Man

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Maja Borg’s Man, (2016), streaming from Wednesday, July 7 through Tuesday, July 20, 2021.

Man is an expansion of gender and language, a journey of physical transformation through the wilderness of pregnancy echoed by the sole remaining recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. The film is a truly experimental expression of form—hand-processed super 8mm film combined with watercolor-negative animation; timelapses of a pregnancy shot frame by frame, day by day; bookended by a series of self-portraits where the filmmaker is satirizing their own use of particular attire, generally read as masculine, becoming revelatory when posed in the context of the pregnant body. For a decade, Borg has been exploring the semantics of visual language in their work, experimenting with form to push content beyond the limits of established thought. They use the deconstruction of language to dismantle other systems—political, sexual, economic, or cultural. This is the second time they draw on the essay “Craftsmanship” (1937) by Virginia Woolf, this time to deconstruct gender identity during their own pregnancy.

Man is presented here as one of five films and videos in Part Two | Gendering, Disgendering, Transgendering, the second of four programs in the online series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.

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