Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires

On the occasion of The Social Life of Film, D’EST launches a new series of zines accompanying the cycle Postsocialism as Method: Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires. The zine series is part of D’EST’s ongoing investigation into post-socialist, decolonial and queer feminist perspectives in moving-image cultures.

The evening brings together three chapters of the cycle:

Krёlex zentre’s Postsocialist Time Slips explores translocal queer imaginaries from Central Asia and asks how experiences of loss, silence, terror, resistance, compassion and love can lead to temporal and political slippages. The zine will be introduced through Gulzat Matisakova’s film My Mother’s Wound (2021), readings, and a conversation with curator Ulrike Gerhardt.

Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song] by Nhà Sàn Collective approaches Vietnamese pop and underground music as an archive of political desires and of social and ecological utopias linked to Vietnam’s 1990s Đổi Mới era and its diaspora. The launch includes Vũ T. Thu Hà’s queer cult film Shut Up White Boy (2002), readings, and a response by filmmaker and writer Angelika Nguyen.

Through Hader Halal [Present is Halal], Fehras Publishing Practices initiated a collective fabulation around their collection of Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1968–1990s), a trilingual journal promoting Afro-Asian solidarity and anti-colonial politics through literature and culture. Focusing, among others, on texts from and about Palestine and their connections across Afro-Asian geographies, the contributors trace interconnected hopes and liberation struggles through readings, a film collage by Omar Delnevo, poetry from Lotus, and songs by Fairuz.