Part of Scorching Suns, Rising Seas, an environmental-justice programme curated by Radical Ecology and presented in partnership with Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, LIFT 2022 and We Are Lewisham.
SCHEDULE & FILMS
12pm
Tabita Rezaire, Sorry for Real, 2017
16:57 min, colour, sound
Tabita Rezaire, Sorry for Real, 2017 (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Sorry for Real is a video animation by artist Tabita Rezaire in which a text-to-speech (white, male) reading voice declaims a 16 minute-long apology, beat by beat, of all of the devastations of racism, settler-colonialism and ongoing extraction, on behalf of the “Western World”. An anonymous, robotic caller performs a seemingly infinite tirade, while an exchange of text messages (“WTF??”, “Thanks for the speech, but…”, “I want his battery to die! Please!”) reveal the performativity of acts of white apology in the face of ongoing and blatant structural white supremacy.
12:17pm
Forensic Architecture, if toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?, 2021
35:03 min, colour, sound
Forensic Architecture, if toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?, 2021 (still). Courtesy of the artists
In the US state of Louisiana, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a heavily industrialised ‘Petrochemical Corridor’ overlays a territory formerly known as ‘Plantation Country’. When slavery was abolished in 1865, more than five hundred sugarcane plantations lined both sides of the lower Mississippi River; today, more than two hundred of those sites are occupied by some of the United States’ most polluting petrochemical facilities. Residents of the majority-Black ‘fenceline’ communities that border those facilities breathe some of the most toxic air in the country and suffer some of the highest rates of cancer, along with a wide variety of other serious health ailments. They call their homeland ‘Death Alley’. Here, environmental degradation and cancer risk manifest as the by-products of colonialism and slavery. if toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down? traces Forensic Architecture’s investigation into toxicity in post-plantation landscapes.
In partnership with RISE St James. Full credits here
12:52pm
Sumayya Vally, Ingesting Architectures, 2014, 2015, 2020, ongoing
13:15 min, colour, sound
Sumayya Vally, Ingesting Architectures, 2014, 2015, 2020, ongoing (still). Courtesy of the artist
Architecture is a condensation and an overlaying of times, stories, field notes, excerpts, archaeologies and forensic samplings. This reflection on atmospheric violence weaves and traces together excerpts and discursive evidence of the inextricable connections between geographies, history, forces of labour, race and class struggles, capitalism, toxicity and climate change.
1:05pm
Karrabing Film Collective, Night Time Go, 2017
31:10 min, colour, sound
Karrabing Film Collective, Night Time Go, 2017 (still). Courtesy of the artists
Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War using truck, train, and rifle and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of this ancestral journey but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection driving out settlers from the Top End of Australia. Mixing drama and humour, history and satire, Night Time Go pushes subaltern history beyond the bounds of settler propriety.
Maria Thereza Alves, To See the Forest Standing, 2017 (still). Courtesy of the artist.
In July and August of 2017, Alves interviewed 34 agroforestry agents who are members of AMAAIAC in Acre, Brazil. AMAAIAC's mandate is to preserve forested areas on Indigenous lands and provide training for more efficient agro-forestry methods, particularly for areas which have been heavily deforested and destroyed by settlers. The forest agents are elected by their community and are responsible through community consensus for managing reforestation, sustainable farming, overseeing animal life, the protection of water sources, environmental education programmes, promoting biodiversity of fauna and flora and caring for archaeological sites. Some of the reservations, particularly those where major highways were planned to deliberately divide up reservations lands, have continuous problems and there AMAAIAC agents have the added task of protecting the land from the destruction of gold miners, cattle ranchers, hunters, loggers, monoculture plantations and settlers. The forest agents are not recognised by the Brazilian government and receive no regular income for their labour, and yet they are the front line for ensuring the possibility that Brazil and the larger world might have a future. As Poá Katukina, the president of AMAAIAC, says, “We have dedicated ourselves to seeing that the forest stands.” The films selected here are interviews with AMAAIAC members Poã Katukina, Yaká Shawãdawa, Pya ko and Busã Huni Kuin. Presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.
2:12pm
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, The Teaching of the Hands, 2020
46:11 min, colour, sound
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, The Teaching of the Hands, 2020 (still). Courtesy of the artists
In The Teaching of the Hands, artists Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas synthesise their research to create an experimental meditation on the region’s histories of colonisation, migration, and ecological disaster. The piece, narrated by Chairman Mancias, layers oral histories, speculative reenactments, observational and found footage, weaving together scenes from the present day to thousands of years in the past. The Teaching of the Hands highlights the environmental memories and divergent cosmologies within Somi Se’k, where both Indigenous and settler knowledge coexist. Presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.
2:58pm
Sky Hopinka, maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, 2020
80:21 min, colour, sound
Sky Hopinka, maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, 2020 (still). Courtesy of the artist
maɬni follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier's wanderings through each of their worlds as they wander through and contemplate the afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, their stories are departures from the Chinookan origin of death myth, with its distant beginning and circular shape.
4:19pm
Manthia Diawara, An Opera of the World, 2018
70:00 min, colour, sound
Manthia Diawara, An Opera of the World, 2020 (still). Courtesy of the artist and Maumaus, Lisbon
An Opera of the World is based on the African opera, Bintou Were, A Sahel Opera, which recounts an eternal migration drama. The Bintou Were opera, filmed on location in Bamako in 2007, serves as a mirror for Diawara to build an aesthetic and reflexive story, through song and dance, about the current and yet timeless drama of migration between North and South, and the ongoing refugee crises. The film ponders on the realities of cultural encounters through the concepts of métissage and hybridity. The success and limits of fusing African and European perspectives are tested by interlacing performances from the Bintou Were opera, past and present archival footage of migrations, classic European arias, and interviews with European and African intellectuals, artists and social activists – including Alexander Kluge, Fatou Diome, Nicole Lapierre and Richard Sennett.
BIOGRAPHIES
Maria Thereza Alves (Brazil, 1961) has participated in the Toronto Biennale, Manifesta 12 and 7, the 32nd and 29th São Paulo Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale and in dOCUMENTA (13). She has had a solo exhibit at MUAC in Mexico City and a survey exhibit at CAAC in Seville. Alves will be participating in the upcoming Sydney Biennale. Alves is the recipient of the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018. In 1978, as a member of the International Indian Treaty Council, Alves made an official presentation of human rights abuses of the indigenous population of Brazil at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Alves was one of the founding members of the Green Party of Sao Paulo in 1987. Her book, Recipes for Survival has recently been published by University of Texas Press.
Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, video, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. She has held residencies at the DAAD in Berlin and The Huntington in San Marino; received funding from Creative Capital and Prince Claus Fund; participated in the Chicago Architecture, Sao Paulo, Venice, Berlin, and Whitney Biennials; recent solo shows include ICA Boston and MCA Chicago. She is a 2020-2022 Inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, and Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School.
David de Rozas (b. 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist and award-winning filmmaker whose practice merges experimental documentary and contemporary art forms, revisiting and relocating the politics of memory. De Rozas films have been screened in festivals and film curated series worldwide, such as Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, and Kassel DocFest. His recent film ‘GIVE’ was nationally broadcasted on POV, and won Best Short Documentary at FullFrame and Best Experimental at the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. He is a 2021 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Manthia Diawara (born1953) is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar and art historian. Diawara holds the title of University Professor at New York University, where he is Director of the Institute of African American Affairs. Much of Diawara’s research has been in the field of Black cultural studies. Diawara has contributed significantly to the study of Black film. In 1992, Indiana University Press published his African Cinema: Politics & Culture and in 1993, Routledge published a volume he edited, titled Black American Cinema. A filmmaker himself, Diawara has written and directed a number of films. His 1998 book In Search of Africa is an account of his return to his childhood home of Guinea and was published by Harvard University Press. Diawara is a founding editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture and politics dedicated to work that engages contemporary Black concerns.
Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence. FA’s investigations employ cutting edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration. Findings from our investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, cultural institutions, international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.
Sky Hopinka (b.1984, United States) is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. Working as a filmmaker, teacher, curator and artist, his practice explores the place of myth in a contemporary Indigenous world. maɬni is presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.
Karrabing Film Collective is an Indigenous media group who use filmmaking to interrogate the conditions of inequality for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and retain connections to land and their ancestors. Composed of some thirty extended family members whose ancestral lands stretch across saltwaters and inlands and the Italian Alps, Karrabing together create films using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Night Time Go is presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.
Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself in human form. Her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and soon to be farmer is all geared towards manifesting the divine in herself and beyond. Embracing digital, corporeal and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle the colonial wounds and energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Rezaire’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality merge as fertile ground to nourish visions for connection and emancipation. Through screen interfaces and healing circles, her offerings aim to nurture our collective growth and expand our capacity for togetherness. The artist is based near Cayenne in French Guiana, where she is currently studying Agriculture and birthing AMAKABA – her vision for collective healing in the Amazonian forest. Her offerings have been shared widely – Centre Pompidou, Paris; MASP, São Paulo; Serpentine, London; MoMa, NY; New Museum, NY; Gropius Bau, Berlin; MMOMA, Moscow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; ICA London; V&A London; National Gallery Denmark; The Broad LA; MoCADA, NY; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, Paris – and presented for international biennales in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kochi, Athens, and Berlin. Sorry for Real is presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.
Sumayya Vally is the Founder and Principal of the interdisciplinary research and architecture studio, Counterspace. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Vally is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1. Ingesting Architectures was presented in 2020 as part of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a General Ecology project event at Serpentine, London.
