A Bar on Majorca

The National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was founded in 1964, making it the oldest continuously existing far-right party in Germany. Sharing many elements of its program with Hitler’s Nazi Party, the NPD no longer has any elected representatives on the state level. Multiple attempts have been made to have the NPD banned, but these have all failed. Early this year, the last ruling on the matter argued that the group is too small and insignificant to warrant an active ban. About a year before this ruling, artist Marian Mayland filmed a demonstration by a handful of NPD supporters on a roll of 30-year-old Kodachrome K40 film. The result is grainy and meaningless until Mayland starts feeding us snippets of information through the audio track. At first these seem unrelated to one another, but gradually we start to make connections. The visuals create an atmosphere susceptible to conspiracy theories, underlining how eager we are to see coherence in what is really nothing more than visual white noise.