March screenings and music

Join us this month at Bar Laika for screenings featuring Harun Farocki, Camille Henrot, and Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang presented by Filipa Ramos, as well as Satellite 15 featuring Debit and 51717.

Please email laika [​at​] e-flux.com for dinner or large party drinks reservations. Happy hour every day from 6–7pm and 11pm–close!

Bar Laika presents: Harun Farocki, A New Product (2012, 36:27 minutes)
Thursday, March 5, 9pm

Scenes from meetings within a company which advises corporations how to design their offices—and the work done there. The film shows that words are not just tools, they have become an object of speculation.

Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was born in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. From 1966 to 1968 he attended the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). In addition to teaching posts in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich, and Stuttgart, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Farocki made close to 120 films, including feature films, essay films, and documentaries. He worked in collaboration with other filmmakers as a scriptwriter, actor, and producer. In 1976 he staged Heiner Müller’s plays The Battle and Tractor together with Hanns Zischler in Basel, Switzerland. Farocki wrote for numerous publications, and from 1974 to 1984 he was editor and contributing author of the magazine Filmkritik (München). His work has been shown in many national and international exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums.

Bar Laika presents: Camille Henrot, Spatial Film (2007, 15:00 minutes)
Thursday, March 12, 9pm

“The universe consists of an infinity of erratic micro-events. Each of them is more important than the large one.”—seen on the wall of Yona Friedman’s apartment

Filmed in 16mm, Spatial Film is a wandering through the apartment and cosmology of ideas of the architect and utopist Yona Friedman. As a conversation develops between Henrot and Friedman on the topics of film, technology, and the creative process, the point of view shifts to that of Friedman’s dog, Baltkis, the center of his emotional and conceptual world.

Camille Henrot (b. 1978, France) lives and works in New York City. Her multidisciplinary practice moves seamlessly between film, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Henrot references literature, mythology, cinema, and anthropology to reconsider the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian resulted in the film Grosse Fatigue, for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition Days Are Dogs.

Bar Laika presents: Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, The Great Silence (2014, 16:22 minutes)
Presented by Filipa Ramos
Thursday, March 19, 9pm

Through an expansive exploration of sound, The Great Silence (2014) examines the irreducible relationships between the living and nonliving, human and animal, and terrestrial and cosmic. The film focuses on the world’s largest single aperture radio telescope, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the edges of the universe. Located at the Arecibo Observatory in Esperanza [Hope], Puerto Rico, the site is surrounded by the Rio Abajo forest, home to the last wild population of critically endangered Amazona vittata parrots.

Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang to create a subtitle script written from the parrots’ perspective, which chronicles humankind’s determined quest to find other intelligent life. While this search spans the far reaches of outer space, the avian protagonists living just beyond the observatory ponder their spatial and cognitive proximity to humans, with whom they share the rare faculty of vocal learning. Only for species of vocal learners, the parrots explain, does sound play such an important role in the creation of mythologies. As humans scan for signs of life amid the consonant vibrations of deep space, the parrots reflect on the imminent end of their kind and the subsequent disappearance of their language, rituals and traditions.

Through a complex research-oriented practice, Allora & Calzadilla critically address the intersections and complicities between the cultural, the historical and the geopolitical. The interdisciplinary nature of their interventions is echoed by an expanded use of the artistic medium that includes performance, sculpture, sound, video and photography. Their dynamic engagement with the art historical results in an acute attention to both the conceptual and the material, the metaphoric as well as the literal. The Puerto Rico-based artists have studied the ephemeral nature of collective drawing with monumental sticks of chalk at the Biennial de Lima, Peru (Chalk [Lima], 1998–2002); the imprints of colonial, nationalist, and military violence on the diverse populations and landscapes of Vieques, Puerto Rico (Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2001–02; Land Mark, 2003; Returning a Sound, 2004; Under Discussion, 2006 and Half Mast/Full Mast, 2011); and the resonance of playing, warping and combining music from various moments in history (Clamor, 2006; Wake Up, 2007; Sediments Sentiments- Figures of Speech, 2008; Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, 2008; Raptor’s Rapture, 2012; Apotomē, 2013; 3, 2013); as well as the entanglement between biophysics, semiotics and actuality (Growth, 2004; Puerto Rican Light - Cueva Vientos, 2015).  

Lisbon-born Filipa Ramos is a writer and editor based in London. She is a Lecturer in the Experimental Film MA programme of Kingston University and in the MRes Art: Moving Image of Central Saint Martins, both in London, and works with the Master Programme of the Institut Kunst, Basel. Ramos is co-curator of Vdrome, a programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers. She was Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed to Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She recently edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press).

Bar Laika presents Satellite 15: Debit and 51717
Thursday, March 26, 9pm

Join us at Bar Laika for the fifteenth edition of Satellite, featuring a live performance by Debit, and a hybrid live and DJ set by 51717.

Debit (Delia Beatriz) has been an influential force in the Mexican experimental, electronic, and club music scenes since 2012. Since relocating to New York in 2015, she has become an active figure in the development of the Latin American musical diaspora’s new generation aesthetics and circuits. Her production style ranges from dance to ambient music, filtered through an experimental approach with signature blends of Latin American musical references, club beats, dramatic accents, baroque synths, and polymorphous textures. Debit harnesses the cerebral and the physical, moving our bodies and minds to her cross-genre experiments. Her Debut LP Animus was released through Mexico City label NAAFI in February 2018, receiving critical acclaim from a wide range of international media. In September 2018, Debit released the ambient tape Love Discipline through Quiet Time Tapes. Her latest release, also on NAAFI, is SYSTEM,a tribal guarachero reconstruction influenced by the sounds of Monterrey, where she was born. 

51717 is the intuitive language of New York-based artist Lili Schulder, a longtime fixture in the NYC D.I.Y. electronics scene. Releases on cult underground labels such as Jealous God, Total Black, and L.I.E.S. have served as tangible documentation of her exploration of themes and emotions handed down to her via an Orthodox Jewish upbringing. 51717’s minimalist sound design is focused on the transmission and decay of overwhelming thematic elements into minor sonic forms. Her work touches on implicit musical tensions between noise and silence, language and sound, material and transcendence—dichotomies that often form the binaristic conditions that are confronted and deconstructed within meditative and ritualistic practice.

Free entrance.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi. 

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website; or subscribe to our events mailing list for Bar Laika.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.