Screening + Conversation 
Wednesday, 5 April, 6–8 pm
The Screening Room,  120 Princess St, Kingston, ON

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Workshop
Thursday, 6 April, 3:30–6:30 pm
Agnes Etherington Art Centre

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All screenings are free and open to all.
The workshops are free and open only to students.
Register as space is limited.

Open Secret is a series composed of screenings and workshops featuring the work of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Kriss Li, Sharlene Bamboat, and Sofía Gallisá Muriente. This series takes its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” Similarly, cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering, and the double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in its making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration. These works present a way to renegotiate what forms around the binaries of outside and inside, of what we know and what we don’t need to know, of expanse and enclosure. The four artists invite us to think alongside them about the effects of subtle transformations, the eroticism of language and translation, dispersion and collectivity, and the architecture of permeability and impermanence. All through what might inspire new formations of the diasporic image.

This series offers an opportunity to showcase each artist’s work in an intimate setting, with conversations to follow the screening. As well, each artist facilitates a workshop the next day for students. This is a chance to think with them on process, practice and form and on how to build a foundational framework for collaboration to take place.

Curated by Nasrin Himada

SCREENING

Celaje  (2020) oscillates between intimate chronicle, dream and historical document. Combining images in Super 8 and 16mm, hand development techniques and original music by José Iván Lebrón Moreira, the piece weaves together an elegy to the death of the commonwealth project of Puerto Rico and the catastrophic times we survive. It is the third and final part of Assimilate & Destroy, a series of works that examine the relationship between climate and memory in the tropics, where nature imposes impermanence.

The Envoy “explores the legacy of colonialism with contemplative nuance, through lingering shots of the one-time home of Rexford Tugwell, an American economist who was appointed the governor of Puerto Rico by F.D.R., in 1941. The elegant, modernist residence is now listed on Airbnb.” (The New Yorker)

WORKSHOP

This workshop is interested in exploring the ways that art can be used to create documents that recombine and resignify histories. By collapsing time and distance, film and video open up possibilities that can be particularly useful to colonized and displaced people looking to produce counter narratives or to defy their erasure. The conversation is rooted in an experimental, politically implicated, research-based approach to camera, sound and editing. We will watch and discuss works that examine architectural and natural spaces, and the layers of history that inhabit them, exposing their poetic and political implications. Participants will analyze their formal approaches to identify practical ideas that can support their own projects. Strategies like artisanal film development, mixing formats, manipulating biodeterioration, and multi-channel installation will also be discussed as tools to explore presence, absence, impermanence, intertextuality, and memory work. The group will also be invited to go on a walk together and practice some of the ideas from the workshop with their cell phone cameras in a group exercise.