SHADOW CIRCUITS
Still from Diana Al-Halabi’s The Disaster Cannot Be Contained
Labouring the flow
Join us for a selection of short artist films in response to ‘shadow circuits’ at MaMA Rotterdam. The shorts focus on labour and cargo ships, set against the backdrop of the current precarity of logistics in the context of inflation, automation and war. With the sea as a political and poetic landscape, the films explore globalisation, the pollution of our resources and the people who labour at different sites along the supply chain. With works by Diana Al Halabi, the Waterfront Writers and Artists, Mohamed Abdelkarim and Natasa Efstathiadi.
Working General Cargo with Gang 23
by Brian Nelson, the Waterfront Writers and Artists
1974, 2 minutes 14 seconds
From the group’s beginnings in the late 1970s, the Waterfront Writers and Artists experimented with film as a way to document and interpret life on the docks. Early on, group members Brian Nelson, Frank Silva, and Michael Vawter created a double-carousel slideshow entitled Longshoremen at Work; the version below is a 1994 VHS transfer of that original production. The group’s other moving-image works were shot on Super 8 by Brian Nelson, extending the WWA’s efforts to record longshore workers’ experiences during a period of rapid change on the waterfront.
The Disaster Cannot Be Contained – كان يمكن أن لا أكون
by Diana Al-Halabi
2022, 26 minutes
Departing from the port of Rotterdam to that of Beirut, the Lebanese artist/filmmaker takes us on a journey through her feminist dream to work on a tugboat in the port of Beirut. A passion for ports and ships turns into a generational trauma due to the aftermath of the port Blast in 2020. The film offers an intersectional narrative and brings together questions of loss, distance, death, and the undead.
A Song For The Loose Destiny
by Mohamed Abdelkarim
2022, 15 minutes
In a distant future, a group of humans gather at a coal mining site to reflect on their past or our future. Against the backdrop of the abandoned Zollverein coal mining industrial site, they engage in dialogue and perform speeches, songs, and poems that convey a sense of sublimity, pain, and alienation. The film speculates on the complex relationship between technology, landscape, and the human body in a post-disaster world. The landscape bears witness to both progress and devastation, portraying potential emergences in the future.
Cotton Chronicles
by Natasa Efstathiadi
2015, Courtesy of Polygreen Contemporary Art Initiative PCAI
Cotton chronicles is what its title may describe, an account, a chronicle of an artist’s stay in Benin, a description of the workers’ activities at the working site, in a warehouse full of toxic and expired pesticide meant for cotton cultivation. A day to day travel-log of events, disparate impressions and landscapes, a celluloid journal edited on camera. One could consider this analogy: the celluloid short shots pasted one after the other are like an artist’s rough sketches on his sketchbook. Mystery can be found in small gestures, shot here and there, they could then be the verses of a poem.
Cineville valid at the door and online the day of the screening!
