Adrift: Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
Still from Every Rupture, 2020, HD video, Sasha Litvintseva, courtesy of the artist
Films Screening Online October 15-19, 2021
Live Q&A with Filmmakers and Programmers on October 17
Adrift is a residency program curated by Bahía Colectiva in collaboration with Los Angeles Filmforum where filmmakers connect with audiences and other practitioners by sharing a virtual archive of the process materials behind their film and video works. The materials showcased may include: texts, images, sounds, music, research notes, drawings, sculpture, found objects, film references, food recipes, news reports, text messages, accidental encounters, inspirations, conversations, arguments, dreams, etc. Existing in virtuality, Adrift is a borderless space for community building and broadening collective knowledge between filmmakers, artists, curators and enthusiasts.
We are excited to announce Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner as our artists in residence this week. Working collaboratively since 2017, their films, texts and lectures focus on the moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds. Their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. The archive of unseen materials will be accessible through Bahía Colectiva’s online platform. The film screening and discussion on the exposed archive will be streamed through Los Angeles Filmforum’s website.
Programmed by Bahía Colectiva.
Ticketing for Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner: Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, at
https://watch.eventive.org/aaaestrella/play/6147db12d746b7004cdeab7c
Total Runtime: 65 mins
Bio
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers, researchers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively in moving image, text, and lectures since 2017. Focussing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. Their combined and individual work has been presented globally: Berlinale, Rotterdam, Courtisane, Cinema Du Reel, RIDM, Ann Arbor, Alchemy and Guanajuato film festivals, Eye Film Museum, HKW Berlin, ICA London, CAC Vilnius, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Berlinische Galerie, MUMOK Vienna, Sonic Acts, Impakt Festival, Berlin Atonal and the Videobrasil, Moscow Young Art, Wroclaw Media Art, Venice Art and Venice Architecture biennales.
Curator Bio
Bahía Colectiva is a community of filmmakers who collaborate in cinematic practice and curation. In collectivity, we share our learnings, our inspirations, our successes, and our losses. Together, we experiment with cinematic languages and dismantle dominating modes of production. We look for forms of resistance through our exchange and the communal dissection of socio-political issues, and aim to take part in the work towards demarginalizing independent, essayistic and experimental cinema. Our work is driven by a process of questioning and centers on themes including, but not limited to: borders, immigration, trees, memory, ghosts, demons, forensics, ancestral connections, landscapes as protagonists, physical and virtual realities, the dark web, land vs territory, exile, decoloniality, gender, our mothers, our grandmothers and waves.
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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the California Community Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Still from Bilateria, 2019, HD video, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, courtesy of the artists
Bilateria
By Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
2019, Digital, color, sound, 13 min
An homage to Vilem Flusser’s text, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the video employs the Klein Bottle as a form with which to inhabit the interstices between organisms and environments. The Klein bottle is a mathematical shape that, like the Möbius strip, merges interior and exterior, beginning and end. Here the form is simultaneously a leaky vessel and a projection surface for an array of found video material. Organisms and environments are mapped onto a single metabolic pathway where inside and outside continuously fold into each other in rhythmic pulsations.
Still from Outside, 2017, HD video, Beny Wagner, courtesy of the artist
Outside
By Beny Wagner
Germany, Netherlands, 2019, Digital, color, sound, 14 min
Outside traverses two metabolic paths in the attempt to forge a reciprocal relationship between the two. Moving from the metabolism of the human body to the metabolism of waste infrastructures, the film creates an inverted exchange wherein the concealment of waste inside the human body turns to the concealment of the human body inside waste. The boundary that divides waste from production would seem to contain an underlying set of moral implications. The film considers these as situated somewhere between law enforcement and class structure as defined through labor positions.
Still from Every Rupture, 2020, HD video, Sasha Litvintseva, courtesy of the artist
Every Rupture
By Sasha Litvintseva
Russia, U.K., 2020, Digital, color, sound, 13 min
A cruise ship during the Brexit referendum. A colony of birds unwittingly killing the forest they call home. A world in a pandemic. Nothing is a closed system. In moving through these three ecologies the film questions what old images can mean after a rupture and offers a space of mourning.
Still from A Demonstration, 2020, HD video, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, courtesy of the artists
A Demonstration
By Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
Germany, Netherlands, U.K., 2020, Digital, color, sound, 25 min
“A Demonstration” is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. “A Demonstration” picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.