Here is where we are

e-flux is pleased to present Here is where we are, a six-part program of films, texts, and interviews put together by Laure Prouvost with the help of her cousins Fran Hawker and Dóra Benyó. It is the fourth program in Artist Cinemas, a long-term, online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Video & Film.

Here is where we are will run for six weeks from October 24 through December 5, 2020, screening a new film each week accompanied by a text or an interview with the filmmaker(s) by Prouvost and invited guests. 

The program opens with Liesel Burisch’s film Gorilla Milk (2020), accompanied by an excerpt from Burisch’s manual Queer Nursing (2020).

Here is where we are
Convened by Laure Prouvost

With films by Gabriel Abrantes, Liesel Burisch, Stephanie Comilang, Nashashibi/Skaer, Pia Östlund, and others; and interviews and texts by Liesel Burisch, Laure Prouvost, and others

Here is where we are highlights a variety of ways of representing the real across the realms of the living. How do we—humans. animals, plants—leave a mark? The contributors in this selection move across a spectrum of criticality and lightness, each finding a unique way of expressing their inner drive. We are together in this world and travelling along the road as it curves. We traverse geographic and geological borders as well as a (mountain) range of styles, sensations, and cultures. Hopefully you are here where we are!

Program

Week #1: Saturday, October 24–Friday, October 30, 2020
Liesel Burisch, Gorilla Milk, 2020
9:57 minutes
With an excerpt from Burisch’s Queer Nursing (2020)

Gorilla Milk documents the meeting between an artist, a YouTube vlogger, and a gorilla. Mixing recordings from the meeting with archival content from the vlogger’s YouTube account, the video explores the artist’s and vlogger’s similarities with, and projections onto, the gorilla. The conversation centers around the beauty of the gorilla, who suffered a severe drop in popularity when her breasts started sagging. The public and the caretakers lost interest. And after losing her fertility, even her troop rejected her. 

Gorilla Milk aims to discuss motherhood, body dysmorphia, and the life of a female in captivity—by the ideas of bystanders, audience, society, and caretakers. 

It is presented alongside an excerpt from Burisch’s manual for queer nursing, which offers an alternative, inclusive way for both performing and supporting nursing. 

Watch the film and read the excerpt here.

Week #2: Saturday, October 31–Friday, November 6, 2020
Nashashibi/Skaer, Lamb, 2015
6:19 minutes

The film was shot over a course of mornings in a farmer’s lambing shed near Lucy Skaer’s house on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Ewes are in labor, giving birth or tending to their lambs. The soundtrack is a musical composition by composer Will Carslake and singer Olivia Ray in collaboration with Rosalind Nashashibi, using trumpet, breath, voice, and piano.

Week #3: Saturday, November 7–Friday, November 13, 2020
Pia Östlund, Paradise Field, 2020
4:35 minutes

Paradise Field is a series of collage sketches and a recorded short text conceived during lockdown when I took daily walks around a 1970s housing estate in East London. 150 years earlier this had been the site of Europe’s largest nursery and importer of rare exotic plants. The same area is also the location of no. 5 and no. 7 Darnley Road, where Laure and I (and several other friends) used to live around 2007. 

The wonders of the plants which once grew there and the love shared amongst friends (in the same place but later in time) fused into an idea of Paradise, which was amplified by the strange stillness of those spring months of 2020.

—Pia Östlund

Week #4: Saturday, November 14–Friday, November 20, 2020
Gabriel Abrantes, Birds, 2012
18 minutes

A collective of people singing is never going to forgive the millions of slaves chained in the bottom of ships.

An upstart theater director named Gabriel Abrantes attempts to stage a faithful production of Aristophanes’ The Birds in Haiti, only for the locals to lose their patience with his rather excessive approach.

Week #5: Saturday, November 21– Friday, November 27, 2020
Stephanie Comilang, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso, 2016
25:46 minutes

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise) is a science-fiction documentary that uses the backdrop of Hong Kong and the various ways in which the Filipina migrant worker occupies Central on Sundays. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso, a ghost played by a drone who speaks of the isolation from being uprooted and thrown into a new place. Paraiso’s reprieve comes when she is finally able to interact with the women and feel her purpose, which is to transmit their vlogs, photos, and messages back home. During the week she is forced back into isolation and is left in an existential rut. 

On Sundays, Central becomes a pivotal place for Paraiso and the three protagonists as thousands congregate to create a space of female care-giving, away from their employers’ homes where they live and work full-time. From early morning to night, the women occupy these spaces normally used for finance and banking into spaces where they relax over food, drinks, manicures, prayer, and dance. Only when the women gather en masse is the signal strong enough to summon Paraiso to them for download. 

Week #6: Saturday, November 28–Friday, December 5, 2020
Closing film to be announced

Laure Prouvost was born in 1963 in Moulennbreak, Albania. She lives and works in an underwater mobilhome to research tunnel engineering, currently in the Channel. She practices making video, boobs, sounds and tea cups, objects and installation. Here a long list of museums and institutions. A line, interesting things, a coma, a line, a list of residencies and prizes. A selection of solo projects including: a Melting Into Another in Lisbon, an Occupied Paradise in Aalst, Deep See Blue Surrounding You in Venice and Toulouse, a Waiting Room with objects in Minneapolis, a New Museum for Granddad in Milano, A tearoom for Grandma in Derry, a karaoke room in Brussels, a new octopus ink vodka bar for Gregor in Rotterdam, A travel agency for an Uncle in Frankfurt, a lobby for love among the artists in the Hague and Luzern… tea bags, and wet floors and tentaculees.

About Artist Cinemas
Artist Cinemas is a new e-flux platform focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic process—producing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It will also acknowledge the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bind the artistic community. Over time this platform will trace new contours and produce different understandings of the moving image.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.