Technological Ecologies

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 Muñoz, Strata of Natural History (2012), Mileidy Orozco Domicó, Mu Drua (2011), Syma Tariq, Partitioned Listening: I hear (colonial) voices (2022), and Taiki Sakpisit, Seeing 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.