Two conversations invite us to reflect together on a cinema that functions as a performance of preparation, imagining and rehearsing the actual place from which we wish to speak. It is this urge that underlies the practice of Robin Vanbesien and the Post Film Collective, and which will be the starting point for an exploration of their artistic process and methods, in conversation with Avery F. Gordon and Brigitta Kuster respectively.

As part of the conversation with the Post Film Collective, their film ‘Rerooting’ (2023, 19’) will be screened. In 'Rerooting,' a multitude of voices, languages, and translations are spun together like the threads of a spider's web to bridge a space in which the creators are together on an audiovisual journey in which they seek to understand and reinforce each other.

Practical information

04.04.24, 18:30 - 20:45

Language : English

Free access, reservation recommended info@la-loge.be

Biographies

By foregrounding the social and open-ended process of filmmaking, the Belgium-based Post Film Collective seeks to formulate a language that correlates with collective experience. Who has the right to make art? Can flourishing be a human right? Who owns space? Who is allowed to draw borders, to produce subjects inside and outside, and thus the conditions of travelling across certain territories? The collective describes their work as a rehearsal of "the capacity to hold space for each other", which involves first and foremost accepting and encouraging the otherness of each perspective, while maintaining the desire to make images together. The Post Film Collective uses the format of a Ciné-Assembly: a practice of cinema as a form of gathering and communal assembly (between the audience, the films, the filmmakers and the cinema space) that opens up collective knowledge production, reciprocal exchange and an ethics of connectedness. The Post Film Collective currently consists of Marcus Bergner, Sawsan Maher, Mirra Markhaëva, Robin Vanbesien and Elli Vassalou. It elaborates on the work and experiences of The Post Collective, created by Mahammed Alimu, Marcus Bergner, Hooman Jalidi, Sawsan Maher, Mirra Markhaëva and Elli Vassalou.


Avery F. Gordon was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara for thirty years and is currently Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of Law University of London since 2015. In 2012, she was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and in 2020 she was awarded the Bode Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Studies Association. She is the author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (2018); The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber) (2015); Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997/2008); Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People (2004), Mapping Multiculturalism (with Christopher J. Newfield) (1997), Body Politics: Disease, Desire and the Family (with Michael Ryan) (1994) and close to one hundred articles and chapters. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and she writes about captivity, enslavement, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She serves on the Editorial Committee of the journal Race & Class as well as several other advisory boards and was the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara from 1997 to 2023. She is an active member of the Hawthorn Archive and was its keeper for many years.

Brigitta Kuster is a cultural researcher and artist, primarily interested in visual and film studies, (post)colonialism, and migration and border studies. Her work has taken the form of research projects, exhibitions, and filmic approaches. Currently she works as a junior professor for cultural theory and film studies with a particular focus on gender studies at the Humboldt University zu Berlin.

Image : The Post Film Collective, Rerooting (still), courtesy the artists