My Cinema

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

The Book of Skies, like its predecessor Excess-The Factory, emerged from poet Leslie Kaplan's experience participating in the national strike and social revolution of ’68 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory, puts the factory experience strikingly on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the poem’s speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

From the beginning of her career, French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L'exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the book’s first translation into English, though it had been translated into five other languages.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

Les sculptures et les films de Judith Hopf sont alimentés par des réflexions sur les relations que les êtres humains entretiennent avec la production et la technologie. Pour Énergies, sa première exposition monographique en France qui eut lieu conjointement à Paris à Bétonsalon et au Plateau, Frac Ile-de-France, l’artiste s’est concentrée sur cet élément invisible dont la quête accompagne notre quotidien et nos activités, produit par la conversion de ressources naturelles en puissance. Ce catalogue réunit des reproductions de dessins inédits, un entretien avec l’artiste et un texte critique de Tom Holert qui fait retour sur vingt années de travail.

Judith Hopf's sculptures and films are fuelled by reflections on the relationship human beings have with production and technology. For Énergies, her first solo exhibition in France, held jointly in Paris, at Bétonsalon and Plateau, Frac Ile-de-France, the artist focused on this invisible element whose quest accompanies our daily lives and activities, produced by converting natural resources into power. This catalog features reproductions of previously unpublished drawings, an interview with the artist and a critical text by Tom Holert, looking back over twenty years of work.

Textes / Texts
- François Aubart, Xavier Franceschi et Émilie Renard, "À propos d’énergie, d’amour et de chansons : conversation avec Judith Hopf"
- Tom Holert, "Changements de rythme : La méthodologie énergétique de Judith Hopf"

- François Aubart, Xavier Franceschi et Émilie Renard, "On Energy, Love, and Songs: Conversation with Judith Hopf"
- Tom Holert, "Changing Pace: Judith Hopf’s Energetic Methodology"

Traduction / Translation
Jean-François Caro
Louise Ledour

Typesetting : Olivier Lebrun

Published in conjunction with the exhibition For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness. Lina Selander in collaboration with Oscar Mangione held at Argos, Centre for Art & Media, Brussels, 24.09.2017 - 17.12.2017.

About the exhibition:
For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness features six video installations, most of them made in collaboration with Oscar Mangione. These works take us to Bredäng (a suburb in south-west Stockholm), Berlin, the West Bank, Pripyat and Chernobyl. All of these places are the occasion and the starting point for broader reflections about our present in relation to historical facts. Selander visits these sites and like an archaeologist digs in their past, their monuments, museums and archives. She looks for visual documents, focuses on details and analytically sketches new hypothesis. In this way, she tries to retrace hidden links between distant imageries, correspondences and analogies, in order to create new narratives. In her essayistic approach, Selander combines her own texts and footage along with still images, quotes and archive material. In this way a constant tension springs within these multiple-layered audiovisual works and reminds us that seeing is never an innocent act.

Fidback est une nouvelle revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque printemps, Fidback fera retour sur l’année écoulée : retour sur la dernière édition du FID, retour sur l’actualité mondiale du cinéma, retour sur le travail d’un·e cinéaste proche du festival, en-dehors de toute actualité.

À partir d’une dizaine de films choisis et éclairés par des textes, entretiens, documents et matériaux inédits, chaque numéro composera une image du cinéma défendu par le FIDMarseille : l’image inattendue d’un cinéma aventureux.

A unique limited edition accessible publication documenting a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal 1986 film Handsworth Songs more, and differently, accessible. Designed by Daly & Lyon it presents a new commissioned annotated audio description script from Elaine Lillian Joseph and new creative captions commissioned from the Care-fuffle Working Group alongside new essays by Clive Nwonka and Sarah Hayden.

The publication was produced in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery and with the support and advice of the UK Association for Accessible Formats and financial support from AHRC. The publication is also available in website form designed by An Endless Supply at slowemergencysiren.org.uk

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics.