The Alphabet of Feeling Bad
performance: Ann Cvetkovich
director: Karin Michalski
collaboration: Renate Lorenz
editor: Elfe Brandenburger
camera: Robert Mleczko
sound: Antje Volkmann
color grading: Matthias Behrens / wave-line Berlin
production: Karin Michalski
support: Wassan Ali, Pauline Boudry
The film is inspired by the work of Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love
and Ann Cvetkovich.
Germany, 2012, HD, 13 min.
The Alphabet of Feeling Bad shows an experimental interview with the theorist and activist Ann Cvetkovich. Cvetkovich's performance, which is based on conversations with the filmmaker, defines terms from A to Z such as 'depression,' but also everyday negative feelings like the impression of being stuck at an impasse, of feeling numb or not able to work, of being overwhelmed by demands, of not being adequate and not getting on, and provides them with a different meaning.
In the tradition of initiatives like the SPK (Socialist Patient Collective) of the 1970s, negative feelings are not understood as individual failure or sickness. Rather the question is raised of how these could be collectively sensed as “public feelings“ but also politicized in the context of neoliberal working conditions and of homophobia and racism.
Ann Cvetkovich is not only working theoretically from a queer-feminist perspective on topics such as trauma and depression, but she is also a co-founder of “Feel Tank Austin,” one of a number of activist groups in the U.S. that organize meetings and exchanges aside from demonstrations and public rallies.
Group members of the “Feel Tank Chicago” performed the “International Parades of the Politically Depressed” (2003, 2004 and 2007) and demonstrated in pyjamas and bath robes with the slogan: “Depressed? It might be political!” Together with Public Feelings groups from New York and Austin, Texas they also organized a conference with the title “Anxiety, Urgency, Outrage, Hope... A Conference on Political Feeling” at the University of Chicago in 2007.
The setting of the film refers to Tracey Emin's well-known work “My Bed,” an unmade bed as a sculpture that symbolically stands for individually experienced crisis-like situations. Whereas this work gains its melancholia but also its humor from the allusion to an artist's biography beyond “normal” female biographies, living in a bed in The Alphabet of Feeling Bad becomes the starting point of a fantasy about possible new forms of politics, where queer passivity is not an obstacle, but a requirement.
With the formal focus on the alphabet and establishing terms, the film also draws connections with examples from the history of conceptual art. John Baldessari's video “Teaching a Plant the Alphabet” from 1972 for example shows a plant for about 20 minutes, which is urged to learn the alphabet. Feminist reworkings of conceptual art – like Martha Rosler's famous video “Semiotics of the kitchen” from 1975, in which she combines the letters of the alphabet with kitchen utensils that she also recodes as weapons – show that meaning is not only meaning, but that signs and objects are connected with societal positions, fixing or even creating them in the first place.
The Alphabet of Feeling Bad is based on the idea that terms might be understood as tools that enable us to feel together and thereby to newly negotiate the meaning of feelings and to politicize them in a queer-feminist way.
Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. She is the author of several publications, including “Depression: A Public Feeling” (Duke University Press, 2012), “An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures,” (Duke University Press, 2003), and together with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds she is the editor of “Political Emotions” (Routledge, 2010).
In 2011 she participated in the Venice Art Biennale in the event series “Chewing the Scenery,” curated by Andrea Thal.
Karin Michalski works as artist and film curator in Berlin. She studied Film Directing and Producing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) as well as Journalism and Political science in Mainz and Berlin. With her films and videos, such as The Alphabet of Feeling Bad, Working On It (2008, Co-Director: Sabian Baumann), Monika M. (2004) and Pashke and Sofia (2003), she has been invited to numerous festivals and exhibitions. Together with Sabian Baumann she installed the exhibition project “An Unhappy Archive” at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 2014 and at Les Complices, Zurich 2013.
She is the editor of the art-fanzine “FEELING BAD – queer pleasures, art & politics.” And she is co-editor of the book “I is for impasse – Affektive Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst” (released 2015 at bbooks, Berlin) as well as the artist edition “An Unhappy Archive” (2016, Zurich).
