Today, the collective Total Refusal from Austria came to Rijeka. At the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, they held a lecture on the repurposing of video game elements and the creation of political narratives in the form of videos, interventions, performances and lectures. Through its transmedia work, the collective has won more than 50 awards, including the European Film Award and the award for best director of a short film at the Locarno Film Festival.
They are currently working on the collective’s first feature film called “Money is a Form of Speech”. In the film, they appropriate the world of a high-budget shooter that recreates Washington DC in detail, but instead of engaging in combat, they explore the connection between capitalism and democracy. During the lecture at MMSU, the film “Hardly Working”, which won the European Film Award in 2023, was shown and presented. “Hardly Working” foregrounds the NPCs that inhabit hyperreal video games, and follows their Sisyphean daily work with ethnographic precision.
The collective will again be in residence in Rijeka for the whole of July.
