Technological Ecologies

Technological Ecologies

Technological Ecologies
Screening and discussion with World Records, Onyeka Igwe, and Laura Huertas Millán

Free admission, first come first served

Date
February 28, 2023, 7pm–12am
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA

This screening and discussion accompanies the publication of World Records Volume 7: Technological Ecologies, edited by Counter Encounters Collective (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes). Inspired by sites where nature and culture, the organic and the scientific, the human and the more-than-human merge in ways that threaten to dislodge these binaries altogether, this issue thinks through the frame of technological ecologies, which analyzes and contests the division between the ecological and the technological in an array of audiovisual practices. It integrates cinematic and recording devices into embodied, affective, and political nonfiction, resonating with Arturo Escobar’s notion of sentipensar (feel-think), which suggests a way of knowing that does not separate thinking from feeling, reason from emotion, knowledge from caring.

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, February 28 at 7pm for a screening of Jeannette MuñozStrata of Natural History (2012), Mileidy Orozco DomicóMu Drua (2011), Syma TariqPartitioned Listening: I hear (colonial) voices (2022), and Taiki SakpisitSeeing in the Dark (2021); and a discussion with issue guest editors and Counter Encounters members Onyeka Igwe and Laura Huertas Millán, moderated by World Records editor Jason Fox.

The event is co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History.

Jeannette Muñoz, Strata of Natural History (2012, 12 minutes)
A cut into the strata of history. In 1881 a group of Kawéskar natives from Tierra del Fuego were exhibited in human zoos across Europe, organized by the merchant of wild animals Carl Hagenbeck from Hamburg and Rudolf Virchow from Berlin. The tour's final exhibition took place in Zürich in 1882, where most of the Kawéskar already affected by disease finally died. Archival images sometimes seem like faint echoes of history. This film is a personal journey on the invisible yet persistent traces and layers that reverberate in a place like echoes. 

Mileidy Orozco Domicó, Mu Drua (2011, 22 minutes)
Mu Drua [My Land] concerns how the filmmaker, a native woman from the Cañaduzales community of Mutatá (Antioquia), views her land, that which surrounds it, and all that which has changed around it. 

Syma Tariq, excerpt from Partitioned Listening: I hear (colonial) voices (sound only, 2022)
This audio work samples and interprets recordings held by the Bristol Empire and Commonwealth Museum collection indexed under “Partition”—the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. The work leaves in the questions asked to “colonial servants,” but cuts out their answers, while also narrating personal encounters with photographs and letters belonging to them. Reliant on eight hours of interview tape, it sounds out the dynamics of power present in the past institution of this (failed) empire museum.

Taiki Sakpisit, Seeing in the Dark (2021, 29 minutes)
A sensorial, left-field take on Thai political history that moves between a subdued past etched in the landscape of Khao Kho mountain, once a stronghold of communist insurgents, and a dynamic near-present marked by Bangkok’s 2021 anti-government protests.

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

Accessibility                 
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.      
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@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 Screening Room and this bathroom.

Category
Nature & Ecology, Technology, Colonialism & Imperialism, Indigenous Issues & Indigeneity, Film
Subject
Publications

Syma Tariq is a radio journalist, writer, and editor. She has long had an interest in sound and its relation to politics. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts, London, where her research refocuses the historical narratives of the 1947 Partition through the unstable act of listening.

Taiki Sakpisit is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Bangkok, renowned for his innovative approach to storytelling and his profound exploration of Thailand’s complex history. Sakpisit unpacks the nation’s turbulent past, infusing his films with a subtle yet resounding political commitment. His works delve into the underlying tensions, conflicts, and anticipations of contemporary Thailand, meticulously crafted through precise and sensorially overwhelming audio-visual assemblage. Utilizing a diverse array of sounds and images, Sakpisit creates immersive experiences that challenge conventional narratives. His feature-length film The Edge of Daybreak won the FIPRESCI prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. His recent works have been exhibited at the fourteenth Gwangju Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, the 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale, and the fourteenth Mercosur Biennial.

Mileidy Orozco Domicó is an Emberá Eyabida filmmaker and producer, a mother, and an heir to the knowledge of the ancestral fabric of her people. She has directed many short films, including Mu Drua (My Land, 2011), Jendá (Return, 2012), La Guajira, Bania (Water, 2015), and Truambi (I Sing, 2019).

Jeannette Muñoz is a Chilean filmmaker based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her experimental and nonfiction 16mm films have screened widely, including at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Media City, Arsenal Berlin, Ourense Film Festival, Festival Junto de Vista, Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe (CGAI), Xcèntric, Palais de Glace (Buenos Aires), Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Videoex, and many other venues.

Laura Huertas Millán is a Colombian and French artist and filmmaker based in Brussels, Belgium. She approaches cinema as an oneiric, diasporic, and multi-cultural medium. In the past twenty years, she has developed a hybrid practice through historical inquiries and cinematic fabulation, revolving around ecological resistances, the legacies of cultural dissidences in Latin America, and artistic strategies to exit coloniality. Her modular approach to storytelling encompasses film, installations, writing, pedagogy, and expanded media. While grounded in real-life contexts and collaborations, her work reclaims fiction as an emancipatory tool, where altered states build potential sites of healing and commonality, and imagination is the most precious political treasure. Selected in major cinema festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel, her films have been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include ℅ Berlin, the Crespo Foundation, MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin’s Modern Art Museum. She was part of Seoul Mediacity biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, FRONT Triennial, Videonnale and ScreenCity Biennial; as well as groups shows at MOMA, LACMA, Banco de la Repùblica de Colombia, among others. In 2024, she was AWARE Nouveau Regard laureate as well as the recipient of the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Prize.

Onyeka Igwe is a London-based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? She pulls apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. She has had solo/duo shows at Tate Britain, London (2025); MoMA PS1, New York (2023); High Line, New York (2022); Mercer Union, Toronto (2021); Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2018). Recent group exhibitions have been held at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Nigeria Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Lagos Biennial, Lagos (all 2024); The Common Guild, Glasgow and South London Gallery, London; (2023). Onyeka also published a book in 2025, June Givanni: The Making of a Pan African Cinema Archive.

Jason Fox is the founding editor of World Records.

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