Kafkamachine

2011
A multidiciplinary project overseas.


In November 25, 2011 a group of people interested in schizoanalysis and it’s adaptations into practice set to sail from Lisbon to São Paulo on a cruise boat “Splendour of the Seas”. The group included a schizoanalytic practice group Ueinzz with the philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart  and dramaturges Cássio Santiago and Elisa Band from São Paulo, Presque Ruines with film makers Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni from Paris and mollecular organization from Helsinki with Akseli Virtanen, Klaus Harju, artists Kari Yliannala, Karolina Kucia, Ana Fradique, cinema photographer Lennart Laberenz and me. There were over forty of us, but still we were a small group on this massive party-boat travelling over two weeks across the South-Atlantic ocean. Our codex was a small script, Projet pour un film de Kafka, which Guattari never published at his time, but was later translated by Gary Genosko. (Guattari 2009b)  This short essay served as a starting point for group experiment and developing a film Kafkamachine. On hours and days we spent in the auditorium reserved for us in the boat we tried to utilize the systems, the grid, presented by Guattari in attempting to demolish the assumed roles of each group and individual, but we ended creating conflict after conflict. In the depths of the financial crisis, and with our keen interest for new forms of producing subjectivity, collaborative practices, minority and contemporary utopias, this was our attempt to confront these issues in the middle of the ocean  —  not alone, but surrounded by the hypermarket of a vessel. Very much alike the situation in La Borde, our Kafkamachine group was version of that clinique with the schizos (Ueinzz), the militants (Presque Ruines), the intellectuals (Virtanen and Harju), the workers (Laberenz and the nurses in the Ueinzz group), the artists and also familiality Guattari would have despised  (Kucia and me with our son and the mother of Kucia as a nanny for our son). Intuitively we had successfully duplicated the system of La Borde. However, we were not unproductive, since we performed Kafkamachine twice in Brazil and we shot hundreds of hours of material during the trip. 

Kafkamachine trailer by Lennart Laberenz