COMBAT BREATHING: THE TIME BENEATH THE CONCRETE

“I’m in jail out here, I’m in jail in there.” –Hugh Masekela

The prison is the institutionalization of a logic central to the systemic formation and reproduction of racial capitalism and colonialism. It remains the primary form in modernity through which states (either under ostensibly opposing but in truth co-constituting liberal democratic and fascistic guises) manage surplus populations, extract surplus value, break social and kinship relations, and utilize the captive body to control not only those within its walls, but also those on the outside. This film program borrows its title – and something of its poetic and conceptual grammar – from the writing of scholar Nasser Abourahme, who in his book “The Time Beneath the Concrete” brings the prison into immediate relation with the colony and the refugee camp in Palestine. Extending his analysis to the ghetto and the reservation within the U.S. context as additional sites of enclosure, this program with works by Alex Johnston, Sky Hopinka, and Larry Clark attends not only to the violence of imprisonment, but also to the ways such sites have and continue to be made into focal points of struggle by those whose lives they seek to crush and mold. What emerges is a transnational, historically grounded, and situated account of the carceral system that traces the prison’s many reinventions while insisting that the project of enclosure, however violently renewed, is never complete.

Alex Johnston EVIDENCE OF THE EVIDENCE (2018, 20 min, DCP) The 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion remains a defining moment of radical resistance – not only in the history of prison struggles and the American anti-racist and anti-state movement, but also for international struggles against enclosure and carcerality. The state’s retaking of the prison on the fourth and final day of the uprising, described as the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War, remains an open wound. EVIDENCE OF THE EVIDENCE examines this fraught and contested history through a granular interrogation of the archival record. Drawing on previously unseen video footage recorded by a state trooper during the four-day rebellion, the film offers a visceral, ground-level account of the events at Attica while tracing how they were simultaneously mediated and narrativized through the images being produced. Recalling Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s seminal VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION (1992), the film considers the manifold roles moving images play in producing history and memory – as well as in their erasure and destruction. At a moment of escalating racism and authoritarianism across the West, when prisons and other regimes of enclosure remain indispensable to imperial domination, EVIDENCE OF THE EVIDENCE emerges as a timely and urgent work of agitprop and media criticism.

Sky Hopinka SUNFLOWER SIEGE ENGINE (2022, 12 min, DCP) The Occupation of Alcatraz (1969-71) marked a historic moment of indigenous resistance in the United States. Led by Indians of All Tribes (IAT), eighty-nine Native activists and their supporters occupied the abandoned federal prison island, demanding self-determination, tribal sovereignty, and land rights, forcefully recentering the question of indigenous land against the settler-colonial foundations of the U.S. empire. Although the occupation also brought to the fore the many unresolved contradictions within pan-Indian political discourse and organizing, particularly around the contested meanings of sovereignty and indigeneity, its memory and legacy continue to offer a vital site of reflection and empowerment in struggles for land and decolonization. In SUNFLOWER SIEGE ENGINE, distinct moments and scales of resistance are collapsed and woven together: documentation of the Alcatraz occupation; the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of ancestors; and intimate reflections on inhabiting one’s body in the present while looking back upon historical struggles and their continuities, excesses, a