Ciné Place-Making
Study Circle
Friday 4 – Saturday 5 March 2022
Kaaistudio's
We don’t make places from nothing. We combine consciousness and capacity to make where we are into places we wish to be. The way we, imperatively, unfix and elaborate the places in which we find ourselves, involves coming to terms with violent processes and oppressive infrastructures. It’s precious to acknowledge how our experiences and imaginations of place-making, while resisting enclosure in different ways, share a sense of commonality, and how our understanding of it sustains and generates collective capacity. At the same time, it’s also precious to recognize how this commonality is ghostly stuff. It escapes the lens-based practices that attempt to objectify, capture or narrativize it. Instead, it calls for a cinematic approach that is attentive to the qualities of its hazy and undefined presence.
Ciné Place-Making traces various cinematic ways of making common cause with situated practices of place-making. We are introduced to a selection of film works and practices that are committed to preserving, reclaiming, and redistributing a set of collectively lived imaginations, dispersed across time and space: Raphaël Grisey’s and Bouba Touré’s archival journey that traces the cultural memory of the agricultural cooperative Somankidi Coura created in Mali in 1977; Marta Popivoda’s reclamation of the memory of female partisan Sonja in Yugoslavia as an alternative monument to collective antifascist resistance; Subversive Film’s redistribution of an archival film collection that uncovers the Japan-Palestine solidarity movement from the 1960s to the 1980s; Ana Vaz’s evocation of the collective visual memory of the Waimiri-Atroari in the Amazonas in the 1980s; The Post Film Collective’s kaleidoscopic, playful auto-ethnography; the collaboration between Lisbon-based high school students and Ana Vaz in which the camera is explored as an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song. These filmmakers take feeling and agency as constitutive of the way these imaginations of place-making become rehearsed on the screen. They explore cinematic methods tailored to serve with care, providing a holding environment that often extends beyond the apparent and the articulated.
In this two-day study circle with film screenings, talks, and lectures, we learn with these film practices how to preserve and proliferate a relational geography of struggles, imaginations, and resources.
With Stoffel Debuysere, Avery F. Gordon, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré, Lara Khaldi, Olivier Marboeuf, Marta Popivoda, Daniella Shreir, Subversive Film, The Post Film Collective, Robin Vanbesien, Ana Vaz, and Ana Vujanović.
Ciné Place-Making is convened by Robin Vanbesien in the context of his doctoral research-in-the-arts project Ciné Place-Making at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.
Friday 4 March 2022, 13:30-22:30
13:30 > 15:00 Session #1, Keynote Lecture: Avery F. Gordon, On the Matter of Living Through It; with an introduction by Robin Vanbesien
15:30 > 18:30 Session #2, Film, Preview: Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré, Xaraasi Xanne – Crossing Voices (2021 exhibition version, 110’); followed by a Q&A with Raphaël Grisey, moderated by Avery F. Gordon
20:00 > 22:30 Session #3, Film, Belgian Première: Marta Popivoda, Landscapes of Resistance (2021, 95’); followed by a Q&A with Marta Popivoda and co-writer Ana Vujanović, moderated by Daniella Shreir
Saturday 5 March 2022, 10:30 - 22:30
10:30 > 12:00 Session #1, Keynote Lecture: Olivier Marboeuf, Towards a Living Place; with an introduction by Robin Vanbesien
14:00 > 16:00 Session #2, Film Conversation, Preview: Subversive Film, Tokyo Palestine Collection, moderated by Lara Khaldi
16:30 > 18:30 Session #3, Ciné Assembly, Preview: The Post Film Collective, On Recreation (working title)
20:00 > 22:30 Session #4, Film, Belgian Première: Ana Vaz, 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Bird (2020, 31’) / Apiyemiyekî? (2019, 27’); followed by a Q&A with Ana Vaz, moderated by Stoffel Debuysere
Ciné Place-Making is produced by timely, in collaboration with Kaaitheater; with the support of Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF), OJO grant University of Antwerp, Sint Lucas Antwerpen Research Group (SLARG), Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA).
image caption: Ciné Place-Making, graphic design by Gloss
