Artist
M+M (Marc Weis und Martin de Mattia)

About the work
This double image speaks at the most diverse levels of stories and their visual construction. One hundred years after the famous takes by the documentary photographer Willi Römer, M+M decided to re-stage one of the scenes he captured during the Spartacist uprising of 1919. At the time, the people of Berlin were celebrating the abdication of the Kaiser on 9 November 1918; in January 1919 in the newspaper district, the Spartacists set up barricades out of rolls of printing paper against the advancing government troop. The original contact prints of most of the photographs of the revolution taken by Willy Römer (1887 – 1979) have been preserved. For technical reasons, many of the scenes he captured were «staged”. This scene took place shortly before the photographer himself was arrested by the rebels. For an exhibition M+M ‘recreated’ this image in the Babelsberg Studio with the help of numerous extras and props. Each extra26 has a number in front of him, like in photographs of archaeological finds; this was a practice used by Stanley Kubrick so as to be able to address extras more easily while shooting his film. Even more irritating is the version without extras.