Ella Raidel is a filmmaker and visual artist who investigates the socio-cultural dimensions of living together and the logic of image production. Her practice creates a discursive space for filmmaking, art, and research. She is an Assistant Professor at NTU Nanyang Technological University Singapore’s School of Art, Design, and Media. She employs documentary, experimental film, immersive storytelling, VR/AR technologies, and 360-degree filmmaking to explore new ways of seeing. By integrating art, technology, and social science, she creates a discursive space for critical engagement within the expanding field of audiovisual media. In 2022, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture honored her with the Outstanding Artist Award for Fiction and Documentary Film. Her work has been published in the book: Of Haunted Spaces – The Films of Ella Raidel Cinema, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyperurbanization, Edited by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore 2023, NUS Press
Geistergegenwart, RAY Filmmagazin 12/23+01/24, pp. 68-73, Text and Interview – Andreas Ungerböck, LINK, A comprehensive and detailed book review spanning six pages in Ray Filmmagazin, Austria.
Camera Austria 166/ 2024, pp.86-87 by Maren Richter
Les Nouveaux Riches Magazine, Association for Contemporary Art and Culture, Interview with Ella Raidel, Interview: Daniel Lichterwaldt, June 2023, Link
Ella Raidel, Video portrait, Outstanding Artist Award, Documentary and Fiction Film, Federal Ministry, Republic of Austria, Arts, Culture and Civil Service and Sports, Link
Teaching Documentary for the 21st Century, Vol. 3, published by CILECT—The International Association of Film and Television Schools.
The volume, edited by Kerstin Stutterheim, Gerda Cammaer, Roz Mortimer, Kym Campbell, and Nico Meissner, explores the dynamic landscape of film, TV, and media education in the 21st century.
Chapter 11: Ella Raidel, “Performative Documentary, Artistic Research, and Emancipatory Pedagogy,” is included in this important collection. The e-book PDF has the ISBN 978-619-7358-13-1.
Abstract:
The Performative Documentary as a Method for Artistic Research
The performative documentary embodies a method I have developed as a filmmaker and arts-based researcher to perform documents while interacting with sites, actors, and audiences. I define the performative documentary as a play on reality, contrasting straightforward reports, facts, or information. My use of the word “play” is understood for its polysemy, where it not only means a theatrical drama but can mean a child’s activity in a game, an improvisation, using an instrument, or singing. Departing from the theories of the performative, this artistic form of filmmaking refers to its capacity for transformation. To perform the documents means to take action to reveal their inner logic of cultural representation. Through the consideration of documents in relation to poetics, participation, and activism, colonial truths and knowledge can be revealed, and diasporic histories experienced. Films become not only cultural-political texts but also visual and acoustic devices for making aware of one’s origins and destinies. The performative documentary encourages students to become active as researchers and understand their practice as an open-ended process in which thinking and making are one. It employs art as the discursive tool, which often goes beyond the traditionally defined medium and method. Its reflexivity engages the self-critique of representation. This paper sets out to define documents and performativity in filmmaking in terms of its methods, artistic processes, and cultural and political significance, and how this practice-based knowledge can be adapted to a teaching method.
Forthcoming: Performativity in Documentary Filmmaking. Poetic Play of Life. Amsterdam University Press, 2026
The regional train and the surrounding landscape from Gmunden to Bad Aussee serve as the stage for this audiovisual docu-fiction. Memories of humans and non-humans retell the story of the Salzkammergut from multiple perspectives. Passengers can hear a conversation between the Train, the Mountain, and the Traunsee Mermaid, interwoven with stories of the local population.
Amsterdam-based documentary theater maker and scenario writer Petra Ardai interviewed locals to create a docu-fiction narrative about how the landscape, the salt, and the industry formed the region. Which powers shaped structures that are still present? What is the place of tradition in the future?
The train journey is divided into five excursions. You can hop op in Gmunden, Ebensee, Bad Ischl, Hallstatt and Bad Aussee. The audio-visual material is arranged according to the scenery. Renowned actress and narrator Chris Lohner, the official voice of all railway stations in Austria, accompanies us on this imaginary journey in the role of the Train. The experience can be accessed via the QR code below and from March 2024 via the Salzkammergut Culture Guide App. Bring your headphones to listen to the story.
In August 2024, the story continues as a cinematic virtual reality experience directed by filmmaker Ella Raidel. The Cine VR takes the audience into caves, mines, and landscapes around the Salzkammergut region in 360° videos. This immersive journey can be viewed through VR glasses provided at the venues.
Estonian Composer Sander Saarmets collected sounds in participatory workshops with people from the region. Susi Jirkuff’s distinct, delicate line drawings connect the audio-visual experience of Regional Express through various media on the App, website, and graphic design.
Marlene Rutzendorfer is the curator, producer, and researcher of the project. Having grown up in the region, she not only coordinated the international team of multidisciplinary artists working on Regional Express but also established a close connection to the area by involving an extensive network of locals.
“Austria’s Salzkammergut bets on arts, culture to reboot region in 2024,” by Ong Sor Fern, The Straits Times Singapore, 14.02.2024. Link
Moshammer, Mariella. ”Geschichten von Riesenkraken, während der See vorbeifließt.“ Volksblatt, 22.01.2024, Link
A preview of the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl 2024 and the project Regional Express, in „Schaufenster,“ Die Presse, Philipp, Norbert. 15.12.2023, Regional Express is an audio-visual experience on the train and in cine virtual reality for the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl 2024 by Petra Ardai, Ella Raidel, and Marlene Rutzendorfer. Link
Lebensg’schichten: Ella Raidel, Video portrait, Salzi TV, produced by Melanie Jungwirth. Link
Cinema, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyperurbanization
Edited by Ute Meta Bauer
with contributions from Itty Abraham, Ute Meta Bauer, Marlene Rutzendorfer, and Yu Weiying
As amalgams of the different spatial logics of other places, reassembled by globalization and the fantasies of real estate development, cities today are becoming what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias. Assemblies of ruins, theme parks, entirely copied towns, simulacra, business districts on a globalized template, reconstructed historic districts, settlements, and ghost towns are finding a new expression in the contemporary world. Nowhere has this become more visible recently than in China and in areas under China’s developmental influence. Copied cities, ghost cities, and large-scale Chinese investments in Africa are heterotopias because they contain the idea of accumulating different times, cultures, and countries within one place, just as a theme park contains all these different place experiences in a bounded zone outside of its own time and culture.
Ella Raidel has explored these phenomena through film and cinematic virtual reality, and this artist’s book reviews reflect the last two decades of her award-winning work. In Ella Raidel’s films, urbanism and architecture, theory, politics, social change, and image production are intertextually presented, opening a discursive space for investigation and commentary. This book will be interesting for art and film practitioners and students of architecture, film, urbanization, and infrastructure, especially those who see cinema as a way of exploring these subjects.
Camera Austria 166/ 2024, pp.86-87 von Maren Richter
published 12/06
Translated from German:
Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Ella Raidel, Of Haunted Spaces, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyperurbanisation NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 2023,
by Maren Richter
For two decades, Singapore-based Austrian filmmaker Ella Raidel has been working and researching China’s efforts to transition from a communist-capitalist two-system state to a neo-colonial superpower. Using essayistic narrative forms, located somewhere between documentary and feature film, she dissects places that represent both dream and trauma – gigantic property projects, copies of European cities, landmarks and villages, often objects of speculation that are preceded by fantasies of political omnipotence and end up as ghost towns. The artist often shoots her “performative documentaries”, as she characterizes her working method, in guerrilla style in the absence of permits and uses the re-enactment of what she has observed – tracked down in urban interstices and at the transitions from one era to another.
The book Of Haunted Spaces, edited by Ute Meta Bauer, explores Ella Raidel’s complex filmic journeys into a fictional real, experimentally and poetically enriched by soundscapes, references to Western film history, Eastern poetry and superimpositions of temporalities in the structure of urban narratives, in which the city itself seems to become an (exhausted) protagonist, as Marlene Rutzendorfer adds. In her essay “The Poetry of Haunted Spaces”, the urban theorist describes Raidel’s films as documentary dramas that form “their own syntax of architectural filmmaking” and go beyond the description of spaces or the tracing of the history of the built environment. They are fabricated realities, fabulations that blur fact and fiction, brought together by protagonists who are haunted by ghosts from different eras.
The ghost infrastructure is not an accidental counterpart to capitalist urbanization, according to Yu Weiying, but emerges as an unavoidable yet discursive force from the abundance of the Capitalocene. In her contribution, the author examines the newly configured Chinese ghost cities as performative entities and outlines the idea of “ghost infrastructural(e)ality” with particular reference to Raidel’s latest film A Pile of Ghosts (2021), which she characterizes as infrastructural spatial productions of an urban reality speculatively haunted by a seemingly promising but unfulfilled future based on global capital. The story about a hotel owner’s silent resistance to the urbanization of Chongqing, which begins as a documentary and increasingly turns into a dream, ghost and love story, is, like all of Raidel’s films, inspired by Southeast Asian independent films. It is the last of a trilogy that began in 2011 with the film SUBVERSES China in Mozambique, based on the recordings of an anonymous Chinese worker, in which Raidel addressed China’s neo-colonial strategy of building infrastructure in exchange for raw materials. This investment invasion in Africa seemed to be a kind of test phase for the Xi Jinping regime before it imagined itself as the world’s largest economic power with the announcement of the gigantic global infrastructure project of the New Silk Road in 2013.
Itty Abraham examines the trilogy, which also includes Double Happiness, about the replica of the Austrian Hallstatt in China, from this perspective. The postcolonial expert introduces his text with the “Chinese Dream” – a complex imagination that reminds the world that China is the oldest unbroken civilization, overcoming past injustices and looking forward, suggesting that “rejuvenation” will help achieve national perfection and lead to global supremacy. Yet for all the kinetic power of Chinese exceptionalism, the China Dream harbours deep doubts, articulated as a “patriotic anxiety” about whether the nation and its resources are still sufficient to fulfil the dream (p. 87).
For Abraham, the three films are a narrative about shifting borders, not territorial borders, but rather urban, historical and temporal ones. Taken together, the trilogy offers a vantage point from which to assess and understand the gaps and contradictions within an increasingly overheated geopolitical echo chamber. The book on Ella Raidel’s long-term research is, like her work itself, a kaleidoscopic journey of discovery into global shifts, exhaustion and borders.
Book Review 2:
Geistergegenwart, RAY Filmmagazin 12/23+01/24, pp.68-73
Ella Raidel – Outstanding Artist Award für Spiel- und Dokumentarfilm
Geboren 1970 in Gmunden, Studium an der Kunstuniversität Linz, lebt und arbeitet in Singapur, Asst. Professorin für Dokumentarfilm an der NTU Nanyang Technologial University Singapur. Raidel ist eine Künstlerin, die konsequent und kontinuierlich an der Schnittstelle zwischen performativer Kunst, Dokumentarfilm und Fiction arbeitet. Ihre Protagonist:innen sind in streng komponierte Bilder eingewoben. Sie wandeln zwischen Tradition, Moderne und Zukunft, durch gewachsene und kopierte Städte, durch Abrisshäuser und postmoderne Erlebniskultur. Teils als real Betroffene und teils als Schauspieler:innen erkunden sie ihre eigene Identität. Die filmischen Räume bekommen durch diese Settings eine heterotopische Ausformung. Sie werden zu Bühnen und Vexierbildern, die nicht mehr eindeutig zuordenbar sind. Persönliche Erzählungen von Menschen, Kommentare und historische Referenzen verschmelzen ontologisch mit der Architektur zu einem mentalen Bild. Dabei entsteht ein neues, offenes Kino. Ein Kino, das genre- und disziplinübergreifend die Konventionen des Filmemachens reflektiert.
Ella Raidel is this year’s recipient of the Austrian Ministry for Culture’s (BMKÖS) Outstanding Artist Award in the category of feature and documentary film.
“Raidel is an artist who consistently and continuously works at the interface between performative art, documentary film, and fiction. Her protagonists are rigorously woven into composed images. They wander between tradition, modernity, and the future, through grown cities and replicas, through condemned buildings and postmodern experience culture. (…) Individual narratives, commentaries, and historical references merge ontologically with the architecture to form a mental image. In the process, a new, open cinema emerges. A cinema that reflects on the conventions of filmmaking across genres and disciplines.”
Die (Lebens)künstlerin die Asien und Europa vereint, OÖ. Nachrichten, 21/10/22
A Pile of Ghosts received the Award for Excellence at the East Asian Experimental Competition at the 36th Image Forum Festival Tokyo!
“Starting with the fiction of the Eiffel Tower in China, the film poignantly shows the fragile actuality that this multilayered and uncertain mass is reality, which is an accumulation of various symmetrical objects, such as new architecture and ruins, real estate brokers, and actors, the sound of a hammer echoing in the void and music from a Hollywood movie melodrama, the pseudo-romance between a nonexistent hotel guest and the host, etc. We admire the insightful editing and music design, which deeply elaborate the space between documentary and fiction, and we also would like to express our respect for this ambitious film that strikes a unique rhythm.” Jury statement
Image Forum Festival 2022, organized by the Executive Committee of Image Forum Festival in association with Image Forum and Aichi prefectural Museum of Art (co-organizers), will take place from September 17th.
TOKYO
– Venues: Theater Image Forum / SHIBUYA SKY / Spiral Hall
– Dates: September 17th to September 25th, 2022
KYOTO
– Venue: Kyoto Minami Kaikan
– Dates: October 7th to October 13th, 2022
NAGOYA
– Venue: Aichi Arts Center
– Dates: November 25th to November 27th, 2022 Conventional forms of imagery and its rigid confinement will be taken away. Here, from film to video, all that moving images are subject for festival screenings. Festival was founded in 1987, this year is 36 times. Festival’s principle objective is to discover and promote perpetually developing visuals in its latest phase. And Festival’s key word is experimental, in this word, we have implemented our will to seek positively and recognize all the possibilities awaiting for visual media art.
A performative, cinematic VR 360 film by Ella Raidel
The documentary VR work explores the relationship between space and body in Singapore’s iconic modernist shopping malls in seven scenarios. The Seven-Step Verse is inspired by the Chinese poet Cao Zhi, who believed that a poem in seven verses shows wit, speed, and creativity. The performers occupy the malls, appropriating clothing and gestures and reciting texts as they pass by – thus pointing to the underlying ideological and social hierarchies.
Crew Director: Ella Raidel Screenplay: Ella Raidel Producer: Ella Raidel VR Cinematographer and VR Technical Director: Benjamin Seide Sound recording: Vanessa Yip, Chua Xin Yun, Yang Haolin Sound design: Ross Adrian Williams Editor: Benjamin Seide Composer: Ross Adrian Williams Production design: Ella Raidel Color correction: Benjamin Seide Title design: Benjamin Seide
FESTIVALS:
Next:
FIVARS – Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories, Toronto, Official Selection (2023)
BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Bilbao, Spain. (2023)
FICMA, The International Alternative Media Film Festival (2023)
12 VR works from across Southeast Asia, South Korea, and Taiwan will be available at SeaShorts Film Festival 2022 as part of our Beyond Mirage exhibition!
The exposition Of Haunted Spaces-The Artistic Research in Filmmaking is published and online: https://jar-online.net/en
Of Haunted Spaces is an artistic research project conducted into Chinese ghost cities. It interprets the paradoxical urban phenomena where cities are built for millions, but not lived in. The research process is presented through the publication of Ghost Paper, a reference to the traditional Chinese joss paper that is burned as an offering to the dead, which I developed with Ralph K.C.Wu.
The first issue used a newspaper format that can be unfolded into a poster. This online version uses the reference to the traditional papers to connect the online with the offline world, the imaginary and the real world, to reveal the effects of capitalism that are haunting our living conditions.
The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal that disseminates artistic research from all disciplines. JAR provides a digital platform where multiple methods, media and articulations may function together to generate insights in artistic research endeavours. It seeks to promote exposition of practise as artistic research.
A Pile of Ghosts (2021) will be screened at Crossing Europe Fimfestival Linz in the program section ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIETY which is dedicated to the “land issue”, presenting films that take a multifaceted look at the economic, ecological, and social importance of land, our basis of life.
