This October at e-flux we look forward to talks, screenings, and performances featuring Mykola Ridnyi; Charles Mudede; Irene Chin, Joshua Frank, Francesco Garutti, Joyce Joumaa, and Erin Weisgerber with the Canadian Centre for Architecture; Feminist Spatial Practices; Svetlana Romanova; Gürcan Keltek, Ali Cherri, An-My Lê, and Aslı Baykal; Kristin Ross and Andreas Petrossiants; Alfredo Thiermann; Trevor Paglen and Joshua Citarella with Art21 and Protocinema; Mae-ling Lokko; and James Hoff with Ben Kudler.
Tuesday, October 1, 2024, 7pm
Mykola Ridnyi: The Kharkiv Trilogy
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Exploring the resilience and fragility of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Mykola Ridnyi’s films capture the city’s profound social, political, and urban transformations over the past decade, specifically under the shadow of the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine. In Regular Places (2015), Ridnyi presents the aftermath of the confrontations between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian factions, reflecting on how the echoes of past violence persist in the city’s relatively peaceful period of life. NO! NO! NO! (2017) centers on young creatives—an LGBT+ activist and poet, a fashion model, street artists, and a game developer—whose lives and practices in Kharkiv are inevitably touched by the war in the neighboring Donbass region. The film contrasts their vibrant urban existence with the encroaching instability of the conflict. The District (2023) revisits Ridnyi’s personal memories of Saltivka, a district on Kharkiv’s northern edge that became a frontline during the Russian invasion in 2022. The film juxtaposes the present-day “ghost area” of Saltivka with recollections of the artist’s childhood, exploring the coexistence of past and present, external and internal landscapes, facts and memories. No Regrets (2011/2016) delves into Kharkiv’s hardcore subculture, capturing a suspension performance in a nightclub where youth radicalism manifests as an extreme bodily experience. Initially seen as a rebellion against societal norms, the perception of pain evolves into a metaphor for a “new normality” in a war-torn context. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation with the artist. Read more here.
Thursday, October 3, 2024, 7pm
Charles Mudede: Consuming Revolutions
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Fredric Jameson is famous for writing, in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), that “someone has observed [it’s] easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This might be the case with science-fiction literature but certainly not with Hollywood movies. From Star Wars (1977–present) to the recent space opera Rebel Moon (2023–2024), social forms that approximate or directly picture capitalism are repeatedly destroyed by revolutionaries. And so it is: Hollywood rarely sides with Empire but with the rebels. Capital doesn’t sell, for a pretty penny, the rope of its own undoing but the fantasy of it. What it can’t produce and promote, however, is what happens after the revolution, as the late Mark Fisher explained in Capitalist Realism (2009). What is to account for this limitation? And why are revolutions more popular than disasters? No movie has made more money than Avatar (2009), a film whose heroes are aligned with the passions of the radical left and Third World freedom fighters rather than the key repressive institution, the military, of over-developed economies. Indeed, it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what follows its demise. Consuming Revolutions is a lecture by cultural critic, filmmaker, and writer Charles Mudede. Read more here.
Saturday, October 5, 5pm
Film as Curatorial Tool: An afternoon with the CCA
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Join the Canadian Centre for Architecture at e-flux Screening Room for Film as Curatorial Tool, an afternoon with selected documentaries produced by the CCA in conjunction with exhibitions exploring topics of quality of life, urban development and decay, and ecological design. The CCA is an international research institution and museum founded in 1979 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. In the past decade, the CCA has expanded into film as a format to investigate the forces shaping our environment, and how architecture may shape society in turn. The screening will be followed by a conversation with e-flux Associate Curator of Film and Video Lukas Brasiskis and e-flux Architecture Assistant Editor Christina Moushoul, who will be joined by CCA curators Francesco Garutti and Irene Chin, on the use of film in spatial studies and storytelling. The program will be introduced by guest curator Sara Silva. Read more here.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 7pm
Feminist Spatial Practices: web platform launch event
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Feminist Spatial Practices—a global collective of architects, artists, designers, and scholars—is launching a new interactive online platform that celebrates the diverse ways that people practice feminism in the built environment. The platform offers an interactive new media visualization and a searchable index of 600+ global feminist practices in art, design, architecture, and activism. The experimental design of the platform enables visitors to discover relationships between practices, publications, exhibitions, and protest movements across time, with themes such as “experimental pedagogies,” “alternative materialities,” and “spaces for non-conforming bodies.” At the launch event, members of Feminist Spatial Practices will introduce the interactive archive, and guest speakers featured within the platform will share their work on intersectional gender equity in the built environment. Fluffy poofs, created from September’s participatory workshop at e-flux, will transform the space at e-flux into an environment that invites multiple embodied forms of participation. Read more here.
Thursday, October 10, 2024, 7pm
Svetlana Romanova: Voyage of Jeannette
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Exploring Indigenous identity, visual sovereignty, and the critical reimagining of history, Svetlana Romanova’s Voyage of Jeanette (2024) examines how dominant narratives of Arctic regions are constructed and how they shape understandings of place and self. Set in the Yakutian Arctic, the film interrogates Western perspectives of discovery, contrasting them with the immediate realities of Yakutian communities. Through her distinct visual language, Romanova reflects on the intersection of personal and collective memory, inviting viewers to consider the complexities of identity and the persistence of Indigenous voices in a rapidly changing world. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation with the artist. Read more here.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024, 7pm
Under the Falling Sky: Films by Gürcan Keltek, Ali Cherri, and An-My Lê
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Under the Falling Sky brings together works by Gürcan Keltek, Ali Cherri, and An-My Lê. This program delves into the intersection of landscape, politics, and collective memory, blending documentary and experimental fiction to elevate historical events. At the heart of the screening is Gürcan Keltek’s Meteors, a poetic exploration of suppressed narratives from a critical moment of the ongoing Kurdish-Turkish conflict, where a concurrent meteor shower takes on mythic significance. Framing Meteors are Ali Cherri’s The Watchman and An-My Lê’s 29 Palms, which bring complementary perspectives on the themes of native land and the haunting echoes of history. Across these films, the question arises: can we ever truly return to our origins, or are we confined to revisiting them through reenactments and cosmic reflections? This screening is guest-curated by Aslı Baykal. Read more here.
Thursday, October 17, 2024, 7pm
The Commune Form: A conversation with Kristin Ross
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Since the publication of her pathbreaking book The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune in 1985, Kristin Ross has continued to release compelling and influential writing on revolutionary activity in the urban context, the relations between artistic and militant creativity, and the politics of everyday life. Recently, Ross has turned to studying “the commune form,” a modality of collective life “anchored in the art and organization of everyday life and in a collective and individual responsibility taken for the means of subsistence.” Ultimately, Ross writes, such struggles “are actually nothing more than an attempt to gain ground in the historic fight against enclosure.” Building upon centuries of struggle and militant theory, radical social geography, and encounters with those devoting their energies to these projects, Ross both investigates and furthers efforts toward collective appropriation based in use, rather than exchange value. Celebrating the recent publication of The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso, 2024) Ross will be in conversation with e-flux journal associate editor Andreas Petrossiants, followed by a Q&A with the audience. Read more here.
Tuesday, October 22, 2024, 7pm
Alfredo Thiermann, “Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin”
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In 1945, having occupied German territory, Soviet troops made two strategic moves: they dismantled the Deutschlandsender III radio transmission tower, the single tallest structure at the time in Europe, and they seized the Haus des Rundfunks in West Berlin, a monumental building designed by Hans Poelzig. These moves were crucial both symbolically and technically, as together they sparked what would become a veritable radio war between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. In this talk, Alfredo Thiermann will present his recently published book Radio-Activities, in which he investigates this spatial conflict by interrogating the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a time when buildings began to interact with the remote transmission of information. Presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.
Thursday, October 24, 2024, 7pm
Trevor Paglen, “You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS: UFOs, Magic, Mind Control, Electronic Warfare, and the Future of Media”
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With AI-generated content, social media influence operations, micro-targeted advertising, and ubiquitous surveillance becoming the dominant form of visual culture, we have entered an era of PSYOP capitalism. This era is characterized by hallucinations and manipulations intended to influence our senses, perceptions, and beliefs. This talk delves into the history of secret military, intelligence, and technology programs that have paved the way for our increasingly strange present. Join us for “You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS,” a lecture-performance by Trevor Paglen followed by a conversation with artist Joshua Citarella presented in partnership with Protocinema and Art21. Read more here.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024, 7pm
Mae-Ling Lokko, “Plant Scale”
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Plant-derived building materials are emerging as a key component of a low-carbon built future, with the promise of reinvigorating local to regional just material economies. From the light, porous to high-density, compressed states of plant-derived building materials “Plant Scale” reflects on the tension between two operative scales at play in the design and reintegrating these bio-based components into 21st century built culture, querying the underlying patterns of human-plant relationships in relation to comfort, ecological health, population growth, biodiversity, and climate change. Driven historically by an ambition to substitute conventional high-carbon materials and drive value addition from design, the lecture by Mae-ling Lokko explores the future implications of scaling plants for building in light of historical patterns in the modern food and energy sectors. Presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.
Thursday, October 31, 2024, 7pm
James Hoff, in collaboration with Ben Kudler
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Artists James Hoff and Ben Kudler will create an audio-visual work that inverts Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and transposes it onto an improvisatory performance context. GPS, a sonic technology, utilizes radio frequencies, doppler effects, oscillators, frequency modulation, and clocks; all tools inherent to electronic and computer music. It is also a visual technology, utilizing 2D images processed from multiple satellites to pinpoint a geographic location, which is then rendered onto a general user interface. On the consumer level, viewers navigate space by following these transmissions, while on the corporate and judicial level they are tracked for advertising and policing purposes. Hoff will use custom hardware and software to collect and apply GPS properties to oscillators and sample banks, creating compositional structures that will then be transformed by visual image and network data collected by Kudler, who will be hacking traffic and security cameras throughout the performance. The event will conclude with a Q&A between Hoff and the curator, Sanna Almajedi. Read more here.
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