COMBAT BREATHING: INSURGENT POIESIS

Marking the opening of “Combat Breathing Vol. II”, this film program brings together contemporary artworks that emerge from commitments to or embeddedness within political struggles and streams of anti-imperialist thought. Here, moving images function as social productions made for collective engagement, transforming mere viewership into situated modes of cinematic “spect-actor-ship,” to borrow from theorist Augusto Boal. Taken together, these films, informed by various experimental and militant traditions of image-making, model the inseparability of and dynamic correspondences between form and content. Titled “Insurgent Poiesis”, the program simultaneously proposes the moving image as a means for agitational ideological dissemination and a space for poetic invention: a form capable of circulating ideas while remaining open to a multiplicity of meanings, unexpected encounters, and unbounded experimentation. Refusing the fiction of aesthetic autonomy, the film program begins with the recognition that all artistic and cultural productions are ideologically conditioned. The selected films by Tony Cokes, Filipa César, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Shiva Addanki, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Camila Galaz figure the political and philosophical entwinement of poiesis and revolutionary activity: bringing something into existence that did not exist before, producing “a world where many worlds fit – un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” by any means necessary.

Tony Cokes EVIL.35: CARLIN / OWNERS (2012, 8 min, DCP) EVIL.35: CARLIN / OWNERS, like many of Tony Cokes’s recent works, is structured by a simple formal operation: the pairing of found text and found music. These audiovisual combinations, attuned to the historical and ideological convergences and divergences of their source materials, generate further meanings. In this work, Cokes pairs an excerpt from a characteristically cantankerous screed by the late stand-up comedian George Carlin with two songs by the British agit-prop post-punk group Gang of Four. Carlin’s words directly confront the contradictions of liberal capitalist democracy – the absurd state of affairs whereby a small ruling class owns and controls everything, from government officials to the workforce, despite the juridical pretense of universal political equality – while Gang of Four’s rebellious songs allude to the Irish anti-colonial struggle and the commodification of pleasure. Taken together, and aided by Cokes’s cinematic choreography of sound, background color, and text graphics, audiences are engaged as critical readers capable of piercing through neoliberal capitalism’s false naturalizations.

Filipa César TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES (2015, 30 min, DCP) TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES belongs to a body of work by Filipa César concerned with the conditions and aftermaths of the anti-colonial struggle of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) against the Portuguese between 1963-74. Departing from the concept of the “Liberated Zones” – used to describe areas freed from colonial domination, and organized and managed by PAIGC guerrilla militants – the film partially reconstructs the memory of these autonomous spaces via archival documents and the contemporary testimonies of four Swedes (diplomat Folke Löfgren, filmmaker Lennart Malmer, filmmaker and psychologist Ingela Romare, and politician Birgitta Dahl), all of whom visited Guinea in the early 1970s. Deeply reflexive of the aesthetic and technological mediation of these insurgent histories, the documents and statements are performatively presented by and visually projected onto a young character in a dark room whose image is, in turn, multiplied as an infinite regression through César’s use of experimental optical effects. Through these inventive means, César’s work opens up struggles as contradictory sites of antagonism and solidarity while projecting the radioactive remnants of liberationist practice i