Publika – Kartographie: von der Zielgruppe zum Rhizom

And I've scrolled you up and down the internet. (Helga Ullbricht)

In "Publika – Cartography: from the target group to the rhizome", Vanessa Stern and her (film) team attempt to approach their audiences of the past few years from a botanical-philosophical perspective and thus break away from prevailing norms of media attention economy such as established schemas of stimulus and reaction, standard seduction strategies and range logic.

She hypothesizes that most parts of her audience resemble underground rhizomes, and tests this thesis by means of film interviews with viewers of her past works. The illustrator Pedro Stoichita tries to map these audience rhizomes in the film, the theater scholar Julia Prager, who researches relationship-forming dynamics in theater, performance and protest, follows and comments on the experimental arrangements and the director's father provides documentary film material from her Austrian home village very costly removal of a bamboo rhizome that he and the director's late mother planted in the garden as a privacy screen in the early 1980s and which, after 43 years, is threatening to overgrow the adjacent federal road.

Ulrike Hentschel, Maika Knoblich, Robin Plenio, Julia Prager, Rachel Rosen, Pedro Stoichita, Dietmar Schmidt & Vanessa Stern