Film & Video

A conference, hosted by the International Center for the Arts José de Guimarães, borrowed its title from an unfinished film stored in an archive in Bissau. Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not over yet) was conceived as a documentary film on post-independence Guinea-Bissau, but was abandoned in the editing process in 1980.

The archive testifies to a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism. Fifteen contributors brought their expertise to the task of re-visiting a period of revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. A rare coming together of artistic, juridical, cinematographic, curatorial and academic practices, the conference was not only a timely and important occasion to address issues of the post-colony in Portugal, but it also yielded new and experimental ways of convening around an archive, convoking conflicts and probing its topicality in the present.

It took place in a room in which, echoing Édouard Glissant’s notion of the ‘Creole garden’, plants, archival objects, technical props, furniture and people were arranged on equal terms.

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.

The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa. It enables thinking a politics of decolonisation for agriculture, migration, care, soil and the archive.

Presented as the blueprints for three public lectures, We are behind proposes alternative routes through Emily Wardill’s work and represents three different attempts at embodying and dissembling knowledge. Using different formal textual devices, from which they also deviate – a standard lecture, the subject of which becomes something felt, not taught; an a-chronological conversation; and the transcript of a play rendered as a formal essay – each section describes the different facets of an ongoing dialogue between the authors. Fragmented not only by dialogic turns, appropriated texts, images, a score and quotations, and containing extensive reproductions of Wardill’s work, the book’s content and design reflects the labyrinthine, and sometimes hallucinogenic quality of her films and their radical combination of form, content and idea.

Each section focuses on specific works. Section One, The Object, uses The Diamond (Descartes Daughter), SEA OAK, and Gamekeepers without Game, to explore ideas of the rational, public art, the public, linguistic framing and the irrational, via Gladys Knight and the Pips, a hand-drawn hallucinogenic section, Seth Price’s essay Dispersion, Norman Mailer, The Rockridge Institute and Peter Gidal. Section Two, The Window follows a conversations between the authors, that opens onto desire, politics, mirrors, and the films Basking in what feels like ‘An Ocean of Grace’ I soon realise that I am not looking at it but rather, I AM it, recognising myself, Split the View in Two (Part Two), and Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck. In the final part, The Theatre, an apparently formal essay on the implications of framing live action, the proscenium arch as a link between theatre and cinema, Dan Graham, perspective, power and its collapse, transforms into a collection of dialogues around Ben, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, authenticity, reality and fiction.

Mettant au travail un concept esquissé par la théoricienne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (qui opère la distinction entre lecture paranoïaque et lecture réparatrice, cette dernière refusant de séparer le blanc des faits du jaune de l’imagination), ce livre se soutient d’une conviction : lorsqu’elle entend partir de la non-effectivité sexe-genre pour libérer, non seulement notre manière d’envisager les identités sexuelles, mais bien la façon de penser le monde, la théorie queer communique avec de multiples avancées parallèles qui, dans les sciences sociales et la philosophie contemporaines, entendent de même se frayer un chemin à travers les clivages et les dualismes entre nature et culture, corps et esprit, monde imaginaire et monde réel, individu et communauté.