Soul interviews
video installation in Maastunnel Rotterdam – website – book & essay, 2021-2022,
a co-operation of Meike Eggers & Michael Anhalt

About Soul Interviews:
What do the moon landing, 5G and Area 51 have in common with a virus?
At first sight, they might look like totally different topics, but they all revolve around a centuries old question: What is the truth? Whom do we believe? On which facts do we base our decisions, let alone our feelings and hopes? All four are excellent fodder for conspiracies. The coronavirus, however, caused an unprecedented renaissance of conspiracy and this time the old phenomenon appears in a new light. Seemingly innocently small and fragmented, but no less influential. And so, I prefer to call this new phenomenon conspiracy anecdotes, instead of conspiracy theories or conspiracy ideologies. So, what is the difference between conspiracy anecdotes and the, let’s say, more traditional conspiracy theories? Basically, it’s all about number and range. Anecdotes are none of those detailed theories that have been deliberately
and purposefully formulated over time to bring power to the storyteller. The anecdotes I’m talking about here are in themselves rather innocent and random. Some of them are ultra-short stories with a clear and simplified plot. Some are blurry one-liners. Others appear as more complex narratives, like the stories told around a campfire once. Or at the regulars’ table. They want to entertain, to shudder, to express concerns or anger, to bring laughter or to simply polish the ego of the teller. Above all however, they bring joy and healing effect of the storytelling. The human brain is constantly trying to turn facts, events and observations into stories to give a meaning to our existence. Stories guide our thinking. They control our perception. They help us to understand the world. Some stories are fairy tales, fantastic narratives, others strictly autobiographical memories. Some sketch out detailed reports, others relate tough propaganda and some even try to point out an objective truth. Whether fact or fiction, narratives are the powerful reality-makers in our heads…

The entire project contains 100 interview sequences presented in a video installation in the
Maastunnel Rotterdam, a website and book including the essay “Anyone who has ever tried to
camp in the wetlands of a mosquito paradise knows, that the scale makes the difference.”
website: www.soulinterviews.art

Dias de Reclusão | Isolation Days
art and literature anthology 2020
Publisher: Maria Vieira, São Paulo, Brazil
ISBN: 978-65-88333-00-6

The project ‚Isolation Days‘ unites well-known and less well-known artists from 5 continents for a common goal: We use our art to financially support three organizations in Brazil and Mozambique which help people who are facing existential problems due to COVID-19. The anthology is sold worldwide and we organized several global online meet-ups and social media activities to draw attention to the problems caused by COVID-19 in the poorest countries. Next to that we hope to promote the boundless power of art as source of hope and beauty.
For the anthology I wrote the SciFi short story ‚Algina‘ and participated in various online events.

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Cinetube
media literacy program in Rotterdam Zuid 2012-2015,
a co-operation of Meike Eggers & Michael Anhalt

Cinetube was a media literacy project for children and teenagers of different cultural backgrounds, in the age between 6 and 22. The education program is teaching them to understand media better, so they can participate in a more conscious and critical way. One example of workshops developed for Cinetube was the TV serie Girl Problems (broadcasted on Open Rotterdam and in LantarenVenster): This edutainment program covers typical topics teenage girls struggle with. The complete production of four episodes were written, acted, edited and filmed by young people living in Rotterdam Zuid, assisted by professionals and
coaches. How does the Islamic Soraya deal with the fact that she is in love with a Dutch boy while her family is preparing for marriage with another boy? Or how is Mandy doing, experimenting with drugs and getting addicted? Girl Problems uses edutainment (education and entertainment) as a way to inform, empower and contribute to personal and talent development. Through the series, problems and dilemmas of young girls were made visible, negotiable and tangible through a fictional narrative.

Girl Problems was a collaboration between Cinetube (Meike Eggers & Michael Anhalt) R-newt, SKVR and De Verre Bergen.

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Blokmapping
artist book, exhibition, online archive 2010 – 2012,
a co-operation of Meike Eggers & Michael Anhalt

Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt’s Blokmapping documents their home neighborhood – the Hillesluis area of Rotterdam – in great detail. Eggers and Anhalt inventoried every rubbish bin, tree, lamppost, paving stone, resident and car within a radius of 333 meters of their home (in a street called Blokweg). Searching on Google produced a range of archive material from local newspapers, Hyves (a Dutch social networking site) and company registers. The bare facts were soon enriched by juicy anecdotes from local residents. The vast amount of material – 12,000 items, including statistics, facts and personal stories on what it means to live in a deprived neighborhood – was placed on a website (www.blokmapping.net) and published in a hefty tome. Eggers and Anhalt call their method “extreme mapping”. They use this way of surveying a small area in enormous depth so as to record and interpret the far-reaching changes occurring in society.

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Lightcloud
interactive video installation and lecture 2009 – 2010
co-operation of Meike Eggers & Michael Anhalt
Dutch Photography Museum

Imagine that you could decide what you look at yourself. Or do you think you do that already? Imagine: a film of Chinese women dancing for Mao or tourists visiting the Statue of Liberty in New York, the vice squad arrests someone, a girl mounts a bicycle. As you view this collection of projections you hear the steady sound of a slide projector. East Germany. Click. A family snapshot of a bedroom. Click. The same place, now empty. Click. Notes from the police. Click.
The “Light Cloud” installation is a collection of historic and contemporary amateur materials, each of which examining the phenomenon of “power”. Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt are fascinated by the chaos of images – from countless authors – that inundate us. Often, a clear boundary between the manufactures and consumers of images and their origin and meaning can no longer be distinguished, making images free for interpretation, aimless and easy to abuse. They no longer follow a set interpretation of reality or a collective “truth”. Our perception of the world is no longer exclusively constructed by those who have the power, but by everyone. We have all become makers of reality.
“Light Cloud” is composed of nine projections combining photography and film. The visitors subconsciously influence the images by movement detectors that guide the films and photos. The projections change location and form new combinations with every movement of the viewer. The only refuge in the chaos is a series of photos that are projected with an oldfashioned slide projector.
The series of photos depicts the subtle boundary between what you see and what you think you see.

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Pyjamocracy: how snapshots confuse our lives
Publication and video installation, 2008 – 2009
Publisher: akv stjoost – Research group Photography
ISBN / EAN 978-90-76861-21-0
Exhibited at Gallery SIGN Groningen, as part of ‘HISTORTION’

For the first time in history the majority of all published images is made by amateurs. On December 30, 2006 I saw the execution of Saddam Hussein, probably like everybody who watches news on TV or surfs the Internet regularly. The next morning the same pictures were also lying on my doormat, published on the first page of my daily newspaper. It was almost impossible to avoid them. What fascinated me most about those images was not the following discussion whether it is bad taste or ethnically incorrect to show pictures like that, but simply the fact that those pictures were made by a mobile phone of an anonymous attendee during the execution, and that they rapidly started their way into living rooms worldwide via the Internet.
This marked a new epoch of images for me: the epoch in which amateur snapshots finally intervene with an until then unknown vehemence into power-struggles, news, professional propaganda and thereby the human perception of reality. There had been other incidents before when amateur footage was used in the traditional media, for example the pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison, a snapshot of the murdered Theo van Gogh, 9/11, the London tube bombing and other terror attacks. But the exclusivity and the impact of the Saddam pictures caught my attention. Were those pictures really made and put online secretly, and so leaked into the traditional media and our consciousness seemingly incidentally, or were they actually commissioned and just a smart part of the official propaganda strategy? They look like typical amateur images, but maybe they aren’t. We will probably never know.