Experimentations 18: Science of the Word
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets, By Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 18
Science of the Word
Sunday, February 16, 2025, 7:30 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057
In person: Jheanelle Brown and filmmakers to be confirmed
Tickets: $10 general, $5 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
https://link.dice.fm/s866f44bb406
Aimé Césaire, the late writer, politician, and co-founder of the Négritude movement, proposed a new hybrid science in 1946 — a science of the Word. He argued that the study of the Word (mythoi, a poetics of knowledge) will condition the study of nature (bios). Philosopher Sylvia Wynter, inspired by Césaire’s idea, stated that humans must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we have known and understood it. Can science deal with and make sense of the human predicament, as Wynter calls it? How can scholars, artists, scientists, and the general public reconcile the tension between scientific and technological advancement, the earth-centered mandate of indigenous wisdom, and righting historical legacies colonial violence?
Curated by Jheanelle Brown.
Jheanelle Brown, Los Angeles Filmforum board member is Project Director and Curator, leading project management, offering scholarly and curatorial guidance to project scholars, developing several film programs, developing the overall curatorial framework of the film series, and serving as co-editor of the resulting publication. Jheanelle is a film curator/programmer, lecturer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts. She has co-curated Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today and the traveling film showcase Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories from 2018 to 2019.
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world. Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe. The series will include eighteen screenings between September 2024 and February 2025, with films and digital works from 1874 to today from around the world, multiple guests, panels and wonderful collaborations that will reveal the possibilities and circumstances of cinema in this realm. See more at www.filmforumexperimentations.org
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is among more than 70 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art.
Major support for Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is provided by the Getty Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional Support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
内共生 (Inside the Shared Life)
内共生 (Inside the Shared Life)
By Erin Espelie
USA, 2017, HD video & 16mm, color, sound, 9:13
This film combines sounds of marine life with moving images of the circulatory system, life at different scales, and Lynn Margulis's words on accepted versus iconoclastic science. She talks also about time, how the new is privileged over the true. This film has a captivating slowness. Among other things, it seems to be about epistemology, how we know or don't know. - Dorion Sagan for Vdrome
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets
By Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys
USA, 2017, digital, color, sound, 9:45
Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The video is an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice.
The Fire This Time
The Fire This Time
By Mariam Ghani
USA, 2022, digital, color, sound, 26:08
A kaleidoscopic trip through the intertwined histories of pandemics, riots, and colonial violence. An archive constantly haunted by its possible collapse. Featuring the voices of science journalist Sonia Shah, poet and literary scholar Anjuli Raza Kolb, medical anthropologist Christos Lynteris, epidemiologist Keiji Fukuda, economist William A. Darity Jr., and historians Nayan Shah, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Nancy Tomes.
JIÍBIE
JIÍBIE
By Laura Huertas Millán
2019, digital, color, sound, 24:46
Conversations are rituals. The Murui Muina, Amazonian andColombian first nation, have particularly elevated this art andits political implications through the ritual de la palabra dulce,a collective conversation allowed by the use of the coca plantpowder, calledmambeorjiibie. During the ritual, the mostpressing political questions are discussed collectively: subjectssuch as neo-colonialism, ecology, activism but also questionsof family and intimate life are considered.In this film, the fabrication of the coca powder in preparationfor the ritual unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. The cocaplant is neither a product nor an object, but a person, a sacredinterlocutor, a kin, the beating heart of a collective body.
Dust to Data
Dust to Data
By Larry Achiampong and David Blandy
UK, 2021, digital, color, sound, 15:25
Dust to Data tracks through the colonial history of archaeology, to current parallels in the data mining of DNA and social media image banks. Working with the Department of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy interrogate the construction of a ‘civilisation’ and its racist ‘origin’ stories that define people into categories: some as human and neutral, others as non-human and/or abnormal.
In the film, Achiampong and Blandy employ motifs, such as the recurring gleaming pyramid as an image of order and hard simplicity, and 3D models of Australopithecine skulls (extinct close relatives of humans who lived around two million years ago). The film also features a fragment of a letter from William Du Bois, author of the seminal book about race and society The Souls of Black Folk, rebuking one of the pioneers of modern archaeology, William Petrie.
Dust to Data explores how science has been used to justify prejudice. This can be found in the origins of archeology, exposing the archaic mathematical tactics employed by Petrie to justify his own assertions about white supremacy. Although debunked by his contemporaries, Petrie embraced eugenics - the practice of altering or ‘improving’ the human species through selective breeding - as a tool for social control. This view was integral to the birth of archaeology, and its pseudo-scientific legacy still permeates fractious assumptions within the field and in wider culture today.