See the films and details below or visit our Vimeo
The program begins on Monday 6 April 2020
Each film will be available for 24 hours from 11am EEST onwards
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As if we ever needed reminding, the future is already here. The future is happening now and not in some distant horizon. Today is already our tomorrow. It is also a time when we need to take care of one another, to share our many dreams, and to look after our future imaginaries. It is a time to gather around and nurture our multiplicities, help build new (re)constructions of this future perfect moment and to explore what remains possible. This is a moment for openness, generosity, and for radical solidarities.
Through collaborative and collective projects PUBLICS has spent much of its last year reflecting upon diverse, alternative and alter-futures. We remain committed to exploring how artists give shape to a more cooperative, intersectional and just world. We are taking this time to think again about what we have been doing, and to share some of the works, ideas and thoughts we have been fortunate to spend time with, and we have been nourished by over the last few months.
This dedicated film program was originally shown in the Autumn of 2019 as part of Today Is Our Tomorrow festival, which aims to support an ecology and diversity of thought, of practices, of identities, and their experiences through its collaborative methodology and co-productive commissioning approach. We are delighted to be able to re-show this series of films on-line for the first time. As a means of expressing desire to embody, to enrich, to resist, to (re-)imagine and to transform our current and emergent time(s).
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Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen: Terminal Beach, 2018 (12:18 min)
Terminal Beach is loosely based on J.G. Ballard’s short story of the same name, published in 1964. The video is part of a larger body of work that investigates the repercussions of the birth of the torn atom, that marked the time when humanity developed the means to end civilisation within a few hours. Terminal Beach entices the viewer into real and imagined historical borderlands and places where time has contorted and turned flexible.
→ Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen
Jonathas de Andrade: O Peixe (The Fish), 2016 (39:23 min)
Fishermen from a village on the northeast coast of Brazil enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate gesture that accompanies the passage of death is a testament to a relationship between species that is imbued with strength, violence and domination.
→ Jonathas de Andrade
Camille Auer: Significant Otherness, 2018 (3:07 min)
The title Significant Otherness is borrowed from Donna Haraway’s book Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs play a significant role in what it means to be human. The evolution of dogs is entwined with the evolution of humans and neither would be the same without the other. A dog is an ever present connection to a more-than-human otherness that encompasses everything around and within us. In a dog this connection takes a graspable scale. A dog stares back at us when the void doesn’t.
→ Camille Auer
Jaakko Pallasvuo & MSL: Fruits of the Loom, 2019 (31:31 min)
In this film of polar extremes, partying meets existentialism, nature meets nurture, and the mundane meets the sacred. Two men retreat to a snowy Nordic wilderness to wrestle with ideas surrounding money and their place in life. Together they father a dismembered plastic doll who cannot grow old and cannot escape the influence of her respectively capitalist and communist dads. Sinister Lynchian lighting and the mourning of stillborn utopias contrast with cheesy George Michael moments and a general air of playfulness.
→ Jaakko Pallasvuo
→ MSL
Althea Thauberger: Preuzmimo Benčić (Take Back Benčić), 2014 (58 min)
Preuzmimo Benčić (Take Back Benčić) is made in collaboration with 67 child performers from Rijeka, Croatia. Part documentary, part fiction, the project followed the activities and reflections of the children during a 6 week period when they occupied the H and T buildings of the former worker-managed Rikard Benčić factory. As co-creators, the film’s cast generated and improvised most of the dialogue and movement presented in the film. Through their words and gestures they re-imagine the politics, histories, and future of the site, and the relationship between work, art and play.
→ Althea Thauberger
Núria Güell: La Feria de las Flores (The Flower Fair), 2015–2016 (42:52 min)
The Flower Fair consisted of organizing and carrying out a series of guided tours through the works of Fernando Botero, “the paisa artist par excellence”, at the permanent collection of the Museum of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. The particularity of these visits is that they are carried out by minors exploited by the growing business of sex tourism in Medellin. The kids guide the visitors through the works in which the artist represented the female body. To do this, these atypical modern art guides rely on their personal experiences around child sexual exploitation and demonstrating the dehumanization of the female body, showing catalogues selling virginity that can be found on the city streets.
→ Núria Güell
Sepideh Rahaa: In Transition, 2017 (13:00 min)
In Transition is produced in the centennial year of Finnish independency addressing complexity of identity and life of women with the West Asian (the so-called Middle Eastern) roots in Finland. The video work is a poetic and metaphorical approach in which concepts of identity, migration, womanhood and dreams are intertwined through the act of knitting with an indirect dialogue and poetry between two women who have never met. Questioning the national identity, they self-position and explore their roots seeking the higher meaning of life.
→ Sepideh Rahaa
Karrabing Film Collective: The Mermaids, Or Aiden In Wonderland, 2018 (26:29 min)
In the not so distant future, Europeans will no longer be able to survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to “save the white ‘race’”, is released into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother across the landscape he confronts two possible futures and pasts. The filmis anintervention in contemporary debates about the future present of climate change, extractive capitalism, and industrial toxicity from the point of view of Indigenous worlds.
Basim Magdy: 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World, 2011 (5:15 min)
In 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World, a cynical analysis of society is presented through the disillusioned voices of colourful tulips with childishly drawn faces. As in many of Magdy’s works, pessimism about the future is offset by a comic sense of the ridiculous. Dark humour reveals the artist’s scepticism about dreams of a more progressive society and political systems that claim social transformation.
→ Basim Magdy
Anni Puolakka: 2 B Ur Own BB, 2019 (7:14 min)
A person in their mid-thirties enjoys being their own baby – producing milk and drinking it, dancing in diapers and toying with language.
→ Anni Puolakka
Orphan Drift & Plastique Fantastique: Green Skeen, 2016–2018 (35:40 min)
Green Skeen begins with an all night ritual to summon a Green Skeen techno-animal, which is released into the dawn light of a summer’s morning in London. Green Skeen is a four-legged, long-necked, small-snouted screen with a furry-filament body that receives images, messages and intel from virtual dimensions. Living wild in the city, the tech-animal grows and changes, but remains in a state of neoteny. One year later Green Skeen is summoned once more through a ritual in one of London’s flagship computer stores, turning all goods, people, buildings and even the sky into a Skeen.
→ 0rphan Drift
→ Plastique Fantastique
Chris Kraus: Gravity & Grace, 1996 (90 min)
Gravity and Grace, Kraus’s last and only feature length film, tackles a decidedly spiritual subject matter. The film takes its name from a compilation of writings by mystic philosopher Simone Weil, and follows its titular characters, Gravity and Grace, through their time in a New Zealand-based cult. While Grace happily stays on with the group, a disaffected Gravity goes on to become an artist in New York City, where she, in keeping with Kraus’s oeuvre, fails. During the course of this failure she ends up as dissatisfied by the art world as she was the cult.
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We warmly thank everyone for agreeing to participate in this program. In keeping with PUBLICS ethos all artists have been paid, or the fee has been donated to a charity chosen by the artist(s)
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