Triple F
Video/Film – 2013
HD Video, 12.22 min
Triple F presents a society where individuals are valued not for their essence but for their performance. The central figures, WILDA, MARLA, and BOA, are portrayed by TV actresses Ela Paul (Under Us) and Denise M’Bsaye (For Heaven’s Sake), alongside the artist herself. These three rulers transcend their physical bodies through the power of their thoughts, controlling others like puppets. A failed ideas marathon has ignited a bitter war between them.
The film evokes the sensuality of 1970s science fiction while exploring the growing distance between the mind and body. Filmed at the neo-baroque Rheda Castle, the Marler Stern shopping center from the 1970s, and the U-Tower in Dortmund, Triple F uses cinematic conventions to depict an autocratic society led by women. The rulers, in an ongoing power struggle, arbitrarily harm, kill, or torture each other’s citizens. A woman collapses with shopping bags, children run to drown in a lake, and their parents die unnoticed on a park bench. In this society, ordinary citizens’ lives are in constant latent danger, as if trapped in a battlefield.
In Triple F, Marcin both admires and critiques the influence of powerful female figures in capitalist society. She explores their obsessive control and highlights the suffering of a society unable to free itself from the goddesses it once desired. The film mirrors and critiques the ugly political and social dynamics of the present, revealing their detrimental effects on the human psyche and exposing the inevitable mechanisms of a service-based society in the modern metropolis governed by the rules of capital. The film is supported by the Film and Media Foundation North Rhine-Westphalia.
EXHIBITIONS
01111010 (…), Esther Donatz as part of Kino der Kunst, Munich, curated by Jürgen Dehm, 2015 (S)
Zero Gravity, Kunstverein Unna, Unna, 2014 (S)
Zero Gravity, 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, 2013 (S)
2010 MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fischer Landau Center for the Arts, New York, 2010 (G)
PRESS
Sarah Corona, “L’arte senza Gravita”, Wallstreet International Magazine, New York, Dec 2013.
CREDITS
Cast
Ela Paul, Denise M’Baye, Nadja Verena Marcin, Frederik Jan Hoffmann, Martin Moeller, Jace Rashid
CREDITS
Crew
Director: Nadja Verena Marcin; Writer: Nadja Verena Marcin; Director of Photography: Violetta D’Agata; Produced by NVM Studio; Production Designer: Nadja Verena Marcin; Editor(s): Mike Lowther, Nadja Verena Marcin, Adam Ginsberg; Concept, Art Director & Performance: Nadja Verena Marcin
SPONSORS
The project is made possible by Production Grant, Film und Medienstiftung NRW, Düsseldorf, 2013