Undoing The Whole Thing, the kick-off event of The Futurism is Ours, is about breaking down and building back up again. Featuring short work by Barbara Hammer, Miatta Kawinzi, and Joey Carducci, the program reflects on the filmmakers’ experiences working within and against cinematic lineages through their exploration of selfhood, queerness, and alternative social realities.
Bedtime Stories I, II, III, (Hammer, 1988) at once playful and poetic, messes with the tools of digital processing--color, saturation, frame rate, resolution--to create an intellectually and erotically charged “other” space. Hammer demonstrates both the limits and possibilities of her filmmaking instruments and, in doing so, evokes longing for another world. In Evidentiary Bodies (Hammer, 2018), that longing persists. Made 30 years after Bedtime Stories, the piece began as a three-screen installation. Hammer collapses the material and immaterial conditions--of celluloid, space, and time--that shape and wear on the aging body. For Hammer, the body is evidence of a decaying present, as well as a hopeful, re-imagined future.
Miatta Kawinzi, the 2018 recipient of the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores internal and external landscapes as sites of re-imagining. sweat/tears/sea (Kawinzi, 2017), through a series of poetic and rhetorical questions, chips away at the confines of language and letters, while Art M.B.F. (Kawinzi, 2013) breaks down sound and rhythm. Oscillating in tone and serious in critique, Kawinzi’s work interrogates both “formalism and form as ism,” and suggests possibilities for new ways of navigating time, meaning, communication, and artistic practice.
Joey Carducci, a longtime friend and collaborator of Barbara Hammer, shot Generations (Hammer & Carducci, 2010) with Hammer during the dwindling days of Astroland in Coney Island. Hammer and Carducci edited the same footage separately, splicing together their pieces in tender, cross-generational dialogue. Carducci encourages viewers to connect his film materials with the aging body, as well as with the mentorships that have shaped--and continue to shape--the present generation of moving image artists. At one point we watch as Barbara Hammer uses a grease pencil (designed for 16mm film editing) to circle the age spots on her face.
Through combined digital and analog technologies and various modes of cinematic expression, each of these filmmakers renders cinema a space through which to examine and reconstruct the self, the body, and the present moment. Together, they tell a story of queer bodies and image-making, of undoing the whole thing before building it anew.
Kawinzi and Carducci will be present for a post-screening discussion.
Bedtime Stories I, II, III (Barbara Hammer, 1988, 33 min. Digital file)Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix and the Barbara Hammer Estate
Evidentiary Bodies (Barbara Hammer, 2018, 9:30 min. Digital file)Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix and the Barbara Hammer Estate
sweat/tears/sea (Miatta Kawinzi, 2017, 6 min. Digital file)Courtesy of the artist
Art M.B.F. (Miatta Kawinzi, 2013, 4 min. Digital File)Courtesy of the artist
Generations (Barbara Hammer and Joey Carducci, 2010, 30 min. 16mm)16mm print courtesy of the artist
