Panel 5
Collectivity and Care: Moving-Image Art as Public Arena

With: Toby Lee (moderator), Louis Henderson, Christina Phoebe, Oleksiy Radynski

How does filmmaking activate communities of support, and what is needed to democratize moving-image production and exhibition? The participants of this panel discuss film production and distribution as a collective and collaborative practice, considering filmmaking as a public arena.

“Collectivity and Care: Moving-Image Art as Public Arena” is the fifth of six panels in the online symposium The State of the Moving Image curated by Lukas Brasiskis, taking place this September 17–19 on e-flux Video & Film, and accompanied by the screening program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories (streaming September 6–20).

Toby Lee is an artist and anthropologist working across film, video, drawing, and text. Her work has been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among other venues. She is the author of The Public Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in Austerity Greece (UCP 2020), and her writing appears in Film Quarterly, Visual Anthropology Review, Millennium Film Journal, and World Records. She is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question of our current global condition, defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theater, poetry, and cinema. Their first feature film Ouvertures was awarded a FIPRESCI special mention at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival 2020. Henderson also has a continuing collaboration with the musician and artist João Polido: together they make installations with musical and narrative audio essays that narrate their shared interest in music as a form of political and social commentary. Henderson’s work has been shown in various international film festivals, art museums, and biennials and is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. He lives and works in Paris.

Christina Phoebe is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Athens, Greece. In her dreamlike work in digital and analogue moving image, playful gestures and site-specific performances become portals to collective memory seen through a diasporic lens. Her first feature film Amygdaliá (2019) navigates constructs surrounding the foreigner in contemporary Greece. With screenings in festivals, community spaces, and university settings, the film has won numerous awards and is discussed in the final chapter of Toby Lee’s book The Public Life of Cinema (2020). Her recent writing includes the piece “Before, After, During, Towards the Temenos,” a reflection of her experiences with Gregory Markopoulos’ 80-hour film Eniaios, published online by Photogenie. She is currently working on her second feature film, an experimental road movie reflecting on the architecture of memory through intergenerational gatherings and dialogues centered in Arcadia, Greece.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), and International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York), among other venues. His texts have been published in Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019), and in e-flux journal.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.