Screening and Discussion / “Meine Keine Familie,” with Jamieson Webster

Date: Sunday, 8 July 2018, 8 pm
Location: Cabinet, Ebersstrasse 3, Berlin-Schöneberg (map and directions here)
FREE. Space limited; please RSVP events@cabinetmagazine.org

Please join us for a screening of Paul-Julien Robert’s documentary Meine Keine Familie, followed by open discussion led by Jamieson Webster.

The film, from 2012, explores the legacy of the Friedrichshof commune, founded in 1973 by the Viennese actionist and avant-garde artist Otto Muehl on a farm outside Vienna. Through the eyes of the children born on the commune, we are confronted with the failure of the communal dream of escaping authority, family, and sexual repression—in the words of commune member Theo Altenberg, we witness a decline from “real utopia” to “surreal patriarchy.” In a time when collective experimentation is met with great skepticism, is there anything to be gleaned from this historical attempt to deconstruct the family and psyche together?

Please note that the film is in German with English subtitles.

Webster and the staff of Cabinet will attempt to make a one-pot stew to aid the evening’s discussion.

Those interested in reading in advance about Meine Keine Familie and Wild Wild Country, the recent documentary series on the early 1980s Rajneesh commune in Oregon, are referred to Jamieson Webster and Alison Gingeras’s article “Portrait Otto Muehl: Communal Fantasy,” which appears in issue 56) of Spike Art Quarterly.

About Jamieson Webster
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York. She has written for Artforum, Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, Playboy, Spike, and The New York Times. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Stay, Illusion!, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013). She is currently working on The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, with Marcus Coelen, and a new book, Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018).