An archaeological excavation site of an early settlement appears in close-ups and detailed views, you can see young people from all over the world digging, sorting, sorting and documenting, and you can hear the sounds and conversations of their work. They form a lively community dedicated to researching early forms of settlement and society. The picture and sound are just as out of sync as the world of the lost civilization is with that of the current excavation team.
Italian artist Rossella Biscotti has completed her video and audio installation The City, which she began three years ago, in Berlin. Her time as a DAAD scholarship holderis almost over. After Basel and Istanbul, her elaborate work can now be seen in the daadgalerie. The artist, who was born in 1978, documented the excavations in Çatalhöyük, near present-day Konya in Turkey, with a forensic, not a romantic view. The Neolithic settlement site was built 9000 years ago and is now considered one of the first urban centers in the world. Under the direction of the social anthropologist Ian Hodder, the socio-economic development of egalitarian societies is being researched at this World Heritage Site. The flat hierarchies and the interdisciplinary exchange of the excavation team, of which Biscotti was a member during her two stays in 2015 and 2016, fit in with this.
She is also interested in the relationship between history and the present with a view to the socio-political question of how human communities form and dissolve again. She could not have guessed that she would experience both a high point and the involuntary end point of the excavation. While the spectacular find of a female marble figure, which was unharmed and finely crafted, is unique, the coup in Turkey in 2016 caused a stirfor the hasty closure of the excavation site. The film shows the team meeting in which the head of the excavation orders the work to be stopped for safety reasons. After that, the lights literally go out for a moment, darkness and silence reign until the final security measures are taken. Once again, the view sweeps over the surrounding landscape with a 360-degree pan. With that the movie ends.