Nina Fischer & Maroan El Sani, The Rise
Germany/the Netherlands 2007, 17' (looped)

The Rise concentrates on the complex relationship between the formal language of a building, the psychological effects that has, and the political- economic reality which forms its setting. The Viñoly building in the newly developed district in Amsterdam, the Zuidas or South-axis, forms the starting point for the docu-fictional approach Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani deploy in their work. These office towers, named after the American architect Rafael Viñoly, have a characteristic, randomly ascending ‘fissure’ in the façade, which from a distance creates the impression of a ziggurat. In reality, the cleft is a stair by which the office workers can descend quickly along the outside of the building in case of emergency. The film installation The Rise plays on this. While passenger planes fly low overhead in the background, the protagonist of the film tries to reach the top of the tower. His tiring trek however leads to nothing more than perplexity and unease. To what this unease must be attributed remains unclear: to the anonymous, inaccessible modern architecture, or to an external threat? (Jelle Bouwhuis, SMBA, Amsterdam)
Nina Fischer (1965, Emden) and Maroan el Sani (1966, Duisburg) have worked together since 1993. As a duo, they have participated in numerous exhibitions, including the Gwangju biennales in Korea in 1995 and 2001, the Berlin Biennale of 1998, the 1998 Liverpool Biennale, Manifesta IV in Frankfurt, 2002 and in the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Japan. ‘Palast der Republik’ was recently presented in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Artists’ website:
www.fischerelsani.netThe Rise by Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani is presented at WRO07 by guest curator and jury member Jan Schuijren. © with the artists. Contact: janschuijren@xs4all.nlHubris
Jeroen Boomgaard
In the opening shot of The Rise, the new work by Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, a man is looking out over the South Axis under construction. He is standing in front of a window with his back to us. We can not read his gaze, but his stance is instantly reminiscent of the classic cinematic depiction of power and unbridled ambition. The setting aptly sums up the South Axis: its showy buildings by top architects such as Viñoly and Ito, and its total accessibility by motorway, station and airport, bring together an almost mythic concentration of will and capital in the area that is stretched out at his feet, while the two large vases that flank the window testify that culture is also high on the agenda.
There is however something that is troubling the man in front of the window. Someone is ascending the stair that is cut into the surface of the office tower opposite him. For the rest of the film we follow this man in his endless trek upward. A new stretch to be climbed awaits him at each corner of the building. The structure stretches dizzyingly above him, and although he has already risen to a great height, he doesn’t appear to get any closer to the top. He has some remarkable encounters on his ascent, spends the night on a projecting roof somewhere around half way up the building, enters an empty office, but not much else happens. A motorway can be seen in the background, and now and then an aeroplane glides noiselessly past in the sky.
It is not only the music that is responsible for the unmistakable sense of threat that broods over the film. But what the threat is, however, is not immediately clear. When one is dealing with high buildings, endless stairs and the dizzying depths that go with them, doppelgängers and mistaken identities, one immediately thinks of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But there the main character’s acrophobia has an assignable cause in a traumatic experience, while his falling for the look-alike is driven by desire. However, the anxiety of this stair-climber has no clear cause, and it is not any clearer what desire motivates his climb upwards. He seems driven by an exigency without purpose, an ambition without desire. He climbs onward in an almost perfunctory manner, and his anxiety appears to be prompted by the top rather than the abyss. He is driven on by the fear of never achieving the heights, but possibly he is filled by anxiety about the void that awaits him there. In his exhausting trek he is the perfect example of the ideal office worker, a subservient member of the expensive-suit proletariat for whom the way to the top is the only option.
Somewhere on his way he enters an office, but it is empty. The man doesn’t seem to know what he is looking for, and climbs on further. But we know now that there is nothing going on in this tower, the exterior of which radiates such dynamism and authority. We know that all this haughty steel, glass and concrete conceals only an emptiness in its heart, and that the tower’s own drive upward also stems from a blind desire to achieve the top. Thus, as in most of the films by Fischer/El Sani, architecture is also central here. But while most of them deal with the emptiness of buildings which were once charged with ideological or utopian significance, these office towers have not lost their content; their ideal is found exclusively in their exterior. Their main asset is their outward uniqueness, and they regard their height as their greatest virtue. And just as the man no longer has any idea why he continues to follow the stair upwards, the office towers of the South Axis have no idea why they are trying to storm the heavens. They press upward out of blind ambition, compete with one another in hubris.
In the final shot the man on the stair looks over toward the tower opposite him, and there he sees his carbon copy standing in front of the window. The realisation of total uniformity is the culminating point of the threat which plays a role throughout the film. But what is involved here is not the theme of the doppelgänger or the shadow, as this has undermined faith in the human subject since Romanticism; once again, it is about architecture. The uniformity which once was the hallmark of a well-functioning office building, the seriality which guaranteed the efficiency of mass production, has now become a bogey. To the extent that globalisation succeeds better in reducing everything to sameness, emphasis on exceptionality or specificity increasingly becomes a necessity, even if it is just to maintain the suggestion of the concentration and concretion of power. For a long time now the world-encompassing web of cash flows has no longer had high points or deep points; everywhere, at the same moment, it can be present or absent in the same way. But it benefits from acting as if it is still intent on some purpose, striving for the top. In doing so it offers a sense of purpose for the workers who, in their eternal trudge upwards, keep the treadmill in motion for the flow of money.
There is more involved here than simply a feint; the threat is real. The office towers that confront one another in the South Axis stand for quality and culture. But at the moment when they reflect each other, the see the vacuum of their hollow pride. As stiff soldiers of capitalism, they lose all their lustre and heroism; only with difficulty can they carry out their commission. They are twins, in the depths of their empty soul.
Jeroen Boomgaard is Professor of Art and Public Space at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.