living in the future of others

The communed guests will use the colloquium as a performative space to publicly weave together relationships across their work, sharing fragments of video and text from projects in-progress. Centered on how their processes of research are indistinguishably entangled with the politics of making films, threads will be traced between techno-scientific optics, intergenerational trauma, memory and modeled futures.

The three have been meeting once a month to create a network of support and collectively think through shared thematics of their ongoing projects: Blanca is currently developing her practice-led PhD on the geopolitics and spatial articulations of particle physics’ “Sensing Infrastructures”, looking at fundamental physics laboratories such as CERN and how they amplify material and political interactions. henry is working on a multi-channel video installation, investigating the use of the ocean as a stage for rehearsing scenarios of British imperialism and its resulting ecological devastation. Solveig has been shooting a film which recounts her mother’s career as an optical engineer. The story is complicated by a non-disclosure agreement signed with the Chinese state in 1987, where her work has been tracing around this absence of information, exploring the personal and gendered experience within structures of power that shroud optical technology. The session will expand on the meaning of a research-film practice and the importance of becoming-with-each-other and extending into many operations of time.

Making their films across archives, family homes and within techno-scientific institutions– the session will address how each space raises different questions about the act of filmmaking itself, and how accessing them in particular ways might disturb our notions of ethics, extraction, privacy, reputational capitalism, embodiment and empath. Other questions addressed include: How do we think about personal memory within larger constructs of time, entangled within broader socio-economic structures? How can cinema be used as a means to embody pasts and futures, in ways which may feel more present than being in those pasts and futures themselves? How might using moving images and narrative strategies critically engage with time that is not of progress or of capitalism moving forward, time that is against linear progression? The session will explore what it means to be living the futures (and pasts) of others, while attempting to inhabit a “thick present”.

#cinema #practice-led research #infrastructure

Schedule

14:00–15:30ish
Talk & Screening/Reading between Blanca, henry, Solveig

Break (15 min.)

15:45–max. 17:00
General Discussion