The Mall, London
Wed 2 Sept · 18:30
Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History As part of a film programme exploring themes connected to the exhibition She Flickered In and Out of History , artist Elisa Giardina Papa and filmmaker and film curator Valentina Manzoni have selected five short films: The Coast , Nöbetçi (The Watchman) , a so-called archive , Journey to a Land Otherwise Known , Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word . Together these films centre archipelagos and their histories of dispossession. Elisa Giardina Papa and Valentina Manzoni write: "Selected in dialogue with Elisa Giardina Papa’s She Flickered In and Out of History , the artists’ films assembled in No Island Is an Elsewhere consider how territories, their histories, and borders are drawn, archived, and ultimately contested. In Sohrab Hura’s The Coast , the shoreline becomes a threshold rather than a boundary, a point of release where distinctions between land and sea, self and other, temporarily dissolve. Ali Cherri’s Nöbetçi (The Watchman) , set on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, reflects on the politics of border recognition and the violence through which sovereignty and national identity are produced and policed. Onyeka Igwe and Laura Huertas Millán revisit colonial histories by confronting the very spaces through which practices of ordering and display take shape. Igwe’s a so-called archive examines the afterlives of British colonial film archives across Nigeria and Britain, while Huertas Millán’s Journey to a Land Otherwise Known reworks the languages of colonial exploration and ethnography through the constructed tropical “elsewhere” of a European greenhouse. Coco Fusco’s Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word returns these questions to the figure of the island. Filmed around Hart Island, New York’s public burial ground, the work unsettles the idea of the island as a space onto which exotic fantasies of reinvention are projected. Here, the island is neither empty nor outside history, but a geography marked by abandonment, death, and mourning. Together, the films ask us to encounter the island not as an elsewhere to be discovered and conquered, but as a place from which those very gestures might be questioned." Running order: The Coast, dir. Sohrab Hura, India 2020, 17 min. Nöbetçi (The Watchman), dir. Ali Cherri, Italy, France 2024, 26 min. a so-called archive, dir. Onyeka Igwe, Nigeria, United Kingdom 2020, 20 min. Journey to a Land Otherwise Known, dir. Laura Huertas Millán, Columbia, France 2011, 22 min. Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, dir. Coco Fusco, USA 2021, 12 min.
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.