Circle of War: Artistic and Historical Narrations on the Frontlines of Ukraine

Session 1: April 29, 6 pm CET

The brutality of the Russian invasion in Ukraine in February 2022 shocked Europe and the rest of the world, while the Ukrainian people, however, experience the anxious environment of frozen conflict already since 2014. After the annexation of Crimea, Russia ignited the hybrid war in the Donetsk and Luhansk region, which divided them in parts: on the one hand subordinated to the Ukrainian state and on the other, self-proclaimed republics under Russian control. While many of the residents left the heavily damaged towns, there still was a social and cultural life during the past 8 years. Since 2014, artists and researchers from Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine visited frontline areas to discover their local context and cultural infrastructure, such as local history museums - the most common type of cultural institutions in the area. Damaged by war and poorly financed by the state, these museums have had the same program for many years and now opened their doors to new collaborations. This led to several exhibitions based on rethinking museum funding and featuring site specific works which aim at constructing alternative ways of representation and interaction with the audience. Future perspectives were established, which due to recent war developments and interventions have been occupied by Russian forces.

Ghostly Times
Violence, Memory and Resistance in the Works of Bruno Varela

Session 1: April 29, 6 pm CET

In the last week of September 2014, 43 rural students disappeared in the middle of an extreme violent police and military attack, ordered after a supposed confusion of the students as drug dealers. Also many other people form Ayotzinapa, a rural zone in Guerrero, Mexico, were murdered that night. After many days, some human remains were found in really bad state, including a body without facial skin. In order to clarify what happened, the Mexican State authorities offered a non-reliable version of the events. It was called the “Historical Truth”, and it meant the beginning of a series of lies and confrontations between the State and some civil organizations.

The evidence of the disappearance was archived and, suddenly, it disappeared. All that was left were some digital copies of the forensic reports and nothing else. Some years later, the President of Mexico ordered the distribution of the information about the case, but, again, there was nothing to be distributed and analyzed. This year, the Interdisciplinary Group of Forensic Experts worked in order to gain access to the archives and submitted their Third Report. As was already known, the Historical Truth offered during 2014-2015 by the authorities was a lie.

In this context the Mexican experimental artists Bruno Varela created a series of works. Each one of them deals with issues of misrepresentation, absence of information and forensic documents and proves. In order to do so, Varela himself, like a gleaner, began to collect all kinds of images and voice records. All those materials were later transformed in three experimental videos: Fauna Nociva (Harmful Fauna, 2015), Volatilidad (Volatility, 2015), and Materia oscura (Dark Matter, 2016).

The hypothesis behind the Ayotzinapa trilogy is that the impoverished state of the images and documents can be re-work through montage in order to create a metaphorical analysis on the conditions that allowed the Nation-State to execute the students and vanished their bodies. Following this idea, Mariana Martínez-Bonilla seeks to problematize the works mentioned above through the lens of the theories of Ariella Aisha Azoulay about the potential history as a way to imagine other possible histories, but also to resist to the violent erasure of the memory and the past.

Eclipse Entanglements

Session 2: April 30, 11 am CET

In 2016, filmmaker Yashaswini Raghunandan, visited a village in Murshidabad which made toys from the remains of Bollywood and Tollywood films. The toy-makers toiled day in and day out, fixing bits of 35mm’s into the insides of bamboo- transforming them into rattlers, whistles and whirligigs. The work in the village was repetitive and monotonous fusing day and night, winters and monsoons. One day, unexpectedly the longest lunar eclipse was announced in the village- opening up the night, their curiosity and dragging their hands away from work. For a brief few hours all the children, women, men and cows looked up. 

Materialist Approaches to Cinematic Creation: A View from Egypt

Session 2: April 30, 11 am CET

Fiction cinema can seem like a mesmerizing dream, an apparition, a series of ethereal ghosts coming and going on screen. Yet as generations of film scholars have shown, some fundamental social and technical factors undergird the production, circulation, and consumption of fiction cinema. Such a “materialist” approach, however, is not unified beyond its rejection of idealist and subjectivizing conceptions of cinema, which says little about what kind of “materialism” can best help us to approach cinematic creation. This paper makes two interventions in this sense. On one hand, it provides a brief glimpse into the actual conditions under which Egyptian commercial filmmakers work, based on ethnographic work in the Egyptian film industry now published in Making Film in Egypt (2021). On the other hand, it illustrates and evaluates the relative merit of different materialist approaches to the study of artistic creation with attention to cinema, including historical materialism, material culture studies, and the “social life of materials” school.

AFRICAN RHYTHM FOR AFRICAN FILM: Transposition of the Concept of "Asymmetrical Parallelism" into Film Language 

Session 3: April 30, 2pm CET

The first film made by an African director was released in 1955. More than 60 years later, we still can't have an objective definition of African Cinema, because we didn't develop an African filmic rhythm.

African Cinema

Session 3: April 30, 2pm CET

“African Cinema” is the theme of the African Diaspora Cinema Festival that draws on the principle that being African is a bond that goes beyond geography, birth or lineage; as people of African origin are spread across the globe and Africa is also proud home to many non-Africans. Africa has been able to capture the world’s attention through its ancient cultural heritage and beginnings of civilization. With films it will have the power to connect people from around the world.