part of The Child Inside Us All, a season of artists’ films selected by Let’s Make Art, in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella.
Fairy tales are handed down, from mothers to daughters and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut. Steeped in memories of childhood, nursery rhymes and other bedside stories seem to speak with the authentic voice of pre-history, and forge a direct link to that bygone past. Although this is an enchanting notion, the reality is that these age-old fables are always something of a patchwork: the product of different authors, at different times.
The party line about Kurt Schwitters was that he was many things: poet, performer, painter, prankster (and permeations of the above). It’s often less noted that he was also a writer of children’s stories – a playful, avuncular spirit with a penchant for the macabre and the absurd.
A number of Schwitters’ captivating children’s tales form the basis of Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Merzschmerz, a series of short videos in which children revisit what they remember of each recently-read story, and relay it in the company of an adult (family member, neighbour, guardian or friend). As the children furrow their brows in concentration, or smirk in advance at the funny things they are about to impart, their excited faces are echoed by the indulgent, quizzical smiles of the adults, creating a moment of togetherness, and adding to the pieces’ infectious charm.
Merzschmerz was commissioned as part of the group project MerzBank. 2017, 15 minutes.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Supported by Arts Council England.
Artist Bio:
Andrea Luka Zimmerman (they / them) is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.
Andrea films include: Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, written and voiced by the late John Berger), Estate, a Reverie(2015), Erase and Forget (2017), Artangel produced Here for Life (2019) and The Wapping Project produced Wayfaring Stranger (2024, featuring Eileen Myles), which have screened widely around the world including at Berlinale, Locarno, IDFA, Istanbul, BAFICI and IFFR festivals, as well as in cinemas, galleries, and community and activist spaces. Selected exhibitions include ‘Shelter in Place’, Estuary Festival, ‘Civil Rites’, the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, ‘Common Ground’ at Spike Island, Bristol and ‘Real Estates’ at Peer Gallery.
Selected writing includes extended essays in ‘Brick’, ‘Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter’, ‘Open Democracy’, (among others) and co-editing the books ‘Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain’ (Myrdle Court Press) and ‘Doorways: Women, Homelessness Trauma and Resistance’ (House Sparrow Press).
Andrea’s films are held in the Arts Council England Collection, Archives and Libraries and are distributed by LUX, Modern Films, Grasshopper Films, Second Run DVD. A 2 disk BluRay, Fugitive Images: Selected Works by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, is released by Second Run. Andrea co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary ‘The Look of Silence’).