Planetary Drift: Access is the New Capital

The geopolitics dictating planetary disposition affect our contemporary condition on multiple, interlocking scales. How are the fibers of personal history, social relation, and national identity embedded in layers of politico-economic crisis? And how can such expansive questions be explored through film? 

In a three-day program orchestrated by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, a diverse collection of filmmakers engaging with such issues will be screened and positioned for discursive consideration. The three-day program, which will take place May 4-6, 2022 at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Interference Archive, and e-flux Screening Room, will address notions of national identity, the intersection of environmental and social crisis, and the planetary shift towards a nomadic sense of community and belonging. How has the current crisis shifted our perspective? And how can film as a medium illicit critical reflection on such questions?

“Access Is The New Capital,” the third feature of Planetary Drift, will take place at e-flux Screening Room, presenting video works by Metrozones, M-A-U-S-E-R (Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest), and Benj Gerdes, originally premiered in the context of the Austrian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, as well as a documentary piece by Benj Gerdes, originally screened at the Gothenberg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2021. Each film diversely explores entangled relations of technology, capital, urbansim, and logistics as part of the broad, encroaching phenomenon referred to as Platform Urbanism. The screenings will coincide with a public lecture and open conversation orchestrated by Carmen L. Hines, exploring techno-capitalism and contemporary paradigms of world-making. Concluding the program, we hope you will join us afterwards at Bar Laika by e-flux (224 Greene Ave) for an open discussion and informal conversation.

The Planetary Drift film screening week is co-curated by Carmen L. Hines and Ameli M. Klein.