Thursday April 18th hours 18:15-21:15
at Sale Docks (Magazzini del Sale)
Dorsoduro 265, 30123, Venice
free entry
with Filipa Cesar, Oliver Ressler, Massimiliano Mollona in the framework og Cinema as Assembly platform iniciated by Institute of Radical Imagination
In On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (2022) the late Bruno Latour and Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, sketch an ecological manifesto, which envisions the coming together of different class constituencies against the toxic effect of planetary capitalism. A similar argument is made by Matthew Huber for whom the emergence of a transnational alliance of energy workers, is a fundamental step towards ecological justice.
But how would such intersectional class alliance look like in the real world? And can suchemphasis on ‘class’ and ‘justice’ avoid being too narrow or Eurocentric, and capture not just the structural relation between pollution and colonialism (Liboiron, 2023) but also differentunderstandings of the environment, not just as a precious resource, but as a living being?
Departing from Fanon’s claim that all decolonial struggles are as much material as they are struggles for self-representation, this workshop interrogates how cinema addresses ecological justice, in conversation with filmmakers Oliver Ressler and Filipa César.
The two filmmakers’ long-established engagement with environmentalism and the issue of political representation, follow slightly different strategies. Ressler, directly engages with specific environmental issues, collaborating with diverse climate justice movements and communities, and opening a space of poetic prefiguration of grassroots political processes; César casts a broader view of ‘the environment’, intended as a polyphonic space loaded with political, ancestral, material, and poetic resonances, developing long-term collaborations with the community of Malafo, in Guinea Bissau, whereby filming is a process of consolidating relatedness – a form of cine-kinship.
These two approaches interrogate in different ways the power of film as tool of counter-information and of production of new imaginaries of struggle.
Film excerpts from Oliver Ressler’ following films will be screened:
- Ancestral Future Rising, 20 min., 2023
- The Desert Lives, 55 min., 2022
- Not Sinking, Swarming, 37 min., 2021
Film excerpts from Filipa César’s following films will be screened:
- Resonance Spiral,92 min., 2024.
- Mangrove School,35 min., 2022
- Spell Reel,96 min., 2017
Filipa César iBerlin-based artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the fictional aspects of documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving images. Her praxis takes media as a means to expand and expose counter narratives of resistance to historicism. Since 2011, César has been looking into the origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau as part of the African Liberation Movement and its imaginaries and cognitive potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda. She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15) both organised by Arsenal—Berlin. Selected film festivals include Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Curtas Vila do Conde; Forum Expanded-Berlinale; IFFR, Rotterdam, and Cinéma du Réel. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: SFMOMA; São Paulo Biennial; Manifesta 8, Cartagena; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstwerke, Berlin; NBK, Berlin; Hordaland Art Center, Bergen; Futura, Prague; Khiasma, Paris; Tensta konsthall, Spånga; Mumok, Vienna; MoMA, New York; Harvard Film Museum, Boston.
Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; and Cultural Centre of Belgrade. Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec (2014), Helsinki (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST). Ressler has completed forty-two films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013. In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and he is the first prize winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016. For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011-2016).2019–2023 Ressler has directed Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Configurations of the project were solo exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2022); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2022); Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (2022); LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (2023); The Showroom, London (2023).
