Nowhere Less Now 4

Nowhere Less Now is an episodic work in which each version refers specifically to its location. This is version 4 made specifically for Hayward Gallery, London.
"Seers’ work does not accept the dichotomy of fact and fiction, as nothing seems entirely factual or entirely fictional. Fictional implies untrue and Seers is looking for the truth in things that supersedes mere factuality. The artist has clearly been concerned with Bergson’s notions of ‘multiplicity’ and ‘intuition’, which attempt to bypass traditional concepts of the One and the Multiple. Her work, and especially the dual-screening method, makes great use of Deleuze’s relational terms virtual/actual, fusion/juxtaposition, continuous/discrete, succession/simultaneity."

In the films presented we discover how a Zanzibar Princess (who fled to Hamburg to escape a certain death by stoning in 1866) becomes connected to Leni Riefenstahl (documentary filmmaker and former dancer). This connection is made through their shared relationship to Helgoland. Princess Salme reinforces her connection to the Kaiser and Reifenstahl's connection to Hitler is established through this red rock in the North Sea. (The islands were bizarrely swopped in 1890 in 'The Helgoland/Zanzibar Treaty' between the British and the Germans).

Typically Seers uses personal biography in order to reveal individual lives against the backdrop of grand historic narratives. The principle narrator of the film whose biography we follow is also a dancer. She explains in the film how she is fascinated by creating a hybrid dance which can join middle eastern and european early modernist dance. The film reveals the psychological effect of her narrators fascination for Leni Riefenstahl's dance in the film Holy Mountain (1926) and the intensity of the politics connected to this dance (this is reflected in Hitler's claim that it was the most beautiful passage of film he had seen). This connection of the dance to Hitler propelled LF into the position of becoming the documentary film maker for Hitler's Germany. Princess Salme's life in Germany was also politically charged - she became a pawn in a game for the Germans to gain control over Zanzibar so as to be able to trade it later with Britain for the strategic port of Helgoland.

The narrator in the film reveals her condition of schizophrenia possibly triggered from her father's condition. She reveals her father's connections to the massacre in Zanzibar (1964) after which he suffered a mental breakdown. History reverberates through lives with echoes and scars that mark the unconscious of history itself.

There is a novella that accompanies this work. Nowhere Less Now⁴ | Lindsay Seers