Jeniffer Mattes graduated in Film and Video from the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, after studies under professors such as Constanze Ruhm, Diedrich Diederichson and Christoph Dreher. While continuing her education at the Academy in Vienna, she made a film together with Haroun Farocki. Her films have been awarded several prizes. Her mature style is also present in her 2015 work selected for the present exhibition, Trading Stories – A Cargo Named Desire. The film combines her well-tested methods: treading a fine line between documentary (the narrator undertakes a journey on a cargo ship destined from Hamburg to Qindao, China, retracing the footsteps of her great-grandfather) and fiction, creating a collage of graphic materials documenting the journey, found footage, and video and audio found on the Internet, as well as writing, both her own and quoted from other authors. Mattes works with the imagination and evokes sensations in the viewer through her amalgamation of compelling poetic images. Trading Stories – A Cargo Named Desire presents a scenario of the possible consequences of the ongoing development of a globalized world caught up in a web of networks and technology. A story about telling stories, the central narrative of the film presents a quest for its own central narrative. Minutes into the film the viewer becomes lost in a medley of stories, only to come to the conclusion that there is no one story, or single history, and that any illusory sense of uniqueness is only a phrase divisible by billions.