Dear friends,
This summer, the journal has decided to say the more the merrier when it comes to our editorial team. Too many cooks don’t spoil the broth! We are pleased to announce the two recipients of the 2020 e-flux journal fellowship. The fellowship is an opportunity for a period of focused reading, research, and study of the journal’s contents. The goal of this fellowship is to identify unintentional or felicitous conversations or contradictions between texts, as well as thematic drifts, latencies, and tendencies that could be further explored and highlighted.
The e-flux journal fellows for 2020 are: Lukas Brasiskis and Camila Salvaneschi
As part of his proposed project, Moving Images in (e-)Flux: Institutions and Disciplines, Nature, and Culture (working title), Lukas Brasiskis will excavate, review, and put in dialogue the essays on moving image art that have been published in e-flux journal over the last ten years. In light of social and racial injustice and looming environmental crisis, Brasiskis will look at how artists, critics, and academics have challenged the dominant narratives of moving image art and will highlight new powers films have acquired in the world of contemporary art. His research aims at assessing both the aesthetic, political, and economic implications of intersections between moving-image culture and the contemporary art world as well as representations of current social, political, and ecological issues in artists’ films. Starting with three broad categories: (1) moving images in between the black box and the white cube, (2) moving images and the social, and (3) moving images and the capitalocene, Brasiskis will review the discourse on ontology, politics, and ecology of moving image art as it has developed in e-flux journal. To highlight how recent discourse on moving image art responds to current academic and critical thought, the fellowship research will result in a critical essay and online discussion among the journal’s contributors followed by a screening of a thematic video-art program, organized and curated by the fellowship recipient.
Lukas Brasiskis is a curator, teacher, and critic based in Brooklyn, NY. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and a teaching fellow at NYU and Brooklyn College/CUNY. Brasiskis’s academic and curatorial interests focus on the intersections of theory, film, and contemporary art. In his ongoing research, Brasiskis explores various iterations of eco-critical art and analyzes social and political meanings of the mediation of infrastructures in the time of the Capitalocene. Brasiskis is an author of several academic articles and a co-editor of Environment in Eastern European Film and Video Art (Berghahn Books Press) and Jonas Mekas Expanded (Yale University Press), both forthcoming in fall 2021. Film and video art screenings and events Brasiskis has recently curated include Landscape to be Experienced and to be Read: Time, Ecology, Politics, a retrospective of James Benning’s films (CAC, Vilnius); Human, Material, Machine, a two-weeks long experimental film program (together with Leo Goldsmith, CAC, Vilnius); Baltic Poetic Documentary as Ethnographic Cinema, a screening and discussion at Michelson Theater (NYU, NY); Welcome to the Anthropocene, a program featuring eco-critical films (CCAMP, Vilnius); Environmental Memories, a program of films by Eastern European artists (Alternativa Film/Video Festival, Belgrade); Jonas Mekas Expanded, a screening and discussion on the administrative legacy of Jonas Mekas (NYU, NY); Mermaid with a Movie Camera, a program of selected films by Emilija Škarnulytė (Spectacle Theater, NY), among others.
Camilla Salvaneschi’s research emanates from the data-driven scientific notion of “multi-futures” and the ability of the magazine to project itself towards a time that has yet to happen—that which Heidegger defined as the futural. Owing to its periodical nature, the magazine exists in the present, balanced between the pasts of its previous issues and the anticipation of forthcoming ones. This anticipation is the very feature that renders the magazine receptive towards the future, allowing it to remain equally relevant both today and ten years from now. Looking into e-flux’s past issues, the project will attempt to collect a number of contributions that have, either consciously or unconsciously, been able to foresee shifts, changes, and disruptions that venture into these diverse future scenarios, providing points of reflection that can help rethink our world and priorities. In this time of great uncertainty, the research aims to prove the magazine’s ability to capture the futural, while elucidating inspiring thoughts that could allow us to rethink the current moment.
Camilla Salvaneschi is a doctoral candidate in Visual Culture at the Università Iuav di Venezia and at the University of Aberdeen. Her research focuses on the periodical nature of magazines and biennials and their ability to epitomize contemporaneity as well as on relationships between magazines and the art system. Recent publications include Contemporary Art Magazines: The Archive in the Archive (2019), Magnifying the Margins: Art Magazines in the Contemporary Art System (Fall 2020). She is co-founder and editor of the upcoming academic journal OBOE On Biennials and Other Exhibitions (2020).