Damir Očko’s video collage, DICTA I. (2017) is the first part of an ongoing series of videos, looking at the impoverishment of language in the public space. “Dicta” comes from the Latin (the plural of ‘dictum’) and it refers to a formal pronouncement from an authoritative source or a short statement that expresses a general truth or principle. The film features the radical reading of a poem composed by the artist based on fragmented cut-outs from Bertolt Brecht’s literary-political essay, Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit [Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties]. Written in 1934, after Hitler’s rise to power, the German exiled playwright directed this text principally at those writers who had remained in Germany, demanding that “a writer should write the truth in the sense that he should not suppress it or keep it to himself and that he should not write anything untrue. He should not bow down to the powerful, he should not betray the weak”. In the film Očko not only revisits and re-reads the text, but by cutting and rearranging the words in a Dadaist manner he composes a randomized, radical, sometimes incomprehensible speech that by means of its own rearranged and manipulated structure proposes a critical commentary on the construction of meaning in the age of “alternative facts”. As he himself put it: “The poem from Dicta I is a Dada cut-out text by Brecht, full of mistakes, strange constellations, and nonsense. I created the subtitles using Google translate, which gave the work a dimension that was conceptually fitting and clear.” The spoken sentences, uttered by a man in theatre greasepaint, are reminiscent of political slogans, their content becoming increasingly meaningless through constant repetition and because of the fact that their presentation always strives for a dramatic effect. In times of alternative facts, Damir Očko’s films seem more relevant than ever: reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s call for truth and exposing the lack of content of political slogans. As Očko himself put it, Dicta I. “refers to the idea of fabricating a sense of truth out of completely false information. I find it particularly relevant for how the political discourse currently works, like a manipulative form of mimicry. Dicta I explores this mimicry by re-collaging a very important text by Bertolt Brecht, Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties, into something that sounds right and truthful but is, in reality, complete nonsense.”