Althea Thauberger

Set against the highly complicated political and economic context of the former Yugoslavian state, on the site of Benčić, the former worker-managed factory in Rijeka, the fifty-seven minutes experimental film is a socially engaged and layered documentation that offers an idiosyncratic approach to the investigation of the complexities of expressing labour, the revelation of boundaries and social class, and the exploration of alternative models of governance.[14]

Thauberger initiated the film as a framework for continuing a critical and generative dialogue about the multiple values of the factory, the restructuring of Rijeka's political economy, and the paradigms of cultural industries. She worked with sixty-seven local children performers who are divided into the roles of “artists” or former workers who have been permitted to temporarily re-occupy the complex, and “mayors” who discuss their own plans for its regeneration. By using children as her cast, Thauberger is able to conjure an inviting illusion of play whilst still encouraging scrutiny of the larger issues underlying the project and the potential socioeconomic failures related to creative regeneration.[14][15] Preuzmimo Benčić, is akin to 20th century forms of radical theatre, such as Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke or techniques within Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. In both forms, there is no division between the actors and the audience and play-acting is employed as an instructive process.[16] Thauberger sees the explorations of the relations between work, art and play as the fundament of this project, and her experience of working with children as mutual empowerment process that invokes imagination, wonder and empathy.[17][18]

Thauberger produced Marat Sade Bohnice in collaboration with Akanda, an experimental theatre company in Prague. The forty-seven minute film centres on the staging of the decommissioned waterworks and laundry facilities of Bohnice, another post-revolutionary institution and the largest psychiatric clinic in the Czech Republic. It consists of filmic documentation of the Bohnice psychiatric hospital performance as a reenactment of Peter Weiss’ 1963 play Marat/Sade, as well as documentation of Thauberger's interviews with Bohnice patients and staff. As Thauberger brings various threads together—particularly as she includes hospital staff and residents in the work—she inserts a raw humanism into her deep-time inquiry of mental illness, pointedly linking Marat's revolutionary apprehension to growing contemporary cynicism about institutions. Marat Sade Bohnice approaches philosophical and art histories, questions art's agency and its role within therapy, as well as troubles the systems of human (un)freedom.[4][19]