SIB V – Seems like everything surrounding you

This special edition of Seeing Is Believing is an invitation to surrender to the rhythmic flow of three films that corrupt a fixed point of view in favour of the transient gaze.

Set and produced in different geographical locations and time periods, the selected works move through the domestic, the public, and the inner life, driven by a mode of sensing rather than witnessing. Through the rhythmic progression of bodies, voices, and surroundings that materialise in passing, the moving image becomes a surface that is haunted but never owned by the desire to fully contain what it captures.

Screening:

La Chambre, Chantal Akerman, 1972, 11′, colour, silent
Parsi, Eduardo Williams in collaboration with Mariano Blatt, 2018, 23’8”, colour, sound
Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off, James Richards, 2011, 16’15”, colour, sound

All films will be shown in OV with English subtitles.

In Chantal Akerman’s iconic short, La Chambre (1972), we follow the scrutinising gaze of two 360° tracking shots that describe the space of a room as a succession of still lives: furniture and the clutter of a small apartment are disrupted by the sole presence of a young woman, Akerman herself, staring back at us.

Parsi (2018), a collaboration between filmmaker Eduardo Williams and poet Mariano Blatt features 360° footage shot by young individuals within Bissau’s queer community who take us on a spry journey through the city’s neighbourhoods. The video footage runs parallel to the driving force of the film’s hypnotic audio track: a recital of Blatt’s cumulative poem, No es (‘It isn’t’), whose constant writing process extends over a lifetime.

Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off (2011) is concerned with processes of dissolution and exchange, asking what happens along the frayed edges of subjectivity as it meets, or attempts to meet another. The film stalks liminal states of exhaustion and sleep. We see bedrooms and the paraphernalia of intoxication, alongside X-rays, skin and globular liquids; sequences which build a heightened sense of inside and outside, the tender and the forensic, the sensual image and its abstraction.

Seems like everything surrounding you is presented upon invitation by Xanadu and Carrick Bell on the occasion of the opening of Berlin Project Space Festival 22 with a night of artists’ moving image featuring screenings curated by 6×6 project, Xanadu, and Videoart at Midnight, and anorak.

Xanadu is a new space initiated for the presentation of artists’ moving image work. With a special focus on working with BIPOC, FLINT*, Queer artists and curators, Xanadu draws on the history and approaches of microcinemas, which foreground idiosyncratic, varied curatorial approaches and flexible, responsive programming.

Special thanks to Xanadu and Carrick Bell for the invitation; the Chantal Akerman Foundation and Céline Brouwez for facilitating the presentation of La Chambre.

Seeing Is Believing is a monthly screening and conversation series dedicated to artists’ moving image. The programme is curated by Lukas Ludwig and Johanna Markert and realised with the kind support of Anorak e. V. members.