This spring, Allies meet (online) to watch ethnographic films and discuss with their makers. We have a line up of movies that explore the effects of urban infrastructures (Not just Roads), a series of short films on Black visual and sonic representations, social justice (Two tales of Modikahna), and on the politics of extractivist archives (Scenes of Extraction). Register to receive the Zoom link!
Our AnthroKino series is part of Allegra’s efforts to strengthen our community through gatherings.
Not Just Roads (70′)
March 7th 13:00 CET
Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Papanicolaou
Not Just Roads is a feature-length documentary film, which explores the recent history of planetary entanglements between the built environment, monetary speculation, and everyday life. It focuses on the sensorium of an urban expressway located on the peripheries of Delhi, the Dwarka Expressway. This expressway is being constructed as a part of the Indian government’s Bharatmala (‘Garland of Limitless Roads’) program, which aims to add a total of 65,400 kilometres of new highways to the existing network of highways in India. Thus opening the Indian countryside to a massive urbanisation geared towards speculative investments for the emerging Indian middle classes and global investors. Currently, these territories are inhabited by agricultural and working-class communities and nomadic herders and criss-crossed by native trails and vital ecological commons. The film captures the friction between the social and material lives of these competing life worlds, shifting between the sensorium of the worlds outside and inside of the gated utopias along the expressway. It journeys working class neighbourhoods undergoing demolition, construction landscapes, protests sites, and the persuasive pitches by the real estate salesmen attempting to sell dreamscapes.
Register here!
Black visual and sonic intonation (short films)
March 21st, 13:00 CET
In this AnthroKino session, we take up Arthur Jafa’s question ‘what could a Black visual language be outside of western paradigms of filmic representation?’. Taking ‘Black Visual Intonation’ as a visual language that could capture the sonority of Black life, we adopt a Black feminist perspective to explore how image, movement and sound are vocabularies that assist us in rethinking and re-narrating the conditions of Black life, and importantly how they can attend to the imaginaries and practices of Black femmes, and the Black diaspora more generally.
We are a trio of artists and researchers who have different backgrounds and influences. We enter in dialogue with each other on how and why the mediums of sound and image are essential to various Black ways of knowing and being. Whilst engaging with notions of time, space, joy, sociality, race, and gender, we celebrate sound and image as process and praxis, and as forms of refusal of the normative logics of ethnographic film making.
We present a selection of short films and sound pieces that represent our respective practices:
Rambisayi Marufu
Archival Encounters: A work in Progress (approx. 5min)
A poetic gesture towards encounters in the archive. A response to an installation I curated at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London (Nov 2021-2022), this work attends to questions of care, repair and intimacy in the museum.
Nasheeka Nedsreal
Steady Renderings (work in progress)
An experimental self-portrait delving into the intricate realms of personal mythology. Challenging notions of singularity and coherence, this kaleidoscopic exploration embraces fragmentation and hybridization through collage. Discarded images and videos converge and gain newfound significance, weaving together a tapestry of visual and sonic ephemera.
Artefact Dream (work in progress)
An exploration on fluidity and displacement, delving into the shifting landscapes of belonging and connection. With frenetic energy, the film embarks on a journey of memory and imagination mutation, fostering a dislodging of belonging. Shot predominantly in Senegal and Louisiana, it symbolizes a transatlantic journey, weaving together themes of transition and interconnectedness.
Melody Howse
Joy – 03:00 mins
A sound and image piece that meditates on the anti-gravitational capacities of dance as ‘Refusal.’ It considers movement a language and practice that is metamorphic. It is made with footage from the Berlin BLM demo 2021 and a soundscape created from demo speeches and sounds from across the African diaspora.
Independence – (work in progress 2:28)
A video collage that evokes and features the experience of my grandmothers whose story of emancipation echoes that of the country which gained independence from the British at the end of 1970’s.
Register here!
Two tales of Modikahna(73′)
April 10th 13:00 CET
Gouri Patwardhan with Nidhin Donald as discussant
Sudhir Waghmare’s canvases take us to Modikhana, a typical servants ‘back alley’ of the erstwhile British cantonment in Poona. His narrative reveals the rich and overlapping layers of the social and political history of Modikhana. In contrast, his daughter Kranti’s quest for form brings her face to face with the daily violence of the environment in which she grew up. It makes her question available ways of confronting this violence. She continues to search for form, and tries to find creative ways to collaborate with her community. The contradictions and realities of Modikhana, an area that has seen much transition, are finely captured through the very different and highly individualistic voices of Sudhir and Kranti Waghmare.
Register here!
Scenes of Extraction (43min)
April 25th 17:00 CET
The event is co-organized with BEYONDREST Conversation Series and the screening will be followed with a discussion with the research-based artist Sanaz Sohrabi and cultural historian Alia Mossallam on the possible ways to restitute contested archives into knowledge production.
Between 1901 and 1951, the British controlled oil operations in Iran expanded their geological expeditions and geophysical methods for locating commercially viable oil reserves across its entire oil concession. “Scenes of Extraction” takes the viewer on an archival stroll into the British Petroleum Archives to unearth the still and moving images that documented this expansive colonial network of geological explorations that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil concessions in Papua and South East Asia. Reading the political economy of images in relation to extraction of crude oil, “Scenes of Extraction” evokes the history of imperial and colonial extractive industries in relation to the history of photography and archives, both as embodied technologies of extraction and dispossession in and of themselves.
Register here!
Amazonianist (me here!) has for sure a lot to learn from the films you will be screening and debating. Thanks for the online registration