OpenCall: Entanglement on Demolition Debris
Deadline for register: Fri, 31 May 2024
Registration link
From the organizer:
To resume our community programs, Sàn Art once again invites you to entanglement on demolition debris, a collaborative project with the Asian Film Archive (AFA), taking inspiration from 7 video essays reflecting on changing geological and socio-political landscapes in the Monograph 2023 program, initiated by AFA, and our journey along the Eastern bank of Saigon River.
Demolition debris is remnants of urban projects and a place where temporality (temporally) pauses and life ceases to flourish if being approached from the timeline of progress. Entanglement or rooting, on the other hand, suggests an action of performing in time and signals of life. Following the path of root entangling on demolition debris, or to put in another way, perceiving other-than-human beings as historical actors amid an abandoned/unfinished urban project, we challenge perspectives that frame non-human beings as a backdrop for human socio-historical movements or perceive them as “primitive” creature that have no relations to human world-making projects.
Anchoring on moving-images and sound, media utilizing time as a material, this project aims to initiate new responses to landscapes. First is a walk through conceptual debris produced by film history to rethink the dynamic between human and nature as well as the slow violence of film representation. Next is a physical journey along the river’s bank to forage/unearth intertwined histories between human and non-human beings and reflect on actions of archiving and forgetting, remnants of violent displacement and opaque signs, or new forms of life co-created by the locals and non-human beings still dwelling and lingering on the landscape.
Time: 03, 06 & 08 Jun 2024
Location: Sàn Art and the East bank of the Saigon River
Target audience: video art or sound practitioners interested in interactions between humans and other living things and materials in urban environments
Asian Film Archive was founded in January 2005 as a non-profit organization to preserve the rich film heritage of Singapore and Asian Cinema, to encourage scholarly research on film, and to promote a wider critical appreciation of this art form
Monographs is a series of videos and essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive (AFA). Monograph offers a critical platform for writers and thinkers to discourse upon the moving image beyond the walls of the cinema. Responding to changing geological and socio-political landscapes, Monographs 2023 explores the tensions between form and formlessness, sound and silence, as landscapes are continually sinking, shifting, stirring.
