Zoo Education:
MA Curating Contemporary Art -
Film Screening
Fictional Geographies
Curated by the first year MA Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art
Thursday 14 January 2010 at 6pm, running time 83 minutes
Lecture Theatre 1, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU
Hollis Frampton, Lemon (for Robert Huot), 1969
Marine Hugonnier, The Secretary of the Invisible, 2007
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, 2009
Filipa César, Allee der Kosmonauten, 2007
Beatrice Gibson, A Necessary Music, 2008
Fictional Geographies brings together five international artists and filmmakers who use film to explore alternative models of engaging with space and place. The programme’s starting point is Hollis Frampton’s 1969 film Lemon, a meditation on the extraordinary that resides within the everyday. Recent films by Marine Hugonnier, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Filipa César and Beatrice Gibson further investigate the interplay between physical landscapes and their imaginary interpretation.
In The Secretary of the Invisible, Marine Hugonnier draws a parallel between cinema and an animist ritual of transformation. Shot on the River Niger, the film plays homage to the seminal French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917-2004) whose work famously challenged observational documentary. In her evocative film, Hugonnier suggests that the mythical constructs of a place are as real as its physical presence. The capacity of cinema to reveal the invisible also characterises Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. The film is set in Nabua, a sleepy village in northeast Thailand that was occupied by the national army from the 1960’s to the early 1980’s. Rather than presenting the violent memories of those who remember the military oppression, the film uncovers the layers of history sedimented in the landscape.
Adopting another set of strategies, Filipa César’s Allee der Kosmonauten also reveals a desire to give cinematic form to history. Shot on the ‘Street of the Cosmonauts’ in the former German Democratic Republic, César takes the viewer on a seemingly fantastical journey through the mundane. As the camera glides through this former East Berlin street, the utopian intentions informing its architecture are allowed to materialise one last time. In a similar way, Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music puts forward an imaginary representation of modernist social housing on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan. Unfolding through received accounts, the film evokes an image of the island in the voices of its inhabitants.
With thanks to Animate Projects, Cristina Guerra Gallery, Nilofar Emami, Max Wigram Gallery and LUX for their kind help and support.
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