EURO—VISION | Screening & Conversation
Wed 24 March 2021, 6pm - 8pm at Online
Join us for an evening of online screening and discussion curated by artist duo FRAUD as part of EURO–VISION, an artist led inquiry into the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies, commissioned by Arts Catalyst and Radar.
The event features artist FRAUD's Unclaimed latifundium: Eat more, fish further!, Rita Macedo’s Weeks of sand, months of ash, years of dust, Sajan Mani’s Tyger von Otherspur and René Vautier’s Afrique 50, and will be followed by a live discussion and Q&A with Sajan Mani and Rita Macedo.
Booking
This event is free but booking is essential. The event will take place via YouTube and Zoom, links for which will be emailed to attendees in advance of the event starting. Book here.
Programme
FRAUD: Unclaimed latifundium: Eat more, fish further! (2020)
Running Time: 7min
This video-piece collates several excerpts from NO-DO newsreels related to Spanish fishing and fisheries propaganda under Franco's regime. His agenda was partly disseminated in cinemas through programmes called ‘NO-DO’, an acronym for Noticiarios y Documentales (news and documentaries). NO-DOs were screened prior to films, usually lasting 30 minutes. These cinematographic preambles slowly constructed the myth of Francoist modernity, the latter including the aggressive development of industrial fisheries supported by the nostalgic backdrop of artisanal river fishing.
Rita Macedo: Weeks of sand, months of ash, years of dust (2020)
Running time: 19 minutes
Through the form of a personal yet distant essay film, Weeks of sand, months of ash, years of dust introduces Macao, a former Portuguese colony handed over back to China in 1999. Having partly grown up in Macao, the filmmaker revisits the learned history of this territory from a Portuguese perspective, addressing post-imperial forms of disavowed political affect alongside the progressing dementia of her own mother.
Carefully positioning personal loss next to reflections on colonial narratives, the film ponders questions of looking back into a troubled past from the instability of a presently self-erasing memory.
"I look at you and I see your gaze devouring the world, but I have no idea what world is being devoured".
Sajan Mani: Tyger von Otherspur (2020)
Running time: 25 minutes
Recycling selected visuals from the thrice produced film Das Indische Grabmal / The Indian Tomb (1921, 1938, 1959) and its second part Der Tiger von Eschnapur / The Tiger of Eschnapur (1921, 1938, 1959), Sajan Mani rediscovers Indianness as an ambiguous cultural construct made in Europe and assembled in India.
Born in Kerala, South India and based in Berlin, Germany, Sajan has been exploring the question: “Are you really Indian, we have seen Indians on TV and they are fairer?” Unleashing his quotidian angst in answer, the artist carefully selects the architectural blunders, cultural appropriation and racial coalescence of exoticization and othering embodied in the film and makes a potpourri of visceral images with videotexts.
René Vautier: Afrique 50 (1950)
Running time: 17 minutes
In 1950, René Vautier was sent by the French government to make a documentary that showed the positive effects of colonisation. The result was Afrique 50, a short film shot in West Africa, highlighting the negative impacts of French imperialist exploitation. Now widely cited as France’s first anti-colonialist film, it was banned in the country for forty years (until 1990) and Vautier received a prison sentence.
Afrique 50 received the gold medal at the 1955 Warsaw festival.
"I shot Afrique 50 between 1949 and 1950 in French West Africa. From the start of filming, I came up against the prohibitions of the French authorities: The film was condemned to destruction by the colonial court of Bobo-Dioulasso, the negatives, seized at the headquarters of the Ligue de l'Enseignement in Paris, were destroyed and I was sentenced to one year in prison. Yet I managed to save a third of the reels shot to make Africa 50." — René Vautier
Artists
Project Partners
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