AF

ALL THAT REMAINS: ARCHEOLOGY AND THE IMAGE

Inscribed about artifacts are traces of human activity: gestures, gazes, textures, abrasions. These are the material and figurative qualities which produce historical potentiality. Functioning like spolia, remnant structural fragments used to erect new stone walls, they act as analytical units through which narrative is assembled, eroded and re-constructed. Following this manner of thought, the frame that circumscribes each respective image in a motion picture - a medium which is similarly concerned with creating potentialities - is like an earthen brick or a worked stone, a material fitted for building walls… or perhaps in this case, more appropriately, buttressed vaults that lead down long unexplored corridors.

Utilizing this metaphor as a point of departure, this program of films, videos and computer-generated realities investigates the relationships between the material, the corporeal, the epistemic and the ontological. By engaging with the image in this way - addressing intrinsic historiographical endeavors - these works seek to produce a more complex, reflective and nuanced understanding of both contemporary and ancient assemblages; artifactual and cinematic alike. In so doing, they beckon their audience not with answers, but rather with a series of questions: What constitutes an image of the world? And by what means is it discovered?

Scheduled Screenings:

Woodbine / 585 Woodward Ave. / Ridgewood, Queens - Wednesday December 1st @ 7pm

Synesthesia / address received with ticket purchase / Bushwick, Brooklyn - Friday February 25th @ 8pm

Total Run Time: 77 minutes

Nazli Dinçel - Shape of a Surface (2017 | Turkey | 9 minutes)

Léa Porré - Law of Ruins (Alexander the Great) (2018 | England | 8 minutes)

Julián Galay - Estratos (2020 | Argentina-Alemania | 11 minutes)

Nour Ouayda - Towards the Sun (2019 | Lebanon | 19 minutes)

Alex Faoro - Strata (2021 | United States | 28 minutes)

Dal Polo All’Equatore

On June 9th, I’ll share a film by Italian artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi at Millennium Film Workshop at 167 Wilson Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

“This rarely screened film is drawn from the 1910 archives of Luca Comerio, a pioneering Italian documentary filmmaker who photographed ‘exotic’ peoples from the North Pole to the Equator. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi rephotographed and hand-tinted Comerio’s spectacular footage of early Arctic whalers, Cossack-like soldiers riding on horseback, missionary schools, hunting and warfare in Africa, British India at teatime and Italian Alpine troops in World War I. They refashioned Comerio’s work in order to tease out the ideology written upon—and between—every image: in Gianikian’s words, ‘the violence of colonialism as it plays itself out in different situations and spheres.’”

A collection of 16mm films by ((arc))

tooth is an artworker, anarchist, and petty thief living somewhere in so-called California.

arc operates as a collective entity which seeks to work outside of a framework that privileges the solitary authorship of objects as a point of artistic creation and finitude, looking instead to a process of intersubjective communal encounter as a locus from which the work generates. As conductive vessels, a configuration of material elements are used to initiate this process, including (but not limited to): photochemical film, performance, sound & light installation, written language, & time-based sculpture.

ascensions, 2017, 8’ ,16mm
"…to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn't what we think it is. 
Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry."
-Hélène Cixous

breathing, 2020, 11’, 16mm
a film concerned with the chaotic sphere of disengagement invoked by the threatened subsumption of the sensitive & vibrational biorhythm into the cold & regulated logic of algorithmic capitalist automation. explored through abyssal bridges of language. towards the conspirational, intersubjective & irregular oscillations of life as resistance.

the arc of the sun, 2012, 3’, 16mm
traveling the spaceways after the end of the world.

x/s/x/s, 2015, 3', 16mm
two artists and a space. a portrait. 

katabasis, 2021, 11’, 16mm
descent and ascent in parallel. 

Designed Reminiscence Vol.3

Designed Reminiscence Vol.3 is the third installment of a larger screening series dedicated to sharing personal moving-image art and experimental non-fiction works that explore concepts of home.

Program No.1
Saturday July 23rd
@ Millennium Film
167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn
730pm - 1030pm

Yeh Woh | 3 minutes | India | 2020
by Anuj Malhotra

The film is a distillation of the present, immensely volatile circumstances in India. It seems that the nation, as a collective, has crossed a certain threshold, and that no return is possible. In the middle of this, the filmmaker inquires the nature of his own engagement with the protests, especially in the context of the remarkable, middle-class apathy in which individuals like him are reared, faced as he is, with a historical opportunity to participate.

RMXTXTURAS: Pròlogo | 13 minutes | Brazil | 2012
by Giseli Vasconcelos

In 2011, the meeting of a network favored the exchange and circulation of information about an Amazonian reality. This entire spectrum of production corresponds to the organization of a dossier, which highlights critical issues that match the local social and political space, without forgetting the sensitivity and singularity that overflow in poetic situations. The remixtextures partially represent these singularities, exposing, through collages, expressions of how the Amazon is lived and seen.

The home my mother never found | 6 minutes | India | 2021
by Mehdi Jahan

My mother suffers from general anxiety disorder and experiences panic attacks from time to time, during which she often mumbles incoherently. When she feels better, she recounts some of the thoughts which occurred to her during these attacks. Her personal experiences mingle with turbulent political events from India and Assam’s history - images from Partition, Indo-China War, The Assam Movement and the subsequent insurgency being inseparable from not only her but the mental landscape of entire generations of Assamese people since India’s independence. My mother often writes down these experiences in the form of letters which she addresses to her mother who passed away several years ago. These letters, which prove to be quite cathartic, give her a sense of peace. This film is an attempt at reconstructing my mother’s process of engaging with her memory triggered by her panic attacks.

Keje | 2 minutes | Turkey | 2012
by Fatma Belkis

Like all other film production studios in Turkey, Güney Film used to send the films that were produced to Committee on Film Censorship. After Seyyit Han was shot in 1968, it was sent to the Committee and the film was banned from being distributed and screened in Turkey. The producer of the film, Abdurrahman Keskiner, had a meeting with the Committee to learn the reason why the film was banned. The Committee did not approve the name of the leading female character because it is a Kurdish name. Keskiner found a studio in Ankara and edited out the sections in which this character’s name was uttered. The following day he delivered the new cut to the Committee, satisfied with the revisions the film was approved. In this video you are going to watch the fragments that Keskiner edited out of the film one after the other.

Here and there, then and now | 31 minutes | USA | 2022
by Helena Deda and Alex Faoro

Between 1998 and 1999, during the War of Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar citizens were forcefully displaced under threat of violence. Many were killed, and many are still yet to be accounted for. In early 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Helena’s mother Marta traveled from Kosovo to live with us in New York for six months, on the remainder of her visa. This video was made during the mass exodus of Ukrainian citizens from their homes, and considers the geopolitical ramifications of the war in the Western Balkans; specifically Kosovo and Serbia. During this same period, Helena and I recorded various activities and conversations with her mother; cooking, going to the park, talking with friends. Interweaving this highly intimate material with contemporaneous Albanian news broadcasts, this project attempts to navigate the complex intersection of place, time, memory, war, history and modernity.

Program No.2
Sunday July 24th
@ Millennium Film
167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn
730pm - 1030pm

We Need New Names | 14 minutes | UK and Nigeria | 2015
by Onyeka Igwe

An essay video work examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic female identity through the contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmakers’ family matriarch. Using personal archive to explore the concepts of female identity, diaspora, cultural memory and most importantly ‘fiction’.

Maelstroms | 8 minutes | USA | 2015
By Lana Z Caplan

Using animation, heat sensitive camera footage from US border patrol screens, military bombing drone monitors, and other collected footage, Maelstroms is a reflection on the dehumanizing use of image technology by land, air and sea.

Quebrantaheusos | 10 minutes | Chile | 2021
By Martín Baus

Quebrantahuesos is the name of a series of poetic interventions carried out in 1952 by Nicanor Parra, Enrique Lihn and Alejandro Jodorowsky, who through texts created from newspaper clippings and arranged on the walls of the city, proposed an appropriation of both space as public language. This film aims to apply this procedure to cinema, on the one hand through an approach to the digital archive of films made prior to the coup, and on the other hand through a film record of the walls and textual residues of the 2019 revolt. With this exercise, two ways are put to the test to speculate on the links between cinema and text, reading and texture, political discourse and poetic discourse.

Don’t be afraid let it show | 6 minutes | USA | 2020-2022
By Erica Sheu

A personal essay film on camouflage and its relationship to her father. Reflections on cross-generation memories.

Presente | 3 minutes | Ecuador | 2021
By Melanie Bravo Zambrano

Present, through the intervention of recycled film material, addresses the reappropriation and questioning of images, through elements of stop motion and principles of found footage. To bring to the Ecuadorian imaginary a fragment of the badly told story.

Irani bag | 8 minutes | Iran, Singapore and UK | 2020
by Maryam Tafakory

Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay questioning the innocence of bags in Iranian cinema.

Tony Williams in Africa (1973) at Millennium Film Workshop

Presented in collaboration with Alfreda's Cinema, Willie Ruff’s newly restored documentary, Tony Williams in Africacame from the director’s interest in African talking drums. “The 37-minute short follows American jazz drummer Tony Williams to Senegal and features Super 8mm footage of Williams jamming outdoors with West African drummers as locals look on, as well as 16mm footage of Williams, Ruff, and pianist Dwike Mitchell sharing music and images from the Senegal trip with New Haven school children...William's friends would say, the musician came to see the film as “the most important legacy he left.”

This film has been preserved by the Yale Film Archive.

Please find event details and tickets here.