slow emergency siren, ongoing: Accessing Handsworth Songs

This DVD contains:
Light Reading, 1978, 20 min.
Pictures on Pink Paper, 1982, 35 min.
Cold Draft, 1988, 28 min.

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

An autobiographical documentary, a fiction that's also an essay and an extended poetic meditation on the ability of the image to represent experience. Sarah Turner's film is a ghost story that explores what we forget and how we remember. The stunning imagery comes solely from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, shot first in 1987-8 and then again in 2007-8. The re-enactment of the journey is a memory work, a re-enactment of the past in the present through the process of filming. But the return journey is haunted by the voices of two dead friends that dominate the soundscape of the 'archive' footage. The film culminates at the haunting expanse of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

Perestroika: Reconstructed re-mixes and extends Perestroika, into two sequences. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory, both sequences of Perestroika : Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquility, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, form stages thee through twinning the instability of memory and re-enacting that within the projective experience of cinema. This extended work delves further into ideas of momentary truth, identity, and how an uncontaminated experience of landscape is literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.

Publication contains DVD of Perestroika, which was released theatrically, blu-ray of Perestroika:Reconstructed, first exhibited as a gallery installation at London's Carroll/Fletcher Gallery April-May 2013, and a booklet of three essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland.

Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.
- Sarah Hayden

Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.
- James Goodwin

This instalment of Bricks from the Kiln doubles as issue #6 of the journal and as an exhibition catalogue for the thematic show ‘BFTK#6: Tentative — Incomplete — Inconsistent: A Catalogue of the Disappeared, Destroyed, Lost or Otherwise Inaccessible’. Presenting objects, artworks, artefacts, models, events and animals that no-longer — or never did — exist in physical form, the exhibition explores themes of death, destruction and reincarnation, examining persisting interests in notions of ephemerality and permanence, memory and record, preservation and erasure, creation and reconstruction.

How do we remember and memorialise? How is space given to the unrecorded? How do we experience the out of reach, concealed, unseen, undiscovered? How can the dematerialised be materialised again, through the mediation of writing, image and sound?

THE ALMOST HORSE
Helen Marten
(inside front / back cover)

‘STILL IN ALL HEARTS, IN ALL BELLIES, IN ALL TOES’:
A BELATED REVIEW OF FESTIVAL DE FORT BOYARD
Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister
(pp.6–8)

EDDYSTONE
Rachael Allen
(pp.11–18)

TO MAKE THE STONE STONY
Emily LaBarge
(pp.21–26)

WHEREFORE AM I NOW?
Lucy Mercer
(pp.29–40)

WESTON: THE TOWN THAT WAS, AND THEN WASN’T
Crystal Bennes
(pp.43–52)

NOTES TO ACCOMPANY VIOLENT INNOCENCE (2019)
Will Harris
(pp.55–64)

GHOST, POCKETS, TRACES, NECESSARY CLOUDS
Matthew Stuart
(pp.66–69)

CONNECTIVITY OF TOUCHING
Ali Na & Mindy Seu in conversation
(pp.71–76)

PEARL
Rose Higham-Stainton
(pp.79–84)

NOTES FROM NEW MEXICO
Jennifer Hodgson
(pp.87–98)

THE MOOG OF AHMEDABAD
Paul Purgas
(pp.101–108)

IN WHICH DECIBELLA ESCAPES AUDITION
Sarah Hayden
(pp.111–122)

D.C.B.: A PARTIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Juliet Jacques
(pp.125–136)

PINBALL REMAINS: ON THE PINBALL ISSUE OF THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Ellef Prestsæter
(pp.139–150)

TOMB III – CADMIUM (2021)
Gilbert Again
(pp.152–154)

NON-DESCRIPT ANIMAL
David Hering
(pp.157–161)

Cover & Bookmark artwork by Helen Marten

Nowhere Near follows the author’s psychogeographic journey from Los Angeles to Pangasinan to Mexico City after his departure from the United States, where he lived undocumented for twenty-six years. Returning to the Philippines with his grandmother to search for lost land and to confront a “family curse,” Revereza surfaces legacies of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism as they bear out in its continued present. Through film stills, photographs, family archives, and a rapt, first-person narrative, Nowhere Near excavates the amnesias and silences that shape personal and historical memory in the exilic, diasporic impasse.

Miko Revereza's Nowhere Near is the 2021 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge John Keene.

About the author

Miko Revereza (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker raised in California and currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship to moving images. He has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile: DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93 – 96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021), and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, and was listed in BFI’s Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, is a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is a recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaker. He holds an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films are distributed by LUX, London. 

Praise

In his powerful and entrancing voice, fueled by irony and critique, Miko Revereza explores neoliberal capitalism, the challenges facing undocumented families, the non-existent “American dream,” and internal and external exile, showing how borders of all kinds (geographical, racial, psychic), though regularly traversed, are policed and criminalized. Nowhere Near is a cri de coeur about twenty-first century American society.
—John Keene

Miko Revereza’s captivating book is a companion to his diaristic 2023 feature of the same title, and it is a pleasure to encounter on the page the resonant literary voice he developed while making that film. Befitting its rich entwining of personal and political histories, Nowhere Near contains a wondrous range of modes and moods: raw and revealing one moment, sharply and humorously observant the next, by turns poetic and plainspoken.  
—Dennis Lim

Nowhere Near is a document of lives lived undocumented. Here, form matters: text branches out from image, while dialogue counterpoints an easy, self-reflexive poetic. With the acuity necessitated by a status requiring constant vigilance, negotiating the privatized avenues of America’s dream, Revereza’s words carry a weight that belies their simplicity. Here and now, our attention matters, as America’s icy grip chills us all.
—Alia Syed

A collection of Pauline Julier’s art that expands from the terrestrial to the cosmos to comment on our place in the universe. 

At the interface of documentary and fiction, the multimedia works collected in Pauline Julier take us on a dizzying journey through space and time. Julier’s art travels through the geological ages of planet Earth, through different histories, natural disasters, and the Anthropocene’s paradigm shifts and into outer space. Her background in political science and photography is reflected in her work: looking into the past and the future, she investigates topical questions about our unlimited use of natural resources, escapism, and the colonization of space. 

Conceived and designed as a work of art in its own right, this volume offers a comprehensive insight into Julier’s art and thought through a conversation with eminent scholar of science and technology studies Donna Haraway alongside contributions by curator Céline Eidenbenz, anthropologist, and writer Nastassja Martin, and art historian, curator, and author Chus Martínez. 

Edited by Céline Eidenbenz and Sarah Mühlebach.

With Contributions by Donna Haraway, Pauline Julier, Nastassja Martin, and Chus Martínez.

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.

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.