COMBAT BREATHING: POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY, PART 2: AMUSSU

The promises and outcomes of modernity – nation-states and capitalist economies, along with their alienating and extractivist logics and infrastructures – have produced immeasurable catastrophic damage to peoples and living environments across racial and class lines. Throughout their reign, these violent systems have not simply been justified by the values of universality, individual freedom, and liberal secular democracy; they have been produced through them, eliminating and exploiting all that does not measure up or conform to their suffocating parameters.

Central to modernity, and to modern discourse more broadly, is the capture of technology as a transhistorical practice and its transformation into a supposedly modern conception governed by the logic of progress. “Postscripts of Modernity” is a film program that engages these catastrophic and violent legacies while demonstrating how film, itself a modern technology, might visualize and facilitate other social relations – in other words, how existing at-hand technologies, currently governed by the reign of capital, might be appropriated and subverted to achieve ends nonsynchronous with their intended uses. The works by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Nadir Bouhmouch disavow modernity’s violence not by returning to an imagined precolonial or precapitalist past, but by insisting on a kind of crude presentism. Their diverse aesthetic interventions within the political contexts they respectively work in embrace whatever tools are currently available within modernity as material for the struggle against it.

Nadir Bouhmouch AMUSSU 2019, 100 min, DCP The people of the Moroccan village of Imider may live alongside the largest silver mine in Africa, but they have reaped few of its benefits. The mine’s encroachment upon their communal life has rendered their existence increasingly precarious, contributing to water scarcity and threatening the community’s almond orchards, oasis, and traditional ways of life. In 2011, the villagers responded by shutting down a pipeline supplying water to the mine and establishing a protest camp around it, inaugurating a struggle that would last to this day. Rather than centering scenes of confrontation, arrest, intimidation, and police violence, which are all part of the fight against the infrastructures of this pipeline, AMUSSU turns its attention to the everyday life, resilience, and creativity of those who sustain the struggle. Conceived as a participatory filmic project, AMUSSU was produced through collective decision-making guided by the community’s Agraw protocol, while community members not only learned to operate film equipment but also participated directly in filming. In this sense, the film constitutes both a formal and methodological intervention into the practice of radical independent cinema. Years after the initial uprising, the protest camp has evolved into a small, largely self-sufficient community, where music, theater, poetry, and other artistic practices have emerged as a revolutionary vernacular. These forms of expression do more than accompany the struggle, as they become part of its infrastructure, sustaining collective memory, solidarity, and an ongoing demand for land, water, and a life lived with dignity.

Introduced by Alma Chaouachi.

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