ISSUE TWO Traces

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect. The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin. Each event showcases a retrospective of selected films by an artist and a small exhibition of his/her publications or works on paper over a span of 4 days.

KAMERA centers on fostering a critical dialogue between different film formats and artists’ books. Through its regular occurrence, it aspires to create a space for community exchanges about contemporary image-making. KAMERA is a series conceived and curated by Labor Neunzehn and AVARIE.

Fascinated by the intersection of visual art and cinema, Helga Fanderl’s short poetic films evoke intense and sensitive experiences of the real world. Using a small hand-held super 8 camera, she creates filmic responses to her perceptions, weaving together imagery and emotions in dense, rhythmic patterns solely through in-camera editing. She presents silent films in the form of ‘compositions’, crafting unique programs for site-specific personal projections and transforming spaces into temporary cinemas.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

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

In response to surges of violent British nationalism and political paranoia around borders, and to related social and ethical crises, JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky have assembled an anthology to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers brings together innovative writing from around the globe, celebrating the irreducible diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry. While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words.

The book is published by Boiler House Press to commemorate the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.

Alireza Abiz • Astrid Alben • Tim Atkins • Andre Bagoo • Veronica Barnsley • Khairani Barokka • Leire Barrera-Medrano • Katherine E. Bash • Áine Belton • Caroline Bergvall • Sujata Bhatt • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Fióna Bolger • Ben Borek • Andrea Brady • Serena Braida • Wilson Bueno • James Byrne • Kimberly Campanello • J.R. Carpenter • Mary Jean Chan • che • Matthew Cheeseman • Iris Colomb • Giovanna Coppola • Anne Laure Coxam • Sara Crangle • Emily Critchley • Ailbhe Darcy • Nia Davies • Tim Dooley • Benjamin Dorey • Angelina D’Roza • Katherine Ebury • Dan Eltringham • Ruth Fainlight • Kit Fan • León Felipe • Alicia Fernández • Veronica Fibisan • Steven J Fowler • Livia Franchini • Ulli Freer • Anastasia Freygang • Kit Fryatt • Monika Genova • Geoff Gilbert • Peter Gizzi • Chris Gutkind • Cory Hanafin • Edmund Hardy • David Herd • Jeff Hilson • Áilbhe Hines • Alex Houen • Anthony Howell • Nasser Hussain • Zainab Ismail • Maria Jastrzębska • Lisa Jeschke • Evan Jones • Loma Sylvana Jones • Maria Kardel • Fawzi Karim • Kapka Kassabova • Özgecan Kesici • Mimi Khalvati • Robert Kiely • Michael Kindellan • Igor Klikovac • Ágnes Lehóczky • Éireann Lorsung • Patrick Loughnane • John McAuliffe • Aodán McCardle • Niall McDevitt • Luke McMullan • Christodoulos Makris • Ethel Maqeda • Lila Matsumoto • Luna Montenegro • Stephen Mooney • Ghazal Mosadeq • Erín Moure • Vivek Narayanan • Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton • Alice Notley • Terry O’Connor • Wanda O’Connor • Gizem Okulu • Claire Orchard • Daniele Pantano • Astra Papachristodoulou • Fani Papageorgiou • Richard Parker • Sandeep Parmar • Albert Pellicer • Pascale Petit • Adam Piette • Jèssica Pujol Duran • Alonso Quesada • Ariadne Radi Cor • Nat Raha • Nisha Ramayya • Peter Robinson • William Rowe • Lisa Samuels • Jaya Savige • Ana Seferovic • Sophie Seita • Seni Seneviratne • Timea Sipos • Zoë Skoulding • Irene Solà • Samuel Solomon • Agnieszka Studzinska • James Sutherland-Smith • George Szirtes • Rebecca Tamás • Harriet Tarlo • Shirin Teifouri • Virna Teixeira • David Toms • Sara Torres • Kinga Toth • Claire Trévien • David Troupes • Arto Vaun • Juha Virtanen • J. T. Welsch • David Wheatley • Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese • Jennifer Wong • Isaac Xubín • Jane Yeh

The legacy and posterity of the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African and Latin American Cinema, which was held between 1968 and 1988 in Uzbekistan.

Between 1968 and 1988, the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and — from 1976 onwards — Latin American Cinema was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. As an exercise in soft power and a response to anti-colonial movements and the socio-political upheaval of the late 1960s, the festival grew into a unique gathering for film professionals and became an important platform for South-South solidarity that went beyond the cinema halls of Tashkent. In essays and conversations by researchers, film-makers, and organizers of contemporary film festivals, the Destination: Tashkent Reader reappraises the original festival's programming, while also looking critically at its legacy. From the vantage point of Berlin-based diasporas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the reader also investigates how such practices of encounters and collaboration resonate within the film scenes of these three continents today.

Contributions by Cana Bilir-Meier, Souleymane Cissé, Pascale Fakhry, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Sophie Genske, Timur Karpov, Ali Khamraev, Valeriya Kim, Carlos Kong, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Maren Niemeyer Jacqueline Nsiah, Furqat Palvan-Zade, Marie Helene Pereira, Elena Razlogova, Aykan Safoğlu, Masha Salazkina, Alex Moussa Sawadogo, Can Sungu, Echo Xuedan Tang, Sarnt Utamachote.