Vilém Flusser described the photographic gesture as phenomenological: a search for vantage points, predetermined by the apparatus’s programme, yet never fully exhausted by it. The MiniDV camera in the club, held by many hands between 1997 and 2004,
radicalised this gesture – it was fluid, collective, guided by emotion rather than calculation. A film was produced in 2004 from this archive: edited from hundreds of hours
of footage, shot by many people at events organised by an international music label based in Munich. The method anticipated what would become the norm on YouTube: user-generated footage predating the platform, which later emerged to manage and monetise it. From this collection of images, the montage pieced together a historiography of the label and the hype surrounding it.
Twenty years later, the footage returns – not as a memento, but as a question. What does authorship mean when, even back then, the camera was in many hands, and the film only took shape during editing? And what does no clearance mean – technically, legally, epistemologically – when the archive has outgrown its own administration? NO CLEARENCE – Hidden Track of a Label History is an archive lecture featuring film clips, documents and a discussion. – Angelika Lepper
Angelika Lepper
Artist and film editor. She studied media art/film, philosophy, and aesthetics at the State Academy of Design, Karlsruhe, located next door to the ZKM – Centre for Art and Media. From 2004 to 2014, she worked as an artistic and academic assistant at the Film University Potsdam-Babelsberg. In 2007, she was a visiting professor of Experimental Television at the Bauhaus University Weimar. In 2026, she gave a lecture at the UNDERDOX halbzeit on “Primitive Diversity. Alexander Kluge and the subjunctive of images”.