Danger(ous) Measures through Filmmaking and Research-based Artistic Practice

Current scholarship holder Vanessa Gravenor will discuss her filmic and media-based practice in the artist talk “Dangerous Measures” in the frame of Otte 1’s program “Nach dem Markt.” on Saturday, 22 November 2025 at 12:30 p.m.

Gravenor will discuss working with secret military histories and using the aesthetics of secrecy as a theoretical and practical method to disrupt but also distribute the unknown knowns always at work in the games of war. From former Soviet secret cities on the Western Coast of Latvia to a bunker outside of Canada’s parliamentary capital in Carp Ontario, Gravenor has been documenting landscapes and periphery regions, tracing the paranoid residues left over from the Cold War. She lets her camera roll while imaginatively looking and reconstructing the gaze of soldiers and ghostly partisans who monitored skies and seas.

During her scholarship period, Gravenor has turned her focus to the Northern Baltic Sea region and the military base in Eckernförde. In an ongoing filmic project, she is exploring the tension and ambivalences between zones of violence and peace and how warm-up, drills, and preparation for future threats can reveal how wars play out on psyches but also ecologies through imagined and historic production lines.