Image Description: Close-up of a person’s face in profile, looking at the camera. Most of their face is covered by blurred green leaves, as if they were hiding. Their gaze is focused, almost nostalgic.
Image Description: Man and woman face each other, as if in conversation. The sun shines on them, casting their shadows onto a desert ground. They stand again an abandoned white building, without windows or doors. Wild nature stretched from the left side of the image and beyond.
An audio caption at the bottom of the screen reads: [Silence engulfs the air]
First offering presents:
Ouroboros dir. Basma Alsharif, 77’, France, Palestine, Belgium, 2017
‘Aching a pain for what has remained, refusing to disappear’ narrates Sky Hopinka in a first feature film by visual artist Basma Alsharif, Ouroboros. Through the symbolism of an ancient serpent eating its own tail as an invocation of the notions of eternity and cyclical time, this experimental documentary filmed by Ben Russell, is a homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope based on the eternal return. Following a man traversing five different landscapes in non-linear cycles, often in reverse, Alsharif creates a space outside of time, mediated by trauma and dislocation. Marking the end as the beginning and otherwise, the film asks how can we move forward when all is lost?
The screening will be accompanied by the live-streamed performance from Catherine Feliz performing their musical project PrieSTusSSY.
Catherine (b. 1992, New York, NY, Lenapehoking) is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person with roots in Ayiti, a.k.a Dominican Republic. Entangled across the mediums of sculptural installation, time based media, and book forms, their work explores earth-based pathways for disarming apparatuses of violence and their cycles of trauma. ‘Sound is an intuitive medium by which to receive and transmute tonics for healing my ancestral African (nations unknown cause colonialism), Taino, and Spanish lineages through the musical project PrieSTusSSY’ says Catherine.
This debut experimental album, cantos de àjẹ́, was created using analog synthesizers and digital editing during bedroom sessions. PrieSTusSSY is inspired by industrial noise and jîbaro songs alike. cantos de àjẹ́ keeps Taino and Yoruba creation stories alive with visceral visions of caves, wombs, vultures, and dark matter.
