Focus BIENALSUR in relation to the theme of New Found Illusions within the framework of Némo - International Digital Arts Biennial of the Île-de-France region.
Screenings October 18 and 19 from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., every hour.
While reflecting on our present and on the “future” as something to be shaped, this selection–emerging from a conversation with José Manuel Gonçalves–offers another path toward the reunion of hopes, framed through the concept of utopia and its possible roles today. Following in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and through the perspectives of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, it seeks to revisit the “unfulfilled promises of modernity” in this “late modernity.”
From a rather dystopian present, the arts manage to revisit those pasts to reactivate their meanings toward a possible future. Let us consider: what configurations of the world are we giving ourselves, or are artists (filmmakers, writers, visual artists, etc.) and intellectuals giving us? Because the entire past is rewritten in the present, and through our questions, seeing ourselves in those pasts and recovering some of those utopias for these presents could be productive for reimagining a future.
Let us engage in the exercise of “looking and looking again” (as John Berger would say) and, in this “looking again,” discover those paths not taken that perhaps deserve to be travelled.
In short, this line of thought finds a condensed expression in the works selected for this Focus. These are the pieces by Gabriela Golder and Ali Kazma, centered on reading practices that cut across time and bring back those illusions still to be conquered—dreams and modern utopias—into a continuous present that might, why not, point the way toward possible futures, while the persistence in practices of care and connection with nature becomes visible in the work of Kapwani Kiwanga.
Image: Ali Kazma, Home, 2014