In the video installation, the theme of the Babylonian confusion is examined by body language. Two people are seemingly communicating with each other, but in fact they are in their own conversation not really reacting to each other.

In the performative video installation Take a breath, the artist immerses himself in the Danube in the Bulgarian-Romanian border region – a river that connects him to his home country. The result is an audiovisual reflection on the agency of the river, which connects human and non-human activities over great distances.

The video installation was created during the Water Tower Art Residency in Lom, Bulgaria, in 2024, and was presented at Lom Art Gallery.

Video installation, Full HD, Sound, 2 min 47 sec, diverse materials, Lom (Bulgaria) 2024

The video installation Außer Betrieb is a column-like sculpture consisting mainly of steel springs from a mattress. It shows a short video that is intended to depict the subjective feeling of a sleepless night in an experimental way.

During two trips to the region and by researching archives in Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany, Janis Schroeder explored the Bulgarian-Turkish border landscape. For the exhibition he created a collage of found and self-created images, texts and sound material. It is a personal geography of the region, which also critically examines his own perspective and privileges.

Gazing out into the horizon, setting your eyes upon the edge of the world. This edge is not a fixed one, if you move it moves with you. Although it exists only in your perception, it governs it nevertheless and orients your movement through the world. It governs perception the same way the horizon point structures every other point in the perspectival image. The edge does not exist, yet it gives structure, it gives life.

The title I can’t go on. I’ll go on. is a quote from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Like the book, which consists of an incoherent inner monologue, the video in the installation amounts to nothing. The person in the black room, which is far too small for him, does not seem to be part of a larger world in which he actively participates. Within this confining framework he would be free to do whatever he wants but instead he just lives on without much happening.

What can I learn from a landscape? What are its processes? What are the processes of its human and non-human inhabitants? And what are my processes when I am in the landscape? What is going on when I walk through the landscape? How can the many insights a landscape holds be perceived and recorded?

“What remains when a person dies?” Latvian folklore enthusiast and translator Iluta Narvila and I have turned to the Dainas, a collection of Latvian folksongs, in search of an answer to this question. In the course of our video research, we have engaged in an experimental exploration of pagan wisdom about man and nature, life and death. Despite primarily being a research assistant at the start of the project, Iluta gradually evolves into its main protagonist.

By hanging posters throughout the city, the filmmaker seeks to engage participants for a film about what it is like to feel at home- or not to feel at home. The film’s six protagonists have either migrated to Germany themselves or are children of people who have migrated to Germany. Their ways of life are therefore shaped by at least two worlds – the world they live in and the world they come from. Shot at locations throughout Berlin that were each chosen by the respective participants, this film attempts to figure out, through conversation, what it means to “feel at home” under these conditions. These exchanges are deliberately open-ended in order to leave room for the protagonists to focus and reflect on elements that are important to them, personally. Thus, the question of belonging – which tends to evade clear answers, particularly in realities shaped by migration – is dealt with and negotiated in many different ways.

“J. Schroeder is interested here in river travel, and more specifically in the fact that it has enabled explorers and ethnographers to penetrate otherwise inaccessible lands. Like the ocean, the river is an essential component of the colonial conquest, with the difference that it is situated in the very heart of the unknown. This is what has notably nourished the dramaturgy of films such as Fitzcarraldo, Deliverance, or Apocalypse Now, where the thread of the river accompanies the narrative development of the film. By juxtaposing a selection of ethnographic archives […] with the experience of his own descent of the Rhône, Janis Lew Schroeder deals with the origins and persistence of discourses produced over centuries by the civilising West.“

Zeitraffer shows the development of a Mediterranean island landscape from its original state to the highly developed and technological present. In the form of a photo slideshow with environmental sound, pristine nature morphs into a landscape marked by the first changes made by humans, such as farming and housing, and then into images of a scenery that is strongly affected by an industrial society.

The video essay tells the story of two male midwives in Geneva, Switzerland. Due to conflicts in their home countries (Burundi and Iran), the two men fled to Switzerland, where they became the first men working as midwives there. Through the vita of these two people, the video essay seeks to challenge dichotomies of man-woman, black-white, north-south, and foreigner-native.

Versuch einer Gegenüberstellung von historischen und aktuellen Stadtraumfragen [Attempt on a confrontation of historic and current questions about urban space]

During this festival held in the ruins of a soccer stadium in Zurich, a living room comes into being in the entrance corridor of the former stadium. In this living room, an old television screens historic video interviews made in the 1980s on the streets of the Swiss German cities of Zurich, Basel, and Bern. During the interviews, passers-by comment on squatted houses of these times – sometimes in a positive manner, sometimes hostile. The interviews are part of a documentary produced at that time by the squatters themselves and come from Swiss Social Archives in Zurich.

From the perspective of a descendant, the video essay Problemhaus tells a story about a family coming to the Ruhr valley in the 1920ies. To adapt to the life in their new country they change their name from a Polish to a German one. The narrator uses the cliché-name “Kryzekowski” and also in the documents which are shown in the film, the original name does not appear anymore. Gradually it becomes clear that the name was forgotten and therefore a part of the history of the family was erased.

The three chapters of this video installation play in three cities in the Ruhr region of Germany. There are three protagonists of different generations walking down the pedestrian streets of these cities on foot. A long camera movement shows them only from behind, their eyes fixed on what they have in front of them. They tell personal stories related to the emergence and appropriation of public space, as well as the region’s history of coal mining.

The video shows a laboratory where abandoned objects that are considered valueless are measured, examined, and arranged. All objects – leaves, stones, bark, paper, plastic, metal, and so on – originated from three different empty lots in Geneva. The video was shown during the self-directed festival Salefriche, which took place on these three empty lots and addressed, among other subjects, the issue of expensive living space in Geneva.

A mother tells the story of her two sons who started a paintball project. In addition to building three large battlefields, they have also been paintball world cup champions several times. The photo slideshow shows mainly activities that happen on the site around the battlefields. Parents, friends, and family come to accompany those who play. What is the social structure in such a constructed place, and what are the differences of roles between women and men, parents and children?

This video essay shows the activities of a group of young European activists going to the United Nations in New York, where they campaign at an international conference against nuclear weapons. For the video work, interviews were conducted with politicians, NGO employees, and activists. The video deals with the topic of nuclear threat in a time in which the political importance and media presence of nuclear weapons has decreased. Why is this topic still relevant for a group of young activists who did not experience the Cold War themselves, and what is the relevance of a film about that?

Without knowing Basel, the protagnist walks blindfolded for three hours in the city. A second person guides him and tells the protagonist what she sees. The spectator of the video hears what the clip-on microphone records of the urban environment and sees the things that are touched by the protagonist.

Insects such as spiders, grasshoppers, flies, and a praying mantis are inside board game boxes. Isolated from the environment, they are projected on the three different board games, which lay abandoned on the ground.