Admission:
General $10
Student $7
July 29, 2025, 8:30pm
Brooklyn 11205
USA
Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for Persistent Erasure, the fourth and final part of the series Decision Moment, presenting artists' films and cinema features that reflect on historical moments of action and inaction and examine cinematic ways of approaching them.
At the core of each screening lies a past event shaped—knowingly or not—by a decision pursued, postponed, or left unmade, whose consequences continue to linger. Rather than reconstructing the past events as heroic acts, the films presented in this program embrace the limits of linear narration as ethical commitment to the complexities of historical decisions, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own actions and decisions in the present.
Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 8–29, 2025, and begin after sunset.
IV: Persistent Erasure
Tuesday, July 29, 2025, 8:30pm
Approaching traumatic experiences as refrains that persistently shape personal identities, these films by Yamashiro Chikako and Iva Radivojević explore ways of grappling with historical events that have stripped away individual agency. Both works employ cinematic form as a means to contend with memory’s inherent elusiveness, incompleteness, and resistance to being fully transmitted or resolved across generations.
Yamashiro Chikako, Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009, Japan, 7 minutes)
Yamashiro Chikako presents the stories of survivors of the Battle of Okinawa through lip-syncing and superimposition. With her body as an archive, she stages the link between the donors and inheritors of trauma and, ultimately, attempts the impossible—transferring memory across generations.
Iva Radivojević, When the Phone Rang (Serbia/USA, 2024, 73 minutes)
Structured through an intimate reconstruction of an important phone call, Radivojević’s film excavates the residue of childhood memories shaped by the moment of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its psychological aftermath. In the protagonist's eleven-year-old mind the phone call erases her entire country, history, and identity. Through a mix of scripted performative recreations When the Phone Rang does not return to the past, instead confronting the impossibility of ever having left it.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
