Mutual Matters consists of seven staged conversations with seven different people revolving around the political activism of individuals in Palestine and Israel. All the characters in the film are or have been active in the Swedish leftist movement in the broadest sense.
Bauer says, “Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that my residency with the Israeli Centre for Digital Art did not come with any demands on me to make an artwork, I started to think about which images and what kind of a film I as a visiting artist could possibly produce. As I have often mentioned, I see film as a medium that forms relations and that always suggests something. What could I then, in my position as visitor in a region, suggest with the help of film? And how would a possible film suggestion be understood and interpreted?
I was fully aware that I would not be able to produce images through an event as the films that I have described did. I was a visitor who had no experience of the occupation. Therefore it was not possible for me to find a strategy with which to visualise the political situation on the ground in Palestine and Israel. I would probably never get beyond the empty, emblematic images. My insight into the occupation was based on information that I accrued through listening to others’ stories and memories of events, but I could not, as these films did, depict the experience of being surrounded and determined by the occupation. However, as opposed to both Palestinians and Israelis who lived in the region, my position as an artist and foreigner made it possible to move relatively freely and have discussions with both Palestinians and Israelis. Therefore I came to speak to a large number of people with different experiences and views of the 121 123 political situation in the region about their political activism. After a while it became increasingly clear that the experience and possibility of listening to others was a possible point of departure for an artwork; through the stories of others I could discern the consequences of the occupation from different perspectives and positions.”
“…Conducting an investigation into film as political action as part of artistic research implies that my own artistic practice plays a crucial role; it is in the doing that I explore the potential for film to act politically, but it is also in doing that new thoughts and questions arise. I use the experiences from making films to think about theoretical approaches and practical methods. The doing is thus a very important part of the research.35 Reflections and arguments regarding theoretical and historical contexts that have affected the film practice of other artists and filmmakers have also been of central importance to this thesis.”
Mutual Matters is a collaboration with Kim Einarsson and Marius Dybwad Brandrud.
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