Initiating Encounters

Dear viewer, I'm writing this letter to you from my couch in a tiny apartment in Mexico City. A computer is on my lap, several Firefox windows are open, and I periodically flick between them to rewatch films, reread my notes about them, look up additional information about the filmmakers and visual artists, check my grammar, or search synonyms in a thesaurus (meanwhile, responding to messages, writing emails, finishing other chores…) before going back to the text... I imagine that, perhaps, your viewing environment for this program could be similar to mine: your private space with cozy seating, a computer (maybe not so many have projectors), a flickering screen, and, of course, fast internet (the main requirement for uninterrupted, smooth online film streaming). Alone or with a few friends, you will be watching the program from different corners of the planet — an incredible audience outreach for experimental cinema! Perhaps, you will close other browser windows and turn off your phone — just like in a traditional movie theater, when you are asked to switch off all devices before the start of the projection, before you will be immersed in the darkness with other moviegoers, this darkness where we breathe together. Movie theaters have their own aura and powers of proximity and bonding. And one form of film presentation – online streaming and movie-theater projection – should not exclude and must not replace another. They are simply different cinematic dispositifs. I’m a filmmaker who sometimes curates, a filmmaker who sometimes programs. It’s my first online curatorial program. My thinking about cinema is informed by practice – experimental filmmaking practice, and by cinema’s potentiality of engrouping people in the real and imaginary communities. “Cinema as a technology of engroupment,” as a queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman points out. I embrace an idea of cinema – particularly experimental cinema – as a place for an artistic inquiry and archival practice where we, filmmakers and visual artists, imagine, reshape, and transform the world – sometimes, beyond recognition – through our alternative representational cinematic practices in "the age of planetary civil war." As a moving image artist and writer Hito Steyerl notes. “Alternative” – to the dominant modes of representation and production of commodity-oriented commercial film industries. “Planetary civil war” – refers to, but is not limited to growing militarization, war conflicts, forced displacement, homophobia and ultra-right politics, to dismantling international laws and accelerated ecological apocalypse, collapsing economic systems and constantly shifting precarisation; in planetary civil war people are committing atrocities in the name of distorted visions of their pasts with “historical/religious justifications” and where cinema, in some way, is complicit … Acknowledging a technological shift and global domination of the digital in moving image productions, dissemination, spectatorship and consumption (now followed by the swift arrival of AI), I still advocate experimental cinema as a relational affective space where we can imagine alternative social worlds and communities, where we can still aspire to a cinematic form that envisions the radical possibility of living, working, sensing, encountering and experiencing each other otherwise. A cinematic space of unforeseen encounters haunted by other memories, histories, and affects, that initiate new openings for visual storytelling and relations. For this program, I have expanded my notion of cinema as a space of relationality and engroupment through filmmaking practice to a film curatorship. As an invited curator/programmer, I have approached filmmakers and visual artists who have been part of my cinematic relational orbit. Some of the artists I’ve known and followed for many years. Some of them I’ve encountered recently – through shared screens in artists-run theaters or festivals, being enchanted by the makers’ mastery of audiovisual storytelling. These films and their makers form cinematic constellations I stay in contact with, engage in continuous conversations with, – real and imaginary, – build political and queer affinities with, learn from, and get inspired by. Although the titles presented differ greatly in their methodological and conceptual approaches, all these filmmakers and visual artists explore archives (found and compiled), problematize the history and work of memory, and explore traces left by ghosts, unexpected social actors, ambivalent political figures, and marginal cultural bearers. Their films are cinematographic instances of artistic inquiries that give space to ghostly and real voices to speak, demand, and question, forcing us to reflect and seek answers, affect us and motivate us to further actions. Whether it be Polish post-war cinema examined through a queer autoethnographic lens and transformed into a polyvocal “mashed-up” glitchy audiovisual poem (Rafał Morusiewicz’s “Bodies without Bodies in Outer Space”); or the haptic archival reworking of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship ‘Potemkin’” (1925), “October” (1927) and Mexican materials to provide just yet another version of his incomplete project “¡Que viva México!” bridging the Mexican and Russian revolutions of 1910 and 1917, and performing a cinematic relational kin-making gesture towards a proto-queer kin-folk (my own “City Bridges Are Open Again”); or the history of the VBKÖ (Austrian Association of Women Artists) critically investigated through a method of “situated movidas” that bring forward uncomfortable ghosts from the archive which reveal the association’s involvement with National Socialism, Austro-fascism, and colonial ideologies (Nina Hoechtl/Julia Wieger’s (aka the Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps (SKGAL)) “Hauntings In the Archive!”); or the unearthing of silent histories of the rarely addressed Austrian coloniality while engaging in conversations and performing reparative gestures of care and protection towards people depicted in an ethnographic photo archive of Paul Schebesta, Austro-Czech missionary and ethnologist, taken in the former Belgian Congo (today's Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the 1930s (Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s “Unearthing. In Conversation”); or the masterful exploration of potentialities in mythical-political worldbuilding through an exuberant creation of cinematic DIY punk and surreal "counter-worlds" (or "underworlds") as spaces of aesthetic resistance and queer-feminist resilience – to destabilize the symbolic orders of colonialism, neoliberal normative rhetoric, and necropolitics (Naomi Rincon Gallardo’s “Verses of Filth”); or relying on structural film tradition, an audiovisual transformation of re-reframed, re-mixed and re-imagined TikTok videos of volcanic activity into a metaphor for renewal, cleansing and formation of territories with fully regenerated histories (Cauleen Smith’s “My Caldera”); or an effective reworking of a USA propaganda film “Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter” through a situationist act of détournement that reveals the original’s manipulation and pretentiousness in its depiction of brutal militaristic heroism in the name of arbitrary moralistic justifications (Keith Sanborn’s “Operation Double Trouble”); or a humorous and playful film analysis of Walter Benjamin’s cornerstone text that, in a filmmaker’s approach, problematizes ownership and authorship in the digital era (“The Artwork In The Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin As Told to Keith Sanborn”); or a blunt video-trace/document resulting from a violent act of direct erasure – a conceptual video work created by the circumstances themselves (Anahita Razmi’s “White Wall Tehran). The films are archives of feelings that let the ritualized process of grieving and overcoming loss be performed, and explored fully while documenting the repetitive labor of remembering against forgetting, capturing the unseen, and the tactile (as in Keawalee Warutkomain’s (aka Belle) “The Last Visit”); or that make a space for intimate and gentle glancing inwards, indexing affections, proximities, and bonds with images and sounds that were recorded spontaneously on a smartphone and film cameras, and approached as separate entities forming distortions, patterns, rhythms, and cycles (as in Lynn Loo’s diaristic “Conversations”); or an archive that traces and chronicles, in a non-linear and poetic fashion, the little girl’s exploration of the world through language that she experiences in acquired words, black-and-white images, inanimate objects, and through a materiality of touches, visual confusions, and constant questioning (as in Guy Sherwin’s “Messages”). The films presented and their creators form a virtual community – although temporary and fugitive – which strives for a different vision of our collective future where differences are bridged, and negotiated, where imagination, – although it can’t oppose real oppression – changes mentalities, “however, slowly it may go about this” as a postcolonial writer and poet Édouard Glissant writes. Together we labor for the political imagination and alternative visuality that leads to new collective ways and modes of being, feeling, sensing, and acting on a reality in the present, potentially changing it for the future. I’m inviting you to take a walk with us where we will share with you our visions, aspirations, knowledge, experiences, aesthetic experiments, excitements, joys, and humor. Welcome to this cinematographic walk! Join us! yours sincerely, Masha