BOOKLAUNCH & SCREENINGS:
Documentary as Encounter - Strangers Within
© Therese Henningsen, Juliette Joffé, Mary Jiménez, Andrea Luka Zimmermann
SoundImageCulture invites you for an afternoon & evening of screenings, discussions, and warm soup on the occasion of the Brussels launch of the anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter.
Strangers Within is edited by Therese Henningsen and SIC-participant Juliette Joffé and published by the independent publishing house Prototype. It explores the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, and other responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers.
The texts engage with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest, stranger and friend, self and other, documentarian and protagonist.
SoundImageCulture is happy to welcome you to an evening with participating artists and filmmakers Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffé.
They will present films and engage in a conversation on their work in relation to questions of representation and encounter.
https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/strangers-within/
This event is organised with kind support of Goethe Institut Brussels.
Reserve your spot via email to: soundimageculture@gmail.com
We propose a participation in the costs of 5 € at the entrance.
Programme
4 / 3 / 2023 : Project(ion) Room, 55 rue de Praetere, 1180 Uccle
4pm
Introduction by Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffé in conversation with Mary Jiménez
Next Year We Will Leave by Juliette Joffé
Slow Delay by Therese Henningsen
Face Deal by Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris
6pm
Soup & More
7pm
Art Class by Andrea Luka Zimmerman
Conversation with Andrea Luka Zimmerman, moderated by Therese Henningsen
8:30pm
Drinks
About the films and filmmakers :
Juliette Joffé, 2021, 46 mins
Guided by a sentence from my childhood, I encounter three people in Paris: a collector of lost objects, a princess in Disneyland and a coffee seller. Next year we will leave is a reconciliation with my hometown through a dialogue with strangers. Through a mirroring effect, the first-person narrative echoes the stories of those filmed, questioning the possibilities of the documentary encounter.
Juliette Joffé is a filmmaker and lecturer based in Brussels. Her films have been shown at festivals such as Visions Du Réel; FIDMarseille; Open City Documentary Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery; and Sheffield Fringe, among others. Her first film, Maybe Darkness (Peut-être le noir), won the Wildcard for Best Documentary awarded by the Flemish Film Board (VAF). Her second film, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Le Héros aux mille visages), won Best Short Film at Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova. In her most recent film, Next year, we will leave (2021), she is interested in questioning the documentary form as a type of encounter.
Therese Henningsen, 2018, 16 mins
‘You’ve got something I want, and I’ve got something you want,’ he said. Twins Trevor and Raymond have lived together in New Cross for fifty years. They opened up their home to me after I approached them on a bus and asked to film them.
Therese Henningsen is a filmmaker and programmer based in London. Her films Slow Delay and Maintenancer (with Sidsel Meineche Hansen) have been shown at Chisenhale Gallery, Venice Biennale, Whitstable Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, Close-Up Cinema, SMK Statens Museum for Kunst, Cryptofiction, Liberated Film Club, among others. In collaboration with Juliette Joffé, she has co-edited the recently launched interdisciplinary anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter, published by Prototype, and is working on a practice-led PhD in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, closely linked to the ideas addressed in the anthology.
Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, 2014, 29 mins
The director’s 102-year-old father is afflicted with dementia. His memory loss raises questions about the nature of family lineage and identity. Who has she become for him? A Lynchian journey into illness where images unravel in their texture and words become visionary. ‘Truth is in the eyes of the beholder.’
Mary Jiménez was born in Peru. She studied architecture in Lima before pursuing film studies at the INSAS film school in Belgium. She has been teaching film direction in Brussels, Cuba and Switzerland. Mary is in charge of Sound Image Culture - SIC, a filmmaker’s laboratory in Brussels. Among others, Mary’s work includes films like Du Verbe Aimer (Berlinale - Forum), The Dictionary according to Marcus (Cinéma du réel), Faceless Heroes (Visions du réel), By the Name of Tania (Berlinale - Generation), Fuga, just finished. Her films have been selected at numerous other festivals worldwide.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2020, 49 mins
Art Class is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The sequence tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose multi-layered practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Films include the Artangel-produced 'Here for Life' (2019), which received its world premiere in the Cineasti Del Presente international competition of the Locarno Film Festival (winning a Special Mention), and 'Erase and Forget' (2017), premiering at the Berlin Film Festival (nominated for the Original Documentary Award), Selected exhibitions include 'Art Class' at METAL and LUX, 'Shelter in Place' at Estuary Festival, 'Civil Rites', the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, 'Common Ground' at Spike Island, Bristol and 'Real Estates' at Peer Gallery.
.jpg)
image © Salomé Lamas - design © Miriam Hempel / daretoknow
SoundImageCulture is pleased to invite you to BOUNDARY ENCOUNTERS: Fictional strategies in reality-based film – a weekend-long program of screenings, presentations, shared meals and conversations, to collectively reflect on the incorporation of fiction within reality-based film.
Together we want to explore how fiction is employed to negotiate issues of access and navigate boundaries between private and public space, memory and history, poetics and politics. BOUNDARY ENCOUNTERS will present a series of thematic screenings of short and feature-length films, discussions and work-in-progress presentations with the filmmakers: Salomé Lamas, James Newitt, Nicolás Pereda, María Molina Peiró, and Stéphanie Roland, along with SIC participants and Stefanie Baumann from the Thinking Documentary Film research group at CineLab/IFILNOVA (New University of Lisbon).
Within the space of the boundary – a potentially contested zone that divides categories and territories – the program proposes a coming together to watch and reflect on films that explore subjects of territory, borders, the sea, technology, memory and history. In this zone, forms of documentary and fiction are interwoven to produce new narrative configurations and where issues of access, visibility and truth are negotiated. The program proposes to consider how strategies of fiction are used within documentary in order to engage with reality, or as Trinh T. Minh-ha observed how, ‘In “documentary,” one has to go through fiction to show reality’.
The films shared over the weekend reveal encounters with ghosts from the past, made by tracing now-dispersed borders. They tell stories – that may or may not be entirely true – by people waiting for their asylum hearing. They speak of testimonies told through the voice of an actor who struggles to recount someone else’s trauma. They describe places that have not been mapped, or that are beyond sight. They give access to technological utopias and autonomous zones. They trace invisible lines on the earth, observe us from beyond the atmosphere and disappear into the sea.
Beginning Friday afternoon and continuing until Sunday afternoon, theis Focus program consists of two evening screenings at Cinema Nova and four themed screening sessions with open discussions throughout Saturday and Sunday, hosted at Projection-Room, along with shared meals, key-note presentation and the sharing of films-in-progress.
BOUNDARY ENCOUNTERS is organised by SoundImageCulture and curated in collaboration with James Newitt. The Focus is realised in partnership with Festival En ville! / Le p'tit ciné, Cinema Nova, ISELP and Project(ion) Room; supported by Loterie Nationale, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Camões Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua and SCAM.
Registration provides access to the entire weekend program ,
beginning Friday afternoon October 21st and continuing until 6pm Sunday October 23rd.
Registration information:
Registration fee is 25 € or 20 € early-bird discount (until October 10th), 12€ for a single day .
Payments can be made by bank transfer to:
SoundImageCulture, IBAN: BE61 0682 5170 4317, BIC: GKCCBEBB
Please confirm payment and registration by emailing receipt of transfer to:
SCHEDULE:
Friday 21st October
15:00 Blue Marble, visit of the exhibition with Stéphanie Roland
18:00 Walking tour to Cinema Nova
19:00 Light dinner PROVIDED
20:00 ‘Extinction’ by Salomé Lamas
Saturday 22nd October
10:00 COFFEE
10:30 BOUNDARY ENCOUNTERS : Introduction
11:00 GROUNDED
‘Le Boudin’ by Salomé Lamas, ‘Flora’ & ‘Private Property Trilogy’ by Nicolas Pereda
13:00 LUNCH
14:30 PROCESS
‘Pantheras’ work-in-progress by Salomé Lamas
15:30 COFFEE
16:00 REAL FICTIONS
Notes on the interrelations between fiction and documentary by Stefanie Baumann
18:00 Walking tour to Cinema Nova
19:00 Light dinner provided
20:00 ‘Tales of Two Who Dreamt’ by Nicolas Pereda
Sunday 23rd October
10:30 COFFEE
11:00 TERRITORY AND THE SEA
‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’ by Salomé Lamas, ‘Podesta Island’ by Stéphanie Roland & ‘Off-Land’ by James Newitt
13:00 LUNCH
14:30 ABOVE EARTH
‘The empty sphere’ by Stéphanie Roland, ’The Sasha '’ & ‘Como Todo Mortal’ work in progress by Maria Molina Peiró
15:30 COFFEE
16:00 PROCESS
SIC - work-in-progress presentations
17:30 WRAP UP
Information on films and participants:
image © Salomé Lamas
SALOMÉ LAMAS
EXTINCTION (2018, 85 mins)
Extinction meditates on the polemics of the contested nationhood of Transnistria, a small brake-away state that claims independence from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic but which is still unrecognised by the international community today. Extinction follows Kolya, a young Transnistrian man who is effectively stateless, through his real encounters with border guards, Soviet monuments and within fictive reenactments. Kolya responds to interrogation-style interviews with the filmmaker, embarks on sojourns through empty streets and works at a local arm-sales factory — while the film concurrently documents aged Catholic cathedrals, Marxist-Leninist monuments and the dense forests of Eastern Europe. Throughout Extinction, Kolya is compelled to navigate dreamlike echoes of the Soviet past and politically charged confrontations in the present. Extinction slowly builds an associative, non-linear tale where the borders between past and present, documentary and fiction remain unresolved.
LE BOUDIN (2014, 16 min)
'None of the people who were asked about me had seen me.' Le Boudin is a short film that uses reenactment to consider the (im)possibility of speaking someone else’s trauma. The film documents the encounter of a young German actor Elias Geissler speaking the testimony of Nuno Fialho, who at the age of sixteen was forced to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. 'I didn’t enlist. They enlisted me.'
PANTERAS (work in progress)
Pantheras is an ongoing project that investigates the Niger Delta to confront concerns of human rights, the climate crises and the need for global geopolitical reorganization. It aims at addressing smuggling ideologies in Nigeria and clandestine economies, neoliberal risks in neocolonialism; governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta. The project attempt to navigate the complex political structures of the region – including spaces of chieftainship, indigeneity and nationalism.
More information on the work in progress can be found at: https://salomelamas.info/PANTHERAS
THEATRUM ORBIS TERRARUM (2013, 23 min)
The Theatre of the World (1570) is thought to be the world’s first modern atlas, created by the renowned cartographer Ortelius's . Theatrum Orbis Terrarum can be seen as a sensorial journey, a vertiginous history, as well as an adventure story. 'When I look at the sea for long, I lose interest on what happens on land' whispers the shaman leading character. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum creates a territory where we can imagine another kind of geography, formed of chance and contingency, with sailors on land, and lands adrift.
Salomé Lamas is a Portuguese filmmaker and visual artist who has shown her work in film festivals and museums such as: Berlinale, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, Museu do Chiado – Lisbon, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB - Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF, Museu Serralves – Porto, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Bozar , Tabakalera, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, Mostra de São Paulo, CAC Vilnius, MALBA, FAEMA, SESC São Paulo, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others.
Her works of modified ethnography reveal her interest in the relationships between storytelling, memory, and history, while using the moving image to explore the traumatically repressed, seemingly unrepresentable, or historically invisible, from the horrors of colonial violence to the landscapes of global capital.
image © Nicolás Pereda
NICOLÁS PEREDA
FLORA (2022, 11 min, Belgian Premier)
Flora is a short documentary made during the production of Fauna (Nicolás Pereda’s new feature film) that operates as a metacinematic reflection on the nature of representation and the ongoing drug war in Mexico. Nicolás Pereda’s Flora revisits locations and scenes from Fauna as well as the mainstream 2010 narco-comedy El Infierno, exploring the paradoxes of depicting narco-trafficking on film—its tendency both to romanticize and to obscure. To screen is both to project and to conceal.
THE PRIVATE PROPERTY TRILOGY: A SURVEY OF THE LIFE AND FILMS OF C.B. (2018, 40 min)
The Private Property Trilogy is a performance lecture of an unfinished film that focused on the life and work of C.B., a complex character who was a multifaceted artist, political activist, amateur archaeologist, self-proclaimed anarchist, and creator of a mining museum in the Northern Mexico desert.
TALES OF TWO WHO DREAMT (2016, 87 min, co-directed with Andrea Bussmann)
Tales of Two Who Dreamt, takes us into the home of a family of Hungarian Roma refugees living in a large, rundown apartment block on the outskirts of Toronto. Carefully observing everyday routines while they wait – seemingly in endless suspension – to hear the result of their asylum application, the film explores a web of stories that emerge from the apartment block, some of which seem to echo a Kafka-esque fairy tale. We are told about a dog left to survive on its own, a mother who lost her mind after the tragically death of her child, a huge snake that disappeared and was never found after an apartment fire, and a young boy who turned into a bird. The family participate in the telling of these stories, reimagining and expanding them, while also discussing how they might feature in the very film we are watching. These stories merge with the family’s rehearsal for their own immigration hearing, which will determine their residency status. As with other of Pereda’s films we are standing on shifting ground – as it is not entirely clear where an interview might end and a dream might begin.
Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. He often collaborates with the theater collective Lagartijas tiradas al sol and actress Teresita Sánchez. His work has been the subject of more than 30 retrospectives worldwide in venues such as Anthology Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, Jeonju International Film Festival and TIFF Cinematheque.
He has also presented his films in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York. In 2010 he was awarded the Premio Orizzonti at the Venice Film Festival.
https://vimeo.com/user36139617
image © Maria Molina Peiró
MARIA MOLINA PEIRÓ
THE SASHA (2019, 20 min)
In 1972 the astronaut Charles Duke landed on the Moon on the Apollo XVI. He was in charge of taking photos of the lunar surface with a high-resolution camera. Questioning the veracity of photographic documentation through its narrative The Sasha is an inquiry about the human perspective on Earth and our constant struggle with our temporal and spatial limitations. From the exploration of space to cyberspace, from an analogue Moon in 1972 to a virtual Moon in Google Earth today, The Sasha is a story about parallel universes where eternity seems to be lost between frames and interfaces.
COMO TODO MORTAL (work in progress)
In a landscape akin to a far away planet, miners and astrobiologists dig the soil for what seem very different purposes: to fuel the technological revolution and to search for life in the Universe.
Como Todo Mortal is part of Peiro’s ongoing research investigating how scientific and technological breakthroughs we are experiencing today, are changing our understanding of life and spatial boundaries. The project considers how these breakthroughs are incresingly challenging our notions of life, nature, the artificial, territory, property and frontiers and how these challenges stress the necessity to rethink humanity’s place from a larger temporal and spatial scale.
María Molina Peiró is a Spanish audiovisual artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, whose work stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. In her work, she explores layered relationships between history, technology and nature through and hybrid form (fiction, documentary and experimental).
Her artworks and video installations have been shown internationally in art centres and museums such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), Louvre Museum (Paris), Washington National Gallery, MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Vilnius National Gallery, EYE Film Museum (Amsterdam), ISEA Korea, London Science Museum, MATADERO (Madrid), Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, TAIWAN Contemporary Culture Lab and CCCB (Barcelona) amongst others.
image © James Newitt
JAMES NEWITT
OFF-LAND (work in progress)
Began during his participation in SIC 2020/21, Off-Land is an film and installation that expanding on Newitt’s ongoing investigation into human memory to digital data storage. Haven looks at how the sea offers spaces of ’extraterritoriality’, particularly in relation to the occupation of floating structures in international waters and the storage of information.
Off-Land began by investigating real-world cases of extraterritorial occupation including: an abandoned World War 2 gun tower in the North Sea that has been occupied by an eccentric British family since the late 1960’s. During the early 2000’s the tower was used to create the world’s first ‘data-haven’, promoting it as the only truly safe place in the world to keep information. Off-Land also considers recent technological advances in data storage, specifically Microsoft’s Project Natick which aims to create a network of undersea data centres off the coast of Scotland. Off-Land reimagines these spaces and infrastructure/s through a speculative narrative, which incorporates archive and found material with 3D animation.
James Newitt is an Australian filmmaker and visual artist, based in Lisbon. James’ work engages with specific social and cultural contexts through personal, observational and speculative approaches.
James has exhibited his work in museums and film festivals including: Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Perth Revelation International Film Festival; Oslo Independent Film Festival; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Lumiar Cite, Lisbon; Queensland Art Gallery; Carriageworks, Sydney; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania; the Gallery of Fine Arts, Split, Croatia; Rosalux, Berlin; and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
image © Stéphanie Roland
STÉPHANIE ROLAND
BLUE MARBLE
Blue Marble is the name the Apollo 17 crew gave to the Earth as seen from space during their trip to the Moon in 1972. A global icon, the first representation of the globe has gone viral: it has been taken up, copied, augmented, monopolised and even falsified. This image has generated countless stories, rumours, fictions and legends.
Other places on earth are the source of narratives, sometimes proven, often invented. It is in the heart of these ambiguous zones oscillating between reality and fiction that the work of Stéphanie Roland, a Belgian-Micronesian artist and director, plunges us.
This exhibition is a journey into an alternative geography, in a narrative that is both documentary and fictional. In search of hidden places, her installations lead us to land on islands that may never have existed, to meet missing people at the end of the world, to probe a point of inaccessibility or to read the memoirs of authors.
Throughout this uncertain Odyssey, the latent image remains a common thread. Stéphanie Roland's works reveal its spectral aspect and its potential disappearance on different levels.
PODESTA ISLAND (2021, 23 mins)
Podesta Island exists according to Google Earth. / Podesta Island does not exist according to Wikipedia. / Does it really exist? / In a hyperconnected and mapped world, are there still unknown areas? // The film Podesta Island paints the portrait of a controversial phantom island by confronting documentary sources with the narratives and legends inspired by this island. This exploration, where satellite imagery and live action intertwine, brings us closer to Terra Incognita and celebrates the imaginary geography.
THE EMPTY SPHERE (2021, 19 mins)
Nothing really survives here. / The bottom is so deep that no light ever reaches it. / Very few boats go through. / It is unknown when the falls will take place. // This experimental documentary portrays a space object and its fall into the darkness of a space cemetery. A woman scientist reveals her attachment to this object and the absence of images documenting this mysterious place. As a reverse sci-fi journey, this essay mixes reality and fiction to guide us, like a stalker, to the outskirts of an invisible place.
Stéphanie Roland is a Belgian / Micronesian visual artist and filmmaker. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Roland makes films and installations exploring invisible structures, hyperobjects and deep time; from the ecological and political to the geologic and cosmic.
After graduating from La Cambre and following Hito Steyerl’s class in UDK Berlin, she completed post-graduates studies at Fresnoy - Studio National. Her work is regularly shown internationally including exhibitions at Louvre Museum, Benaki Museum, Botanique, Kampala International Art Biennale, Bozar and Wiels. Her films have been screened in international festivals such as FID Marseille, Visions du Réel, ZINEBI, FEST New Directors / New Films and Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin, among others. Her second short film, Podesta Island, won the Alice Guy Prize, at FID Marseille.
https://www.stephanieroland.be
.jpg)
image © James Newitt - design © Miriam Hempel / daretoknow
STEFANIE BAUMANN
Stefanie Baumann is currently a researcher at CineLab/IFILNOVA (New University of Lisbon), where she coordinates the working group "Thinking Documentary Film" and conducts a research on the philosophy of documentary formats through the critical theory of the early Frankfurt school. She obtained her PhD in philosophy in 2013, and taught philosophy, aesthetics and contemporary art theory at University Paris VIII (Paris, 2007-2010), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, 2013), ALBA - the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts/ University of Balamand (Beirut, 2012-2015) and the Maumaus Study Program (Lisbon, since 2016).
Stefanie’s research explores how documentary films are, by their very constitution, an expression of the “quarrel between poetry and philosophy”, the former being associated with art, invention, subjectivity and the senses, the latter being related to the search for truth.
image © Untitled - from the series Surface Studies, Oraib Toukan
A program of different encounters that takes time to look closely at the critical language, and forms of resistance in artistic work. We come together in a series of events and conversations to experience artworks, discuss and engage with different artists, to reflect on the choices they make in their work when dealing with politically charged materials and different forms of coloniality.
Presented by SoundImageCulture. In partnership with Chair Mahmoud Darwich, BOZAR, Pianofabriek and Beursschouwburg. Supported by VGC, SCAM, SABAM for Culture, Kunstenwerkplaats, OMAM/MSH. Design by Miriam Hempel/daretoknow.
Aesthetics of the Political is an on-going research by Samah Hijawi: https://www.samahhijawi.com/aetheticsofthepolitical.html
Saturday June 19, 2021, 11:00 - 22:00 - BOZAR
SoundImageCulture is happy to invite you to Aesthetics of the Political, a program of collective reflection on how artists translate their political ideas into aesthetic form in their work. The day is centered around creating collective encounters to watch films and reflect together on the different strategies artists use in their work.
We begin the day with Samah Hijawi and Maxime Jean-Baptiste who will map out some thoughts and ideas around how we define ‘the political’. Together they will invite us into the subject by sharing their reflections on things that inspire them; quotes and images they keep close to heart when dealing with politically charged stories in their work. This will be followed by a screening of Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s film.
In the afternoon, we will come together for a screening and a reflection guided by Oraib Toukan that explores our ‘consumption’ of mediatized images from colonised contexts around the world. This will be followed by a performance by Sana Ghobbeh that unpacks the multiple histories embedded in just one simple image. We break and continue the conversation together in The Royal Park, ending the day with the premier of Odyssey by Sabine Groenewegen.
Program
11:00-13:00 Opening discussion, screening and reflection
Conversation between Samah Hijawi and Maxime Jean-Baptiste
(Avant Premier) Moune Ô - Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Lunch in the Park (Royal)
15:00-17:00 Screening and Talk
When Things Occur - Oraib Toukan
Thinking through Cruel Images, Oraib Toukan
17:30-18:30 Performance
This Wall Grows at the Root - Sana Ghobbeh
Light Dinner in the Park (Royal)
21:00-22:30 Film screening
(Premier) Odyssey—Sabine Groenewegen
Buy your PASS for the day here: https://www.bozar.be/en/calendar/aesthetics-political
Information on Films and Artists:
Maxime Jean-Baptiste ‘Moune Ô’ (2021) > TRAILER
17 mins, Creole with English subtitles
In ‘Moune Ô’, Maxime Jean-Baptiste continues the research he started in Nou Voix (2018) concerning colonial memory, the Guyanese diaspora, and the staging of Black bodies. By questioning how “official” narratives are constructed, the film Moune Ô encourages a shift in perspective regarding the link between colonisation and extractivism.
Maxime Jean-Baptiste (1993° FR) is a director and performer based in Brussels and Paris. Having lived in the context of the Guyano-Antillean diaspora in France, a French mother and a Guyanese father, his work as an artist sees himself as an exploration of the complexity of Western colonial history by detecting the survival of past traumas in the present. Her audiovisual and performative work focuses on portraits (artists, dancers or members of her own family) using the form of reenactment to conceive the potentiality of a living and oralized memory. He obtained a Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts at the erg and a Master's degree in Media Arts at K.A.S.K. School of arts (Ghent, BE).
Oraib Toukan ‘When Things Occur’ (2017)
28mins, Arabic with English subtitles
‘When Things Occur’ is based on Skype conversations with Gaza inhabitants who were behind the images that were transmitted from screen to screen in the summer of 2014. The film probes the face of mourning and grief—its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks how the gaze gets channeled within the digital realm, and how empathy travels. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’? What is the behavior and political economy of the image of war? And who is the ‘local’ in the representation of war?
Oraib Toukan is an artist and EUME fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine and was visiting faculty at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah. Between 2015 and 2017 she taught at the Ruskin School of Art’s University of Oxford Graduate Teaching program. In Autumn 2018 she was Mercator fellow at the Cultures of Critique program at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Toukan is author of Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the essay-film When Things Occur (2016). Her writings have appeared in a number of publications, collected works, and biennale readers. Since 2011 she has been analyzing, and remaking works from a found collection of film reels that once belonged to now-dissolved Soviet cultural centers in Jordan in 1990-1991.
Sana Ghobbeh 'This Wall Grows at the Root' (2016)
Performance, 45mins, English spoken, no subtitles
This Wall Grows at the Root is happening in front of the image of the monumental entrance gate of the University of Tehran. The later added fence surrounding the campus is the central element in all the chapters of this performance. The work takes the socio-political feature of this infrastructure into semi-fiction.
Iranian-born artist Sana Ghobbeh lives and works in Brussels. She studied Architecture in Tehran and received an MA in Fine Arts in Sweden. She was part of the advanced performance studies of a.pass in 2016.
Sabine Groenewegen, ‘Odyssey’ (2018) > TRAILER
71 minutes, Dutch, English with English subtitles
Two undefined intelligences are intercepting earthly footage of humans living in an area known as the LowLands. The researchers exchange their findings through a visual feed, in an attempt to understand the occurrence of extraordinary apparitions. The onlookers’ efforts to understand an enchanted human world are interrupted by another signal which imposes itself on the unfolding investigation, resulting in a play with the logic of the production of meaning. Through a combination of found footage, sci-fi and poetry, Odyssey interrogates the visual rhetoric of whiteness in the specific Dutch colonial project and evokes questions about the stories we are told, and our possibilities to disrupt them.
Sabine Groenewegen is an artist working with moving image, collage, and immersive experiences. She is currently exploring the ways in which the experiences of our ancestors are part of our present and future psychobiological reality.
Samah Hijawi is an artist, curator and researcher currently completing her PhD in Art Practice at ULB and the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, in Belgium. In her multi-media works, she explores the aesthetics of representation in artworks that allude to the histories of Palestine, and in her project ‘Aesthetic of the Political’ she extends that question to the histories of coloniality. Her works have been shown at KANAL Centre Pompidou Brussels, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah; The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels; PS1 Gallery London, Nadine Art Space Brussels, The Hayward Gallery in London; BOZAR and Beursschouwburg in Brussels.
PREVIOUS
Saturday, September 26, 18:30 - 21h at PIANOFABRIEK:
Menu of Dis/appearance: Dinner Table Performance
Mirna Bamieh, Palestine Hosting Society
Menu of Dis/appearance, brings us together in a much needed setting—around the table to break bread. Mirna Bamieh’s work narrates stories about time, history, and the parts of ourselves that slip away with lost food traditions. In her dinner-table performance she takes us on a journey through the dishes that are slowly disappearing from the Palestinian table, as access to wild foraging is restricted by colonial appropriation of both the land and the foods of the Palestinians over time. In this work, the artist takes the audience through the violence embedded in the meticulous erasure of identity of the colonised, even in their food culture.
Secure your seat for the performance > tickets (from September 14th)
We ask a contribution of 15€ / person to be paid upon reservation.
*Menu of Dis/appearance worldwide premiere in New York, commissioned by the Fisher Center for Performing Arts, for the Live Arts Bard Biennial: Where No Wall Remains(2019)
Information on the artist:
Mirna Bamieh, Palestinian Hosting Society
Palestine Hosting Society is a live-art project founded and run by artist/cook Mirna Bamieh in which she seeks to examine the culture of food in Palestine that aims to construct and reconstruct their relationships to place, history, society and politics, through food. The research unfolds through eating, reading, and conversation. The research develops into culinary interventions that unpack social concerns and limitations vis-à-vis contemporary political dilemmas, reflecting upon the conditions that characterise contemporary Palestinian communities.
Mirna Bamieh is an artist from Ramallah/ Palestine. She obtained a B.A in Psychology from Birzeit University in Ramallah (2002-06). M.F.A. in Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2011-2013). Ashkal Alwan HomeWorks study program in Beirut (2013/14). Her work attempts to understand and contemplate the ever-shifting politics, while equally questioning notions of land and geographies of in-between temporality. Her work looks at scenarios that take the language of the absurd and the ironic and uses them as tools for political commentary. Currently, she is working on developing works that use the mediums of storytelling, and food for creating situational performances such as: Potato Talks Project, Palestine Hosting Society
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYD070D7iyE
Website: https://palestinehostingsociety.com/
Instagram: palestine_hosting_society