One of the fundamental points in critique of the archive is its seeming neutrality. Regarding photographic archives, artist Allan Sekula wrote that archives treat images as atomised entities, depriving them of any context. The Arsenal, by contrast, considers itself a place of production – a place, in which working with film acts on our perception of the present, understands itself as political, asks questions, and allows for incompleteness. (Englisch)

Archive workers, filmmakers, and film curators have, in this way, materialized and created a kind of “dealing with” films, producing, sometimes very deliberately, active relations with and inbetween them. As part of his practice as an artist, film curator, and author, Florian Wüst concerns himself with various types of documents he then edits, collages, and reassembles. The short film programs and film series he curates at multiple venues, among them the Arsenal, live by juxtapositing and contrasting diverse films and film genres. relations intermixes the viewing of some Chilean and West German films of the early 1970s with personal notes, historical information, and literature quotations. Materials are set into a new context, that provokes new readings of them. What do we really see and hear in a film? How does the situation of viewing a film change our understanding of it – there and here, then and now? (Ines Schaber)