In the process, documentary work is becoming increasingly sophisticated, beginning to seek other, third ways alongside Cinéma Vérité and ‘Without a Muzzle’: Lampalzer/Neuwirth/Deutsch demonstrate in Asuma in 1982, firstly, that the ways of recording reality do not always have to follow the guidelines of public television – and secondly, that social issues and art do, after all, sometimes go hand in hand. The record of a few relaxed days of work with young disabled people – as part of a project in Luxembourg – manages, like most of the Medienwerkstatt's documentary work, without pedagogical commentary and journalistic meticulousness. Asuma, an impressionistic volume, is less about quick comprehension than about listening and watching. The filmmakers do not make it any easier to access: the viewer has to do the work of decoding themselves, meaning is not imposed here.
For example, Asuma makes no distinction between caregivers and those cared for, but rather shows that the boundaries between disabled and non-disabled are very easy to blur. And the art work itself takes place on many levels at the same time in this film: the video recording accompanies the creative self-portrayals of the disabled as an artistic medium and treats both the manual work in the workshop and the concrete poetry, the onomatopoeia and the sound machine music of the project participants with the same, strangely unwavering stoicism. A second tape, made a little later (and with the same cast), called Wossea Mtotom – The Meadow is Green in the Garden of Wiltz, once again manages the feat of telling of utopias that are unfortunately not self-evident in very matter-of-fact images: of the fruitful collaboration of disabled and non-disabled artists in the nature of Luxembourg, of the merging of art, life and work.

The time of its creation seeps into Asuma without much artistic effort through the images and sounds: some of the work processes that Asuma documents are accompanied by music that seems to come from a radio playing on the side and carries the sound of a time long gone (from the perspective of the late nineties). The synthetic amateur pop of the Neue Deutsche Welle of the early eighties – or, to be more precise, Andreas Dorau's ‘Fred vom Jupiter’ – beeps childishly in the background, past images of a social ideal that can only be realised under laboratory conditions (of casual cooperation between disabled and non-disabled people). The social utopian aspect of the endeavour is further enriched by the presence of this seemingly inappropriate song: the naive science fiction of German pop corresponds here, in the process of association, with the beautiful, fairytale-like, futuristic fantasies (‘The great people on the moon’) of many an amateur artist.

Stefan Grissemann, Blimp 39