Imagine for a moment that i am alien which i am by the standards of many including my own… descended from aliens that have been creating deep sea cities, called (record a sound from water). These cities are populations are large descendants of unborn babies that were in the wombs of pregnant would be slaves thrown overboard during the trans-atlantic journey. Some of us are amphibious. Many of us are able to take human form but are also capable of breathing underwater. Some of us are elected to remain in human form. Those of us on earth communicate every other full moon with the populations underwater, giving data and updates to whats taking place in the human world. We have a very particular relationship with the earth as we inhabit most of the earth. An virtually colonise- able part of the earth. – Jamika Ajalon

Mourir en Peu is composed of three short films united by the theme of the discovery of America (the city filmed as a sea voyage, its cafes shown as a colonization museum, around the world within the space of the house) and linked by the filmmaker’s interrogation about their own route.

“I took the photographs. I like to take photos, though I’m not interested in photography as an end-all. The images in Indefinite Pitch are like a deck of cards to me: a fixed set that is infinitely shufflable and without individual value outside of the game. I wanted to create images at once specific and vague. They depict exactly what they are said to depict (the shoreline of the Androscoggin river in Lewiston/Auburn, Maine) but they don’t tell you much about the place. They are beautiful (in my opinion) but also generic, the way most beautiful things are generic. Like a photo of a sunset. Or a catalog swimsuit model. Or maybe a hit movie at Sundance.” – James N. Kienitz Wilkins, interview for Warehouse Industries, 2017

Woodberry’s ten-minute short, Marseille Après la Guerre is a poetic, black-and-white portrait of dock workers in post-WWII Marseille, which is also an homage to the great Senegalese film director, Ousmane Sembène. Researching the history of the National Maritime Union several years ago, a radical union of sailors founded in 1937, Billy discovered a collection of photographs by union photographers of the docks in Marseille, many portraying dock workers of African descent. The images reminded Billy of Sembène’s book, ‘Le Docker Noir’, hence the film. Although the photographs are static, Billy’s framing and editing creates a moving visual narrative, undergirded by the atmospheric Marseille music of Moussu T e lei Jovents. – Jan-Christopher Horak

Black Code/Code Noir revolves around the murders of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell, two Afro-Americans killed by US-police officers in Missouri in 2014. Through an intricate layering of historical events, the British film director Louis Henderson puts them in a larger perpective to critically reflect on them as latest manifestations of a long history of slavery and racial oppression. Like an archaeologist, Henderson digs for material in the World Wide Web, using circulating images and mobile footage, news fragments, graphics and animations to draw a line to the current upheavels in Ferguson. Even today, social interactions continue to be determined by the history of slavery and the ‘black codes’ restricting human rights of blacks in the United States. Internalised social codes and racist structures are furthermore inscribed into algorithmic culture and the surveillance mechanisms controlled by Big Data, on the basis of which the American police state decides between life and death of Afro-Americans. Yet for Henderson, looking back into history also provides hope for the future: Can the anti-slavery insurrection that took place in the former French colony of Saint Domingue in the eighteenth century be a guide on how to hack the ‘black code’? (Foto Museum)

Amílcar Cabral was murdered on January 20, 1973. 47 years after his murder, expressions referring to the immortality of his thought and action are still frequently used. However, these isolated expressions say little about the possibilities of the emergence of any legacies on a political, local and transnational level. These are the possibilities we try to reflect on and discuss in this session, based on the film that summons the real and potential returns of Amilcar Cabral. The Return of Amílcar Cabral shows the solemn ceremony surrounding the return of Amílcar Cabral’s remains from Conakry where he was murdered in January 1973, to Bissau, in 1976. This was a collective effort of Guinean filmmakers and one of the few documentaries they managed to finish. According to Sana na N’Hada, the original purpose of this film was to invite the Guinean diaspora to return to the newly liberated nation.

In Search of UIQ unfolds the story of Félix Guattari’s lost science-fiction screenplay, ‘Un Amour d’UIQ’. Conceived during the 1980s, this unmade film imagines the discovery of the Infra-quark Universe (UIQ), an alien intelligence from a parallel dimension that falls in love with one of its human hosts, an event which has catastrophic consequences for the whole planet. Moving between documentary, fiction and essay, through the deployment of video, film and sound archives, letters and other documents that are enmeshed in a series of fabulations, In Search of UIQ explores what the cinema of the Infra-quark might have been (and may still become) and considers its rapport with key social and political transformations of our time from autonomist struggles to the digital recoding of life.

A key masterpiece of the L.A Rebellion, Bless Their Little Hearts distills the social concerns and aesthetics of that trailblazing movement in African American cinema. Billy Woodberry’s film showcases his attentive eye, sensitivity to the nuances of community and family, and the power of the blues. Searching for steady work, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) views his chronic unemployment as a kind of spiritual trial. But day work and selling a few catfish can’t sustain a family of five. While his wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore), works to support them with dignity, Charlie finds comfort for his wounded sense of manhood in an affair that threatens his marriage and family. At the heart of this devastatingly beautiful film is the couple’s agonizing confrontation – shot in one continuous ten-minute take – that ranks as “one of the great domestic cataclysms of modern movies.” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker)

The Third Part of the Third Measure, a new audiovisual composition commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Sharjah Biennial 13, creates an encounter with the militant minimalism of avant-garde composer, pianist, and vocalist Julius Eastman. The Third Part of the Third Measure focuses on what The Otolith Group describe as “an experience of watching in the key of listening,” invoking political feelings of defiance and the collective practice of movement-building that participates in the global struggles against neoreactionary authoritarianism. The Third Part of the Third Measure invites viewers to attend to exemplary ecstatic aesthetics of black radicalism that Eastman himself once described as “full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage.”

People to be Resembling is a pentagonal portrait of Codona, the post-free jazz, pre-world music trio founded by multi-instrumentalists Collin Walcott, Don Cherry and Nana Vasconcelos in 1978. In its arrangement of positive and negative stills with colour and black and white moving images and original compositions by Charles Hayward, People to be Resembling reimagines the process of recording as a meditation upon permutation and cohabitation.

In La Panne des Sens we return to Césaire’s Martinique to rediscover landscapes resembling opera scenography and fortress-like forests. There is a deaf and latent force that sweeps the stage of servitude and only insufficiently burst with every storm.

Myriam Lefkowitz’s ongoing project Walk, Hands, Eyes examines the relationship formed between a city and its inhabitants. Over the course of an hour’s silent walk a participant and a guide form an immersive relationship with their surroundings through the simple acts of walking, seeing, and touching. In the small river town of Arcos de Valdevez, Doc’s Kingdom seminar participants guided each other in pairs after a hands-on workshop offered by the choreographer.

Mining for Ringwoodite compares the 2014 geological discovery of ‘fossilized’ water – termed Ringwoodite – found in the interior of a diamond in Brazil, with the prospects of mining on the moon or asteroids as announced by private companies in recent years. Ringwoodite, which holds water in the form of hydrogen and oxygen bound together, can only be found in the earth’s transition zone, between 410 and 660 kilometers below the earth’s surface. Until now, it had only been artificially created in laboratory or found in asteroid rocks. In the meantime, seismic wave analysis has suggested the presence of a vast repository of ringwoodite beneath the USA, and further studies are in process in other geographies.
Given that water scarcity will only worsen throughout the twenty-first century, this episode speculates on a near future in which ringwoodite as well as rare minerals found in nearby asteroids will be the objects of a new mining economy. Perhaps in this future, both the earth’s interior and outer space will become new capitalist frontiers, similarly to the role played by gold and silver mining in the colonial past.

“This episode, set within the context of inhabitants’s collaboration with Contour Biennale 8, weighs the fiction of allegorical images against the concept of the legal fictitious person. In particular, it puts in perspective the abstract body of Justice in relation to the status attributed to corporations for juridical purpose under the United States code of law.
Set to the tone of feminist post-punk bands and composers, we draw on a recent US Supreme Court legal case that granted religious rights to a corporation called Hobby Lobby, which allowed it to deny its federal obligation to provide contraceptive healthcare to its female employees. The case sets jurisprudent record within the United States Common Law, which means that common law judges not only apply the law but also make the law through exemplary cases that may then be used in future cases. As such, the consequences of the Hobby Lobby ruling, which opens the way for corporations to practice a faith, may come to affect women’s autonomy and rights to their bodies in the future.”

The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the black revolutionary founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women—across all lines of race, class, and sexual orientation—emerges to blow the system apart. Filmed guerrilla style on the streets of pre-gentrification New York, Born in Flames is a Molotov cocktail of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.

Alien(s)kin: Queer other Other Lands of Here is an audio visual poetical performance that that speaks to the queer POC’s (person of colour) agency from the so called margins as disrupters of dominant narratives and chrono-geographies. For ever transversing borders, frontiers, with an eye on ‘space’ as the place to realise create and recreate alternative zones in time/space — Zones where alternative narratives breath and seed transitory geographies.

Legendary Beat figure Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it’s granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Embodying the spirit of those efforts, the new film from Billy Woodberry is perhaps the closest we can come to knowing the man and his time. The cumulative effect of And When I Die is to understand a familiar, over-exposed era with new eyes, thanks in no small part to the honest assessment provided by some of New York’s Beat generation some half-century removed. (Kanopy)

Internet voodoo is on the rise in Ghana, and so is a new industry, where young workers extract not just metals, but also bank details and holiday photos from hard drives that are sent to be scrapped. A kind of reverse archaeological mining, where the metals, which were initially exported to the West, now return in the form of antiquated hardware. All this according to the Ghanian storyteller, who presents his country in this ‘letters from a visionary’, which form the narrative backbone (and title) of Henderson’s hypnotic film, which illustrates his dizzying points with the open mind of a wandering spectator and with graphical 3D reconstructions of underground mine systems. (CPH:DOX)

As technological progress pushes forward in the west, enormous piles of obsolete computers are thrown away and recycled. Pushed out of sight and sent to the coast of West Africa these computers are thrown into waste grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. On arrival the e-waste is recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings in order to extract the precious metals contained within. Eventually the metals are sold, melted and reformed into new objects to be sold – it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these heavy processes, the video highlights the importance of dispelling the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology to reveal the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.

Anathema reimagines the microscopic behaviour of liquid crystals undergoing turbulence as a sentient entity that possesses fingertips enthralled by the LCD touch-screens of communicative capitalism. In isolating and recombining the magical gestures of dream factory capitalism, Anathema proposes itself as a prototype for a counter-spell assembled from the possible worlds of capitalist sorcery.

Special Features assumes the form of an interview, filmed with an old video camera, conducted by Wilkins with an African American man (played by three different actors at various points of the film) who recounts a dream (or was it?) involving another man—the trilogy’s titular Andre—working security at a party at Shaquille O’Neal’s house. (“It was plotted like a movie, so vivid,” he says.) But his dream’s significance seems to reside not in its psychoanalytic implications, nor in the metaphysical contradiction its subject embodies (the living dead), but in technology and the internet’s role in determining the contents of his story. The man’s account most closely resembles a hazy recollection of a YouTube video viewed at some uncertain point in the past, and Wilkins seizes upon this narrative fuzziness to blur the lines between both plain old lived experience and technologically mediated experience (is there any difference?), fiction and truth, and the virtual and the actual. (Cinema Scope)

A disembodied, anonymous character reflects on the titular Andre, a fellow prisoner whose obsessions with mainstream cinema and video technologies serve as oblique clues to how he escaped. Andre’s aspirations to achieve absolute fidelity in image-making intersect with questions about representation, identity, and personal ethics.”The title is literal. It is ‘b-roll’ with Andre. The ‘a-roll’ (interview footage normally considered primary information) is not with Andre. In today’s editing parlance, ‘b-roll’ is supporting footage: cutaway shots, filler to cover a bad edit, bits and pieces to support the main argument of the ‘a-roll’. These moments are the closest we get to Andre, if we accept that the GoPro found in the box was operated by him. It’s the only physical evidence, and the only original footage, despite being perceived as supplemental footage.” – James N. Kienitz Wilkins for Vdrome

“If you see something, film it.” Citizen-shot footage distributed through social media has galvanized social movements, in the demand for transparency and accountability. As a political tool, such videos have reverted surveillance against itself, proposing instead a record that comes from below; in other words, a type of vigilance led by citizens against power and abuse, in what has been called “sousveillance”. Yet, beyond our newsfeeds, how does citizen-shot video actually become evidence? How does it perform in the courtroom? Do most of these videos have legal value?

In a small Lisbon theatre an organization calling itself ‘The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’ which claims it can employ everybody recruits actors on the eve of a transatlantic voyage. But the reasons for this journey remain a mystery. What is the relation between the Oklahoma Theatre and the ship, with its regime of control, work and entertainment? And what are the signals that start to emerge from bodily gestures, voices, dreams, radio frequencies, charts, waves, the ocean, trying to tell us? In the wake of Guattari’s ‘Project for a Film by Kafka’ and in homage to Kafka’s ‘Amerika’, Disappear One works a series of variations around the unfinished novel in the context of an imminent shipwreck, shifting the trajectory of Karl’s journey towards Brazil and tracing its lines of disappearance in the depths of the South Atlantic.

Mediums is a medium-length movie filmed exclusively in medium shots about a group of potential jurors gathered on their break. The characters anticipate their involvement in the American legal system while channeling tips and advice to pass the day.

“We need other kinds of stories,” Donna Haraway implores as she faces the camera. “Storying otherwise,” in Haraway’s expression, is an apt characterization of the work of this paradigm-shifting thinker, whose contributions to feminist studies of science and technology resist and even rebel against hegemonic ways of thinking and living. But what form should such stories take? What might they sound or feel like? To watch Fabrizio Terranova’s Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016) is to know that the filmmaker took Haraway’s imperative to heart. Both subtle and explicit filmic techniques mimic, comment on, and evoke the rhythms that sustain Haraway as a thinker, a storyteller, and a human being. In experimenting with different kinds of storytelling—bending the genre of documentary by fusing the intimate everyday with the playfully surreal—Terranova brings one of the most evocative social theorists to life and demonstrates the supple, transformative nature of storytelling itself. – Alexandra Middleton

What has happened in Portugal that, without great commotion, we will relegate ourselves to being extras in our cities, mere supplements of local color, an addition of authenticity to scenarios intended for the leisure of tourists? What happened at the turn of the decade that made us renounce to a life as actors in the story of a country in need for reinvention? That, as children terrified by a fantasmatic punishment, has made us incorrigible ‘bambinos’ and eternal militants of irresponsibility? Portugalito is a sad pamphlet against the nationalism and patriotism that seem to be increasing.

Hydra Decapita is a way of connecting this historical atrocity to the present of financial capitalism via a few other roots. We link the 1781 atrocity to J.M.W. Turner’s painting, ‘The Slave Ship’ from 1840, which attempts to visualize this atrocity. Then we link that to John Ruskin’s 1843 text from ‘Modern Painters, volume I’, in which he talks about Turner’s methodology for painting water, and he refers to this painting. So, you have this constellation of dates, and finally you have the Detroit electro group Drexciya, which from 1992 to 2002 created a series of albums that were set in this underwater kingdom called Drexciya. This kingdom was populated by the children of slaves who had been thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. [In] this science fiction, the female slaves who were thrown overboard did not die but gave birth to children who could breathe underwater. We constructed a relation between these elements. Visually, the film is extremely monochromatic. It’s also based on singing, so you get a film that has a desolate eeriness to it. And all of this is our way of trying to apprehend abstraction. The idea is that financial capitalism works through abstract processes that nonetheless have real effects, which means that our language, aesthetically speaking, has to become as abstract as reality itself. It also relates to the point that I made earlier, about constructing nonlinear relations to the present. – Kodwo Eshun

“Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil (Ojibway), in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The case pitted the Umatilla people and other tribes, who wanted to provide a burial to the ‘Ancient One’, against two scientists—one of which from the publicly-funded Smithsonian Institute—who wanted to study the ‘Kennewick Man’. In order for the claim to fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) it became necessary to establish the lineage of these remains.
This fight unleashed a controversy with groups attempting to establish white ancestry, and with this seeking to altogether undermine the indigenous sovereignty over land and ancestors and annul centuries of colonial violence. The evolving science of DNA and cranial morphology was grotesquely called in to testify to the purity of the bones’ ethnicity, where native claims to embodied knowledge of its origin had little means of addressing the court. Despite all of this, the Umatilla people and other tribes ultimately repatriated the ‘Ancient One’ and he was reburied earlier this year in 2017.”

An investigation on deep sea mining, in an effort to both inform about and help to preempt this, for now, hypothetical, industry. The jump from speculation to reality is, however, short. One could say that there is no deep sea mining industry. Rather, what is being pushed is a discourse, a language, and an imaginary (a speculation), creating the conditions for financial interests to establish this new economic frontier as unavoidable.

Louis Henderson shares footage shot for his current project in Haiti, reflecting on the legacy of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture.

In a dystopian future in which oil extraction has become a catastrophic reality in Portugal, a citizen-journalist looks back and questions how it was possible to go ahead with such plans.
For An Oil Free Future is a mini-series of protest videos against fossil fuel prospection and extraction (oil and natural gas) off the Portuguese coast (offshore) and in land (onshore) through fracking.
Over the last few years, and particularly in 2015 under the former PSD/CDS-PP right-wing government, several contracts were signed between the Portuguese State and major oil companies (Galp, Partex, Repsol, Eni, Australis, Cosmos and the controversial Portfuel). The matter is of major national interest, given its environmental impact, rupture with Portugal’s international climate agreements, and the redefinition of the country’s energy plan. Furthermore, these contracts were signed without any public consultation. In the meantime, the Socialist Party came to power in late 2015, but has avoided making a clear declaration about the situation, and, from the little we know, appears to agree with the plans.