimmen-Striesen, which had driven on the closed road the night before.“


This week, Sven Johne presents six videos as a sneak peek into his new work in progress: a work about the snow catastrophe on the island of Rügen which happened in the winter of 1978/1979.

These films are not works of art, but only a filmed collection of the material for a photo-text work I’m currently developing with Sebastian Orlac. The work is about the snow catastrophe on the island of Rügen in 1978/79 — the place where I was living then — and the reflection of this state of emergency today. A contemporary witness tells a child about the crisis and he talks about the “heroism“ of his generation. The core of this work is about „masculinity“ and „defensiveness“ — or rather the tradition of these constructed and questionable self-attributions… The six small videos, however, only show the source materials for the work: a lot of photos from the press published in 1978/79 and the newspaper articles read by the children. It is interesting that we talk about a snow catastrophe in times of global warming. My son at the age of nine has seen the snow only once in Berlin.” — Sven Johne