e-flux events continue this month with Ghost in the Landscape, a screening of three films by Lois Patiño preceded by a video introduction by the artist; “Racial Solidarity at the Kyiv Film Factory: Black Skin, 1931,” a talk by Christina Kiaer; and Code Names, a performance by Maryam Tafakory followed by a conversation with the artist.
Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 7pm
Ghost in the Landscape: Three Films by Lois Patiño
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Every landscape has its ghost: Neglected or obliterated events and experiences continue to weigh on archetypal history. Lois Patiño, a Spanish filmmaker and artist, focuses on landscapes to revive these ghosts and remind us of more-than-human pasts and futures. In this screening, we will watch Patiño’s Mountain in Shadow (2012), Night Without Distance (2015), and The Sower of Stars (2022), synaesthetic and meditative landscape films that via cinematic means overcome our perceptual limits, and create sensorial confusions to open up the spectral spaces situated between the past and the future. Read more on the films and event here.
Thursday, November 17, 2022, 7pm
Racial Solidarity at the Kyiv Film Factory: Black Skin, 1931
A talk by Christina Kiaer
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The silent film Black Skin, produced at the Kyiv Film Factory in 1931, is based on the true story of the young black American Robert Robinson, an industrial toolmaker who was recruited from the Ford factory in Depression-era America to work in the USSR. The only black worker out of 380 American guest workers at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, he was assaulted, shortly after his arrival, by two white American workers. They were soon tried and convicted of “national chauvinism” amidst a wave of Soviet outrage at American racial prejudice, turning Robinson into an unwilling celebrity. The film’s blunt title stems from journalistic accounts emphasizing that Robinson was attacked only because of the color of his skin, but the inherent sensuousness of the reference to skin, reinforced by the film’s many lingering close-ups of African actor Kador Ben-Salim’s skin, uncovers the ecstatic libidinal energies of Soviet racial solidarity and offers a possible counter-narrative to the assumption that such solidarity was always merely opportunistic or outright phony. Retrieving the liberatory possibilities of this early aesthetic of anti-racism can be part of a decolonizing practice, even if these possibilities most often turned out badly. The fact that this anti-racist film was produced by Ukrainian-Jewish artists in Ukraine, which Russia is now attempting to re-colonize in the name of Great Russian culture, only adds to the urgency of retrieving the shared material practices of a socialist solidarity and collectivity that has gone lost. For those who can’t attend in person, the event will also be livestreamed. Read more on the event here.
Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 7pm
Code Names, a performance by Maryam Tafakory
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To the outsiders, the bystanders, the virtual onlookers, to the disaster capitalist, the hopeless, the failed revolutionist—from wherever you are standing, come a step closer and listen as we try to rewind, to fast forward, to pause, to look away, to stare at this screen blurred once with pixelation, twice with tears—with a disorientation that comes with being outside, among bodies plagued with indifference, with voluntary numbness, with individualism, with indoctrinated rationality, with sense-making that makes little sense to the rest of us, with an engagement that is never engaged. And then there is the problem of your resistance to seeing, which results in our silence. Every word comes from a tongue never our own but one of an endless war within, of an unheard collective rage carrying a history buried alive that nonetheless insists on living. A war that began this year. A war that began last year. And another four years ago. After the one fourteen years ago. And the one 24 years ago. And the one 42 years ago, lasting eight years, if only on paper. And of course, the one 44 years ago—after which there was a war every single day. Read more on the event here.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our events mailing list here.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [at] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
