March events

Join us this March at e-flux for talks, launches, screenings, and a workshop-performance, featuring Olga Touloumi; Ben Rivers; Evan Calder Williams and Brian Kuan Wood; Dana Kavelina; Ou Ning and Dalida María Benfield; a film by Krzysztof Kieślowski and by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew; Cindy Keefer and films by Jordan Belson; Maria Chávez, Evicshen, and Mariam Rezaei. Read more on the programs below.

Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Olga Touloumi, “Assembly by Design”
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Following World War II, architects were invited to build, both literally and metaphorically, the United Nations, the new organization to manage the transition from a colonial to an institutional organization of the world. Inside courtrooms, theaters, industrial plants, and ultimately the permanent UN headquarters, architects debated democratic form, the role of mass media, and the very structure of diplomacy. The task was an impossible one: to gather the entire world in one place, to design a global assembly. The result was the emergence of a new type of space, the “global interior,” a diplomatic spatial apparatus formed in the intersection of debates on media governmentality and corporate technique. This talk by Olga Touloumi will examine the evolution of the UN’s global interiors from constitutive imaginaries that legitimized the organization to articulation points of a global bureaucracy in a multipolar world. Read more here.

Thursday, March 6, 2025
The Real and Elsewhere: Films of Ben Rivers
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A formative figure in contemporary experimental cinema, Ben Rivers‘ films merge ethnographic observation, speculative world-building, and avant-garde storytelling. His work challenges the conventions of documentary, creating cinematic spaces where landscapes and characters exist on the peripheries—of society, of history, of what is known. This program brings together a selection of Rivers’ films that exemplify his engagement with speculative ethnography, science fiction, and the intersections of mythology and landscape. Through these works, Rivers reconfigures the documentary form, not as a means of capturing reality, but as a possibility for envisioning new ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. Join us for a screening of selected works, followed by an in-person discussion with the artist. Read more here.

Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Launch of e-flux journal issue #152: On Paralysis, with Evan Calder Williams and Brian Kuan Wood
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Please join the editors of e-flux journal for an evening launching the journal’s issue #152, featuring the fourth and final installment of Evan Calder Williams’s essay series “On Paralysis.” Paralysis has become a term and idea inseparable from contemporary understandings of subjectivity, infrastructure, politics, and war. Conjuring associations of indecision, physical immobility, and trauma, it names a breakdown of the normal processes of circulation and information that promise systemwide health and seamless flow. But what if the very smoothness of these circuits of production is precisely what debilitates human bodies and broader systems of relay and exchange? And what are the potentials for refusal and unexpected agency that can be found in the interval when nothing works like it’s supposed to? Williams will be in conversation with e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood about stoppage, sabotage, disability, delay, and damage, as well as the critical tools that Williams’ “On Paralysis” essay series finds in the hidden intimacies between limited movement and expressive power. Read more here.

Thursday, March 13, 2025
Dana Kavelina: It Can’t Be That Nothing That Can Be Returned
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 In this digitally rendered speculative future, the dead from the war on Ukraine are given the choice to live again—to reckon with past trauma. Painful memories can be removed and archived to a living monument, revisited with an emotional distance; full memory immersion for perpetrators ensures they never forget. Join us for a screening of It Can’t Be That Nothing That Can Be Returned (2022, 52 minutes), a film by Dana Kavelina that will be followed by a video conversation with the artist. Read more here. 

Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Paradoxical Utopias: The Agritopianists, a conversation with Ou Ning
Co-presented with Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research
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Join us for a presentation on The Agritopianists: Thinking and Practice in Rural Japan, featuring a talk by author Ou Ning, followed by a conversation with Dalida María Benfield. Ou Ning’s The Agritopianists is a crucial contribution to utopia’s other histories, the world histories of utopian social experiments. It maps a unique trajectory of rethinking social possibilities across geographies and cultures. It is a history of Japan’s early twentieth century artist-led rural communitarian projects, and the utopian theories that motivated social change there and beyond. The Agritopianists vividly describes these efforts and asks the reader to consider the enduring relevance of the work of these Japanese activists and artists to subsequent, contemporary questions of anti-capitalist life, communalism, environmental stewardship, and planetary interconnection. Read more here.

Thursday, March 20, 2025
Economies of Love. Part 1: Virtual Desires
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Urban spaces shape one’s body language, virtual connection brings people into proximity without collapsing distances, and longing takes new forms—unspoken, deferred, and refracted through various optics. If modern love is no longer an immediate event, as Alain Badiou once argued, what new forms of intimacy emerge when the distance between bodies becomes the defining structure of desire? Join us for a screening of A Short Film About Love by Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988, 86 minutes) and First (2019, 11 min) by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew. This event inaugurates Economies of Love, a monthly screening series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures. Read more on the March 20th event here, and on the Economies of Love series here.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Cosmic Cinema: Jordan Belson and the Vortex Concerts
Organized in collaboration with the Center for Visual Music (CVM)
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Join us for an evening featuring a talk by curator/archivist Cindy Keefer, director of the Center for Visual Music (CVM), followed by a digital screening of select restored films by Jordan Belson including Allures (1961), Meditation (1971), Chakra (1972), Mandala (1953), plus Séance (1959). As Keefer has written, “Belson created abstract films richly woven with cosmological imagery, exploring consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself.” Drawing from her extensive research and direct work with Belson, she will discuss his early work, legacy in expanded cinema and light shows, his cinematic practice, influence from Oskar Fischinger, and his seminal role as Visual Director of the Vortex Concerts (1957–1959)—a groundbreaking series of events at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco that merged electronic music and immersive visual effects. All films except Séance were restored by CVM. You can check more on their programs and archives here. Read more on the March 25th program here.

Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Turntablism with Maria Chávez, Evicshen, and Mariam Rezaei
Organized in collaboration with Roulette
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The turntabalism trio blends elements of musique concrète, free improvisation, noise, techno, and hip-hop with custom instrument creation and modification. Each artist brings a unique approach to turntablism, employing techniques such as scratching, beat-juggling, sampling, and looping. Their tools include double-needle-head shells and acrylic needle nails. The trio’s compositional style merges sound sculpture, maximalism, minimalism, and sonic destruction. Together, they demonstrate that New Turntablism transcends technique, genre, and compositional theory; it’s about exploring the unknown. Join us at e-flux for a workshop and talk with the experimental turntablism trio Maria Chávez, Evicshen (aka Victoria Shen) and Mariam Rezaei, followed by a solo-performance by Rezaei. Read more here.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Events mailing list here.

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