Doc’s Kingdom will be back in Odemira from 19 to 23 November 2024, with a programme of screenings, debates, installations, sound performances and collective meals.
Under the title “Ways of Listening”, this year’s programme, curated by Stoffel Debuysere, aims to counter the traditional focus on visuality by developing critical perspectives on documentary from the point of view of sound. In order to imagine and discuss the political and ethical possibilities and implications of the sonic, Doc’s Kingdom will be deployed as a space for collective study that insists on more than meets the eye; a space for viewing and re-viewing cinema in the key of listening.
>> More information through this link.
Expeditions is a two-part tape-slide show, subheaded Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality, in which archeological metaphors organize an aestheticized, ideologically charged enquiry. Drawing on images from high colonial portraiture, ethnographic photography, and contemporary
reportage, Black Audio uses them as raw materials in a choreographed audiovisual performance. Over images of the past are inscribed philosophical phrases of the present. Between images of present conflict are “expeditions” that open onto a past seen through the representational genres that elide the violence of the orders with which they collude. From this new angle, maps become measurements of both distance and domination, and placid portraits take on a sinister cast. As a majestic male voice claiming that Blacks “don’t know who they are or what they are,” repeats over and over, it becomes a stutter-like symbol for the speaker’s own incapacity to comprehend the Other’s identity. Ambient sounds and manipulated voices (produced by Trevor Mathison) resonate forcefully, unearthing the deep structural meanings that bind the signs together.
Expeditions is a decidedly antirealist document; instead its makers struggle with every possible formal means of achieving a vision both poetically allusive and lucidly interpretive. (Coco Fusco)
In her latest film, the sonically striking What About China?, Hi8 footage shot in rural China from 1993-1994 is reframed thirty years later: first against China’s contradicting representation, histories, and futures, and second through the process of conversion from video to digital, where the transformation of low-res images creates ghostly animations on a canvas of multi-generational change. Pulsing against the surface of this inquiry is a theory of harmonics that takes the Hakka Roundhouse – a circular multi-family dwelling connected by common areas in the center – as its nexus. Minh-ha finds in this architecture, in the materials she uses to compose her film, and in the footage converted from video to digital a network of passageways: between society and nature, self and other, landscape and innerscape.
In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner’s highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world.
Expedition Content is an augmented sound work for cinema, composed from the archive’s 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.
Robert Gardner’s Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea resulted in one of his most widely seen, discussed, and debated films, the feature-length Dead Birds (1964). In the final years of his life, he also began editing together more than a dozen short pieces drawn from the hours of footage amassed during the expedition. Following his death, Gardner’s Estate embarked on a project to complete and present these short works. Olivia Wyatt was commissioned to complete the editing on Gardner’s pieces, and Ernst Karel was brought on to construct soundtracks for the films, using the sound recordings taken by Michael Rockefeller during the expedition. It was this project that led Karel to spend hours studying Rockefeller’s recordings, a process that ultimately inspired the conception of Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition
Content. Ranging in length from 2-20 minutes, and mostly focusing on a specific facet of Hubula culture (such as the process of gathering salt, of building a kaio, of herding pigs), these films register more like brief sketches. Karel’s soundtracks skillfully and unobtrusively utilize Rockefeller’s tapes to bring into play the evocative sounds of Hubula life, while also referencing the people and processes of the expedition through which the visual and auditory elements were created. (AFA)
Reassemblage is Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first 16mm film, made after a three-year stay (1977-80) in Senegal, where she taught music at the Institut National des Arts in Dakar. It was during this stay that she had become aware of the hegemony of anthropological discourse in any attempt, by both local outsiders and insiders, to identify and capture the observed culture. This film is a response to the urgency she felt to question the anthropological apparatus, its essentialising constructs and colonial ethos. This also implied a questioning of her own position as a “hybrid insider”, as someone who shares a certain experience of colonialism but at the same time is no less considered an outsider than any European.
Above all, the film is a response to a desire to “not simply mean”; a desire
not to approach Senegalese culture by wrapping it in reductive constructions of meaning. Minh-ha subverts the conventions of cinematic representation by playing with repetition, non-synchronous sound and unstable camerawork that disrupt temporal and spatial continuity and invite viewers/listeners to assume their own relationship to the world that appears on screen.
A cinematic exploration of London as a symbolic as well as a civic space, representing ideals of affluence and the hope of a new beginning, and contrasting it with the reality of the harsh welcome offered to many migrants. By 1989, the conservative government was three years into a programme of wealth creation and urban redevelopment unparalleled in 20th Century Britain. Black Audio Film Collective’s third work Twilight City can be seen as the first essay-film to map the new London through an excavation of Docklands, the City, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs. In its movement between archival image, fictional script, studio interview, photographic tableau and travelling long shots, London is reimagined as a nighttime city of light and glass, bordered by a landscape of dreams, sequenced by Trevor Mathison’s evocative electronic score.
48 stands as a paradigm of Sousa Dias’ approach. Examining the history and memory of political repression, torture, and resistance during the forty-eight years of the Estado Novo (New State, 1933-1974) – the fascist, colonial, and corporative dictatorship initiated seven years after the 1926 military coup d’état – the film re-uses anthropometric photographs of political prisoners – victims of torture – gazing upon and questioning the viewer with their testimonies fifty years after the related events o interweave past and present and point to trauma.
48’s rigorous formal system thus recreates the biopolitics of fascism by sensorially reenacting the oppressive historical experience of political prisoners through the tension between visual and sonic elements, a strategy that, addressing the archives in their material, ideological, and cultural itineraries, leads to their profanation and agencement.
(Raquel Schefer)
Fordlândia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlândia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. His aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States.
Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade. Nowadays, Fordlândia is a space suspended between times, between the 20th and 21st centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground. Although Fordlândia is well-known due to the brief Fordian period, one must not forget the history either before or after. Giving voice to the inhabitants who claim the right to write their own story and reject the ghost town label, Fordlândia Malaise blends together archival imagery, drone footage, tales and narratives, myths and songs.
After making Fordlândia Malaise, I returned to Fordlândia twice. During my last stay, I came upon a discovery–made accidentally by local workers – of indigenous artifacts beneath the Fordist factory itself. As these objects emerged from the earth, ancient memories began to surface as well.
In October 1985, Britain witnessed a spate of civil disturbances in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in urban centres of London. These were violent, tragic events, marked by the death of an elderly black woman, Joy Gardner and a white policeman, Keith Blakelock. Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure these events and the inability of the British media to go beyond its concern with demonising or rationalising the rioters and their motives, to break the anxiety-driven loop of morbid responses to the presence of blacks in Britain.
Handsworth Songs explores the idea that the riots represented less a self contained drama of rage with a single origin and trajectory than a multiplicity of issues, ambivalences, to do with race, longing and belonging – not all of which could be shored up by recourse to a rhetoric of civil disorder. The film’s sense of multiplicity extends to a rethinking of black British presence, and a refuting of the idea of a homogenous black community with a single sense of presence characterised by uniformity of ambition and expression. Instead the film evokes a broad range of voices, tones, registers.
Sound is everywhere. It exists on so many scales at times it is difficult to grasp. Its energies intertwine with the wider systems of a city, bleeding beyond borders and passing through our perceived boundaries. Many of these intersecting energies are imperceptible to humans. Even spaces we consider quiet are, in fact, extremely busy, full of action and energy.
To produce Vanishing Points, I documented how some of these urban flows intersect with my own everyday movements, and how I also contribute to them by recording the quiet space of my home as I cook and work; the quiet path surrounded by trees on the old railway line where I often run; the busy trains as I commute across the southwest of England; the crowded London tube lines; and the flow of people and traffic in the dense urban environments of Brixton and Bristol. As I traverse these spaces through stereo and electromagnetic field recordings, it becomes clear how everyday scenarios brim with life and activity, more than we might dare to imagine.
This piece’s subject is a key component of the global water cycle: the enormous streams of concentrated water vapor which flow through the sky from the tropics towards the poles, releasing heavy rain in high wind, particularly in the western US, and anticipated to increase in frequency and intensity with climate change. Performed in quad, the piece consists of unprocessed stereo and multichannel location recordings of atmospheric rivers, made over the past few years, as they pass by our house at the rocky northern California coast.
From 2011 to 2013, a string of puzzling burglaries took place in Southern California: tubas went missing from a dozen high schools. This genre-defying debut film was sparked by these events. Imagining what a band might sound like stripped of its deepest sound, the visual artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel, who identifies as d/Deaf, asks what it means to listen. The film winds through storylines blending documentary, narrative, and reenactment – one centered on a Deaf drummer playing a fictionalized version of herself, another following the school communities dealing with the theft – with ingenious interpretations of history-making concerts, from John Cage’s 4’33” to the last punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club (organized by filmmaker and artist Bruce Conner), interspersed throughout.
A story told through sound and its absence, The Tuba Thieves embraces the possibility of miscomprehension and delay in a meditation on access and loss. Featuring a cinematic experience of Los Angeles rarely seen – or heard – before, and incorporating open captions as a rich narrative space, O’Daniel’s work is profound in its prompt for (hearing) audiences to tune in differently.
Naked Spaces – Living is Round is a film on the poetics of dwelling and the relationship between houses and cosmos in West Africa. It explores the rhythm and ritual of life in rural environments of six West African countries (Senegal, Mauritania, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin) through a nonlinear structure that challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking. For Minh-ha, the question of cinema and light is pivotal in Naked Spaces. Dwelling is both material and immaterial; it invites volume and shape as well as it reflects a cosmology and a way of living creativity. In other words, to deal with architecture is to deal with the notion of light in space. To deal with the notion of light in space is to deal with color, and to deal with color is to deal with music, because the question of light in film is also, among others, a question of timing and rhythm. The relationship she worked on between color and light was also the link she conspicuously drew between architecture, music and film. The connections that determine the structure of the film are those that she has experienced in the living spaces of the
different peoples involved. The work reflects Minh-ha’s ability to reflexively critique both the structures of filmmaking and her own gaze. The narration typically provided by culture and authority is replaced here by three distinctly accented female voices speaking English, each of
which conveys a different approach to documenting reality, traversing the images at different angles.
Set in south-western Iran, in the province of Khuzestan and bordering with Iraq, Meezan (Scale) is an observational and immersive experience, a journey from the sea to the land, about labor at the margins of petro-capitalism in three chapters.
Departing from the shore of Abadan, the first oil company-town in the Middle East, it follows a group of Arab fisherman who exemplify the realities of maintaining intergenerational ways of
living and working on the sea. The men lead us to Bahrakan harbor where they barter for their share of the catch. What is contemporaneously a meeting place for fishmongering was a site of arduous migration for refugees fleeing Abadan after the mass destructions of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980’s. Meezan concludes in a secluded shrimp processing plant on the outskirts of Abadan where women who are shuttled in from surrounding villages furiously peel and devein shrimps in their own race for wages.
Despite the massive industrialization of the region, waterways of Khuzestan remain a significant source of income for the native communities who are most intimately connected to these embattled landscapes, and Meezan is a reflection on the relation between bodies and scales to acknowledge the weight of the past and its consequences in the present.
Across three distinct chapters, an inquisitive camera and intricately detailed sound design (by Ernst Karel) closely attend to both the individual and collective in the environments that dictate daily life and the scale of production operating along the margins of a petro-capitalist landscape.
“Morning and Other Times is a multichannel sound composition that was recorded in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, over a period of four weeks in early 2014 – a few months before the military coup which led to the dictatorship under General Prayuth. The piece attends to the multidimensional nature of the city, not just in terms of human multiplicity, but also in terms of the ways it’s inhabited by beings of different species, and so the piece takes as its starting point the voices of nonhuman participants in the urban environment. In one recurring case, that of dogs, the voices are literally in dialog with audible religious and political aspects of life in the city: namely the ringing of bells in temples (which are places that shelter street dogs), and the bugle calls which emanate from a military training facility on the outskirts of the city. The piece also relies on overhearing, on listening through, in order to convey something of its setting by what is revealed in the background. For example, when I was going through my recordings some months after making them, I found that I had more than once inadvertently recorded the Thai national anthem being broadcast somewhere in the distance; including them in this piece contributes to the theme of a pervasive background of nationalism and militarism”. (EK)
Materials Recovery Facility was made with location recordings from the Casella Waste Systems facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts, USA. This is where commingled (‘single stream’) recyclables collected by various surrounding municipalities and institutions are brought for sorting. The facility uses massive overlapping conveyor belts and automated sorting methods including optical sensors, precisely directed blasts of compressed air and magnets. But the machines don’t function nearly as effectively as expected so a large staff of human workers manages much of the separation by hand. This stand-alone audio piece also formed the basis for the audiovisual work Single Stream (2013), made with Paweł Wojtasik and Toby Lee. For this occasion, Ernst Karel presents a newly edited iteration.
Assistants: Patrícia Santos Herdeiro, Luisa Gago, Kátia Lisa
Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual
Câmara Municipal de Odemira
Portugal Film Commission
Quinta do Chocalhinho
Arbutus
Cinema Fulgor
COde – Centro do Conhecimento de Odemira
Cultivamos Cultura
Mirabolante Livraria Café
Escola das Artes - Universidade Católica Portuguesa - Esta parceria é financiada por Fundos Nacionais através da FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia no âmbito dos projetos UIDB/0622/2020 e UIDP/0622/2020
Kask & Conservatory School of Arts Gent - in association with the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory School of Arts Gent)
Institut Français du Portugal
ECAM - Escuela de Cinematografía y del Audiovisual de la Comunidad de Madrid
Caimán Cuadernos de Cine
Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola
Arsenal, Batalha Centro de Cinema, Casa-Atelier Vieira da Silva, Chocolates Beatriz, Light Cone, Lisson Gallery, LUX, Smoking Dogs Films (John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, David Lawson), Mulheres Trabalhadoras da Imagem em Movimento (MUTIM), Monte do Verdelho (Cá do Monte), Restaurante o Tarro, Restaurante Escondidinho, Royal College of Art.
Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker working across sound, moving image, sculpture, installation and performance, whose work is generated from a deep engagement with sonority, acoustics, access, and complex embodiment. Informed by her experiences of being d/Deaf/hard of hearing and collaborations with others on the d/Deaf spectrum – including composers, athletes, musicians, and actors – Alison builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. Her latest, multi-awarded film The Tuba Thieves (2023), uses real-life tuba thefts in Los Angeles as a springboard to critically explore how the history of sound segregations is deeply embedded into urban spaces through the design and mediation of sound, how sound travels through these substrates and who is allowed or obligated to hear it. She is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Ernst Karel works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and postproduction sound for nonfiction film and video, with an emphasis on observational cinema. He has worked alongside Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and has collaborated with artists and filmmakers such as Anocha Suwichakornpong, J.P. Sniadecki, Luke Fowler, Ben Rivers, and Helen Mirra. As an improviser he has played and recorded with Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tim Daisy, Liz Payne and Aram Shelton among others, and with Kyle Bruckmann he forms the group EKG. Lately he works around the practice of actuality/location recording (or ‘fields [plural] recording’) and composing with those recordings, with recent projects also taking up archival location recordings. He has taught audio recording and composition through the Sensory Ethnography Lab, the Center for Experimental Ethnography at Penn, and the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. He is currently an affiliate of the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts at the University of Southern California.
Matilde Meireles is a sound artist and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects. Her work has a multi-sensorial, durational and multi-perspective critical approach to site, where Matilde investigates the potential of listening across spectrums and scales as ways to attune to various ecosystems and articulate plural experiences of the world. Some examples include the inner architectures of reeds and complex water ecologies, resonances in everyday objects, local neighbourhoods and the architecture of radio signals. Her upcoming new album on the Crónica label, entitled Loop. And Again. (2024), delves into the dynamics of magnetic fields, intricate wiring arrangements, and their interconnectedness with the shifts in the surrounding landscape. Her work is also presented regularly in the form of performances, installations, community-based projects and publications. She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, Queen’s University Belfast.
Susana de Sousa Dias is a filmmaker and artist from Portugal. Her films and installations explore the dialectics of history and memory, questioning established regimes of visibility with a focus on the archive. Using still photographs and archival imagery, her first works (2000-2017) deal with the memory of the dictatorship in Portugal. Through testimonies from political prisoners, and resulting from extensive research in the national archives, her work played an important role in the public denunciation of the violent repression and torture used by the regime. More recently, she directed Fordlandia Malaise, in 2019, and co-directed Viagem ao Sol, with Ansgar Schaefer, in 2021. She often collaborates with her brother António de Sousa Dias, composer and artist, in the creation of the soundtrack for her films. Her work has received numerous awards and has been presented worldwide.
In 2012, she created a female collective that directed Doclisboa for two editions, establishing new sections such as Cinema of Urgency and Passages (Documentary & Contemporary Art). She is a co-founder of the production company Kintop. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts-Video, and teaches at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon.
Trevor Mathison is an artist, composer, sound designer, and recordist. His sonic practice – centered on creating fractured, haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music – has featured in over thirty award-winning films and installations. Trevor was a founding member of the cine-cultural artist collective The Black Audio Film Collective (1982 -1998), where his sonic designs defined and situated the Collective’s audiovisual works, including Signs of Empire (1983), Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Last Angel of History (1996). He has continued to work with some of his former collaborators from BAFC (John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and David Lawson) creating sound design for numerous documentaries and installations. With Anna Piva and Edward George, he formed the projects “Flow Motion” and “Hallucinator”, whose mutant techno dub featured on the leading record label Chain Reaction. In recent years Trevor has produced a series of artworks and album releases as part of the ongoing and iterative project From Signal to Decay.
Gary Stewart is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sound, moving image and computational creativity. His work examines social and political issues of identity, culture, and technology. Through the application of innovative technologies and practices, he is part of a global network of collaborators who are advocates for equality, climate justice and better health through the arts especially those from marginalised communities. Operating through a range of theoretical, fictional, and artistic frames, his work traverses media art, experimental music, and research. Under the moniker of Bantu, Gary sets out to explore and bring fresh new perspectives and in particular to “Black Noise”. Batu’s recent release Instability (2024) draws upon both personal experience and collective trauma – that of a diaspora subjected to the rigours of a prolonged “hostile environment”.
As Dubmorphology, Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart create installations and performances that incorporate elements of dub and musique concrète which functions as a binding agent for disparate visual material that is bound together by what might be dubbed “post-soul noise”.
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a writer, theorist, composer and filmmaker whose practice is mainly positioned within the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies. Born in Hanoi, she emigrated to the US during the Vietnam War, where she studied music composition, ethnomusicology and French literature. While teaching in Dakar, Senegal, she created her first film, Reassemblage (1982), which documents the lives of women in rural Senegal in a manner that she famously described as “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” the subjects she portrays. She has consistently challenged the traditional documentary format and has been deconstructing normative ways of looking at and listening to different cultures, whilst being dedicated to questioning totalizing systems of knowledge and categories of identity. She considers each work to exist as a “boundary event,” eluding labels such as documentary, fiction or experimental film, instead positioning her work between these designations. Alongside audiovisual works, she has published numerous essays and books on cinema, cultural politics, feminism and the arts. She is Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.