monoscape
2017, 2.5K video, 16’41”, color, sound
Monoscape observes the container port of Cologne-Niehl, the largest of the city’s harbours, entered from the Rhine at kilometre 695.8. Gantry cranes, straddle carriers and trucks synchronise streams of goods around the clock; people appear only as attendants at the edge of the machinery. The film holds the port in static tableaus and lets the montage take its rhythm from the machines. It renders logistics as a sculpture in real time, a system set to a planetary timetable that reaches from a short stretch of quay far into the surrounding land. What comes into view is the structure, form and mentality of a landscape defined by supply chains, and the way it orders everyday life while withdrawing from perception.
Daniel Burkhardt, assistant professor for artistic editing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, written on the occasion of the film’s presentation on ZOOM, the school’s online platform for artistic film projects. On the 2017 single-channel version. English translation of the German original.
Viktor Brim’s art consists in looking. What sounds mundane and everyday proves, on closer inspection, to be complicated, since every act of seeing inherently carries a stance and a position, a particular relationship to the object of observation. Brim’s gift lies in neither exalting nor demeaning the landscapes, objects and people he turns his gaze upon, neither mystifying them nor diminishing them through analysis. Through the exact measuring of the duration of his gaze and the precise setting of the frame, he succeeds, seemingly without effort, in letting what he observes tell its own story, as if of its own accord. And this on the levels of the past—through inscribed traces—the present—through documented presence—and the future, too—through the extrapolation, invited on the part of the viewer, of events that are only ever visible in fragments.
Brim’s films describe, above all, places, and they narrate through them and with them, in their function as bearers of (hi)stories. He chooses landscapes that are devoid of people in the immediate present of the recording, yet fundamentally made, conceived or shaped by human beings. Brim does not let people speak directly, does not have them express their assessments, ideas and visions in words, but shows all of this by way of manifestations already realised, of legacies left behind in the world. The striated landscape, which human beings have made their own and formed according to their intentions, thus serves as mirror, archive and witness.
The video work Monoscape sets out from a relatively narrowly delimited, unspectacular area: a small harbour zone in the north of Cologne. Brim focuses on this monofunctional space, where various streams of traffic and goods converge and must be synchronised, fascinated as he is by the complexity and dynamics of the logistical system behind it. He shows us a scene calibrated to a global temporality, one that ignores local conditions and never rests: a dynamic real-time sculpture, its veins plugged directly into the network of globally circulating goods, its arms reaching far out into the surrounding region.
Within this already confined area, the freedom of movement of Brim and his cinematographer Simon Baucks was restricted still further, as they were only permitted to remain within a small zone. Using telephoto lenses, they managed to extract an astonishing number of distinct visual tableaux from the ensemble they found before them. And it quickly becomes clear that this is not about documenting a specific local harbour area, but about observing a world-spanning network of circulating goods. It is a system that once had the human being as its point of origin and centre, but which has gradually taken on a life of its own, following its own inherent laws and logical rules. Within it, human beings are now merely observing, serving figures at the margins, and this is precisely how the human protagonists appear in Brim’s film: penned into enormous operator cabins, where they work two or three levers, or standing outside, lethargically waiting for the machines to finish their work and for the omnipresent logic of production to transfer them from A to B. Brim shows human beings apathetic within a system they themselves created, one that has long since slipped from their grasp and grown beyond them.
At the same time, however, Monoscape is also a celebration of the elegance of machines and industrial processes, of their unwavering and at once enigmatic functionality, and of their appearance, poised between monumentality and delicacy. The film commits itself to these technical pacemakers to such a degree that it generates its entire rhythm from the turning, lifting and rolling movements of the logistical apparatus. “An atmosphere should emerge that spreads through the objects and their interplay,” writes the filmmaker. That this succeeds is due in part to the fact that Brim does not simply break the logistical processes down into their various segments for analysis, but examines the individual machines and their functions for their performative potential. Every shot is like a stage on which precisely choreographed actions unfold. It almost seems as though they had not been captured through documentary observation, but staged for observation.
The film decontextualises the technical processes: we do not understand what is being moved, lifted and pushed, to what end, or to where. Brim looks at the visible structures, at the surfaces and edges of the vast sculpture, and questions them as to their aesthetic and narrative potential. The sheer scale of the individual machines often exceeds the frame: the entire content of the image is set in motion, there is no orientation, no foothold, no outside, and we, the viewers, likewise lose ourselves in this immense choreography of technical processes.
In the montage of his tableaux, Brim concentrates not on visual analogies alone, but also works with oppositions. He fans out the complexity and multiplicity of the visual formations, creating a whole range of at times opposing impressions: synchronous and counter-directed movements, force and fragility, speed and standstill, gravity and weightlessness.
From an insignificant point in the Cologne harbour, Brim looks out at the manifestations, organisational structures and interdependencies of an omnipresent, world-spanning system for the transport of goods. An extremely ramified, finely differentiated network that, at least potentially, connects and synchronises the world’s smallest corners with one another. What emerges is the image of a logistical fabric that communicates via nodes and lines and bears an astonishing resemblance to models of neural structures. The rhythmically honed montage generates a pull all of its own, drawing us ever deeper into this technical fabric. And in retracing the rhythms, the flowing and jerky movements, the continuous blinking of the warning lights, the pendular motion of the gripper arms, the trembling of the lashing straps, the turning of the crane cabins and the slow rolling of the container gantries, it becomes palpable that the moods, metres and atmospheres that emerge do not reference the external alone, but also hold a correspondence, an equivalence, to states within.
A container vessel leaves the river at kilometre 695.8 and turns into the harbour basin. Niehl I is the largest of Cologne’s ports, around 1.3 million square metres of quays, basins and storage areas in the industrial north of the city. By the figures of its operator, HGK, more than 2,000 vessels are loaded and unloaded here each year. The decision to build the port predates the First World War; the entrance, the west quay and the first basin followed in the 1920s, and by 1970 the site had reached its final extension. With the container revolution it grew into one of the inland hubs that connect the seaports of Rotterdam and Antwerp to their German hinterland. The surfaces and edges that new transshipment routes and terminals cut into this territory are the film’s actual material.
The port is a sculpture operating in real time, an ensemble of apparatuses working around the clock whose reach extends far into the surrounding region. Its smallest unit is the container, the standardised box in which the value chain takes physical form; in the film it becomes the protagonist. The machines that handle it, gantry cranes, straddle carriers and reach stackers, dissolve into partial movements that transmit forces and tensions rather than equipment. The shots follow the logistical cycle from day operations into the night, when the processes recede into shadows and silhouettes. There is no voiceover: the acoustics of the port, its signals, impacts and idling engines, carry what would otherwise have to be explained. Isolated from their productive context, the apparatuses stand as forms in their own right, a way of seeing indebted to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of industrial architecture.
Industrial cycles push production out of the city and leave behind landscapes organised around a single function: terminals, distribution centres, corridors of transit. The architect and urbanist Ian Nazareth, in Transformational Urban Landscapes, describes this as an urbanism in which industry, infrastructure and logistics work as a single system, until the city itself can be read as one continuous landscape shaped by containers and global infrastructure. Transport geography sharpens the question that follows: not what is moved, nor from where to where, but how. Logistics, write Markus Hesse and Jean-Paul Rodrigue, is a system of space-time interactions in which time becomes a factor of distance, friction and resistance, synchronised at nodes and terminals (The Transport Geography of Logistics and Freight Distribution, Journal of Transport Geography, 2004). Ideally these processes unfold out of sight, where goods are produced, and reappear seamlessly on the shelf. Niehl is one such node among many.
The chains that pass through Niehl run downstream to Rotterdam and Antwerp, Europe’s two largest ports, and outward into a network that now reaches China along the routes of the Belt and Road Initiative, the infrastructure programme China launched in 2013 (Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road, National Development and Reform Commission, 2015). Its maritime arm runs by sea to the Chinese coast, and Chinese state shipping holds terminal stakes in both Rotterdam and Antwerp. Its overland arm, a rail corridor across Eurasia, ends a short stretch of river north of Cologne at Duisburg, the world’s largest inland port, where the Rhine meets the Ruhr and dozens of freight trains arrive each week from Chinese cities. A parallel information route of cross-border optical cables doubles the physical one.
