Marco Mazzi, Hypothesis for an Ideological Journey, 2011-20

In March 2011, a violent earthquake followed by a deadly tsunami hits Japan causing catastrophic damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant, killing thousands of people, and giving rise to a true ecological and social disaster of terrifying proportions. I am living in Japan at this point in time and find myself shaken to the core by the reality that the city of Tokyo is experiencing. It is precisely at that moment that I decide to contact filmmaker and writer Harun Farocki (1944-2014), proposing a video project to be shot in Berlin during the summer of that year. I already know Farocki, having organized a public talk about his films at the University of Waseda in Tokyo only a few months ago. My new project is going to be called Hypothesis for an Ideological Journey and it is going to be about the alignment of historical memory with the archive, film as an archive, and the collective and historical memory of a city as an archive. Farcoki agrees to participate in the project and I send him two questions: “What does the public, historical memory of a city consist of and what is the function of the archive?”, and “What is the point of recording (and thus archiving) a revolution?”. The second question is inspired by Farocki’s and Andrei Ujică’s film Videograms of a Revolution (1992). Together with Diego Cossentino, we shot the interview with Farocki on the morning of 14 June 2011. In addition, we amassed several hours of video footage from areas of Berlin that had undergone radical architectural change since 1989. Can we think of ideology as a journey? If so, would it be a journey of discovery, of growth, or of reverie? Is, perhaps, the act of choosing an ideology, a political, philosophical, or existential set of beliefs, a one-way journey? Or is it always possible to retrace one’s steps after having made certain determinate choices? Is the choice itself reversible? Is the meaning of a choice (existential or political) dictated by forward momentum or the hypothesis of a return, of a reevaluation? If the ideological journey anticipates or at the very least does not exclude the possibility of “a return”, what is the role of the archive in all this? Can it be licit to write and rewrite history according to our ideological “shifts”? The journey itself, the journey as tangible experience of another world and culture, might it constitute an experience so totalizing that it is capable of making us reconsider and even disavow an ideological choice that at first seemed inevitable? Could the journey, this movement of body and thought, also be a means of pausing and of accepting the otherness of the other? These are the queries that Hypothesis for an Ideological Journey seeks to evoke. The video was recorded in 2011 but was edited and published on DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art in the spring of 2020 while under quarantine as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.