Evidence, Subjectivity and Verité in Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty – a Shot-By-Shot Analysis

In this article it is argued that the political message of the film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) by Renzo Martens is based on a ‘truth-claim’, enforced by Martens’ presence in the film. In order to strengthen this truth-claim, Martens has adopted documentary aesthetics such as the hand-held camera. Yet, the artist defines the film specifically as an art piece and not a documentary film, differentiating between the objectivity that ‘mainstream’ documentarians advocate and the objectivity or ‘truth’ that Enjoy Poverty claims to reveal. It is demonstrated how Martens uses the documentary material as ‘evidence’ in order to create a rhetoric narrative that gives reason to presume that certain events in the film have been pre-organized or staged. With this strategy the artist aims at debating a relevant issue in contemporary art: Engaged contemporary art pieces often hide that the problems they want to debate are inherently present in the pieces themselves.