Mar 6, 2020 – May 9, 2021
Beyond the World’s End
See how art can help us think creatively about combating climate change and social injustices.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020,
7pm - 9pm
Free
Join curator TJ Demos for a virtual introduction and (re)screening of films originally shown last month at the Del Mar Theater that seek to offer points of light in a dark world.
How are visual artists imagining radical futures? How can the traditions of oppressed peoples become the foundation of the future? How can social justice and ecosystems flourish going forward? How can we escape our current climate of catastrophe and anxiety and instead transform the present into a radical future by asking what is “not-yet”?
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Shown in conjunction with our exhibition Beyond the World’s End, this three-part film series is part of a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series. Directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, and including the collaboration of UCSC PhD Mellon fellows Isabelle Carbonell and Chessa Adsit-Morris, it brings leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz to discuss what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, and how we can cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU
6:50pm – Screening opens. Space is limited to the first 100 people to sign into the Zoom meeting.
7:00pm – Welcome from MAH Staff, followed by an introduction from guest curator TJ Demos.
7:15pm – Film program will begin, followed by a 20 min open conversation on zoom.
The Zoom link will be sent out at 2pm & 6:40pm on event day to all that RSVP'd via Eventbrite. If you have any questions please email info@santacruzmah.org.
Mar 6, 2020 – May 9, 2021
See how art can help us think creatively about combating climate change and social injustices.
The Last Angel of History, 1995 (45min)
Black Audio Film Collective (UK)
One of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, this cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, slavery, cultural alienation, and otherness. The analysis is rooted in an exploration of the cultural works of Afrofuturist artists, such as funkmaster George Clinton and his Mothership Connection, Sun Ra’s use of extra- terrestrial iconography, and the connections drawn between these issues in the writings of black science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler.
Until The Quiet Comes, 2012 (3.49 min)
Kahlil Joseph (US)
An amalgam of the work of director Kahlil Joseph, composer Flying Lotus and dancer and choreographer Storyboard P, this video wordlessly narrates the ubiquitous and rarely spotlighted story of urban violence, resilience, community and creativity. While the killings of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Trayvon Martin provoked temporary national attention in the US, ultimately the incident of a murdered Black man (or the countless who are doomed to be imprisoned despite their intelligence, creativity, talent, kindness or youth) continues to remain overlooked—or worse, recognized and accepted as an unalterable fact.
Time Travel Experiments, 2017 (9.03 min)
Black Quantum Futurism (shot by Bob Sweeney) (US)
Time Travel Experiments draws on the time travel manual embedded in the novel Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), a book of interconnected chrono-migration stories written and self-published by Rasheedah Phillips in 2014, with a soundscape created by Moor Mother, who together form Black Quantum Futurism. BQF is a transformative approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into, and enliven, possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. BQF’s work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.
Wakening, 2013 (9 mins)
Danis Goulet (Cree/Métis)
In the near future of the Indigenous sci-fi film Wakening, the environment has been destroyed and society suffocates under a brutal military occupation, not too dissimilar to the colonial present. A lone Cree wanderer Weesakechak (the benevolent cultural hero and trickster of the Cree tribe) searches an urban war zone to find the ancient and dangerous Weetigo (the terrifying cannibal spirit, and potential accomplice, of Cree traditional lore) to help fight against the occupiers.
Coordinates, 2018 (6.37min)
Woodbine Collective (US)
This short essay film from the Queens, New York-based anarchist collective Woodbine addresses the state of contemporary catastrophism, a planet increasingly screen-captured and AI obsessed racing toward extinction. “Against the end of the world,” this is the time for mass revolt and the art of creating new modes of existence, Woodbine claims, dedicating themselves to radical models of futurity based within present collective struggle.
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