In 1969, Ulrike Meinhof, a socially conscientious journalist working in Berlin, was commissioned by the Südwestfunk, a German state television network, to write a film script that would critically address the dynamics of authority in state-run orphanages for adolescent girls. Entitled, "Bambule", a word of African origin meaning: "dance" or "riot", the resulting film was a dramatization based on documentary evidence. The film was completed in early 1970, under the direction of Eberhard Itzenplitz, who worked closely with Meinhof on production decisions. Just prior to its release in the spring of the same year, the film was shelved by German television authorities when it was suspected that Meinhof had participated in the escape of RAF leader Andreas Baader from state prison. The film was not shown on German television until 1995.
Adams divided one complete shot (approxima-tely 17 seconds in length) of Ulrike Meinhof's "Bambule" into 416 individual film stills and handed them out, one by one, in their original sequence, to passerby's on Berlin's Kurfürsten-damm. This action utilized one of the oldest and most direct methods of distributing information: the "handbill", or "flyer", associated with political propaganda and advertising. As the individual film stills were handed out, a mini digital video camera supported from a customed designed apparatus, attached directly to Adams' arm, shot close-ups of the ongoing hand-to-hand transactions.

The extracted film "shot" shows a frantic adolescent girl being chased through the corridors of the orphanage by two nuns. The Sis-ters are intent on catching the girl and cutting off her hair as a lesson denouncing her emer-ging sexuality.

Given the unpredictability of the time needed for the hand to hand distribution of the film stills, the reshooting of Meinhof's footage proceeds through a new duration and rhythm. Delays generated by refusals are contrasted
by quick grabs. Film time is reprogrammed
in the real time needed to perform this street action. 17 seconds of film footage is erratically and slowly drawn out to 136 minutes. The ci-nematic suspense of the original footage is delayed and filtered through the more erratic suspense of recorded circumstance.

Dennis Adams. Was born in 1948 in Des Moines, Iowa. He is internationally renowned for his public interventions and museum installations that address the processes of collective amnesia and social exclusion in the design and use of architecture and public space. He has produced public projects in Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Spain, The Nether-lands, Switzerland, and the United States. His work has been the subject of over 50 one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe.
In 1994, two separate retrospectives of his work were held at the
Museum van Hedengdaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the Contemporary
Arts Museum in Houston.
In the last two years, Adams completed a major public commission on 22 sites for the new international trade fair center (Messe) in Munich, produced a new video installation for 13 Quai Voltaire, Caisse des Depots et Consignations, Paris, and an installation project for the Witte de With in Rotterdam. He was represented in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and is currently working on public projects in Baltimore, New York, Sao Paulo and Utrecht.
Mr. Adams has been a faculty member or Visiting Professor at numerous institutions including Cooper Union School of Art, Parsons School of Design, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.
He is currently a Professor in the Department of Architecure and Director of the Visual Arts Program at MIT in Cambridge. He lectures frequently around the world and his published writings, interviews and statements have contributed to the discourse about the relationship of art to the urban context.