In person: Jheanelle Brown and filmmaker Mariam Ghani
Aimé Césaire, the late writer, politician, and co-founder of the Négritude movement, proposed a new hybrid science in 1946 — a science of the Word. He argued that the study of the Word (mythoi, a poetics of knowledge) will condition the study of nature (bios). Philosopher Sylvia Wynter, inspired by Césaire’s idea, stated that humans must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we have known and understood it. Can science deal with and make sense of the human predicament, as Wynter calls it? How can scholars, artists, scientists, and the general public reconcile the tension between scientific and technological advancement, the earth-centered mandate of indigenous wisdom, and righting historical legacies colonial violence?
Curated by Jheanelle Brown.
JIÍBIE
By Laura Huertas Millán
2019, digital, color, sound, 24:46
Conversations are rituals. The Murui Muina, Amazonian and Colombian first nation, have particularly elevated this art and its political implications through the ritual de la palabra dulce, a collective conversation allowed by the use of the coca plant powder, called mambe or jiibie. During the ritual, the most pressing political questions are discussed collectively: subjects such as neo-colonialism, ecology, activism but also questions of family and intimate life are considered. In this film, the fabrication of the coca powder in preparation for the ritual unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. The coca plant is neither a product nor an object, but a person, a sacred interlocutor, a kin, the beating heart of a collective body.
The Fire This Time
By Mariam Ghani
USA, 2022, digital, color, sound, 26:08
A kaleidoscopic trip through the intertwined histories of pandemics, riots, and colonial violence. An archive constantly haunted by its possible collapse. Featuring the voices of science journalist Sonia Shah, poet and literary scholar Anjuli Raza Kolb, medical anthropologist Christos Lynteris, epidemiologist Keiji Fukuda, economist William A. Darity Jr., and historians Nayan Shah, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Nancy Tomes.
内共生 (Inside the Shared Life)
By Erin Espelie
USA, 2017, HD video & 16mm, color, sound, 9:13
This film combines sounds of marine life with moving images of the circulatory system, life at different scales, and Lynn Margulis’s words on accepted versus iconoclastic science. She talks also about time, how the new is privileged over the true. This film has a captivating slowness. Among other things, it seems to be about epistemology, how we know or don’t know. – Dorion Sagan for Vdrome
Dust to Data
By Larry Achiampong and David Blandy
UK, 2021, digital, color, sound, 15:25
Dust to Data tracks through the colonial history of archaeology, to current parallels in the data mining of DNA and social media image banks. Working with the Department of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy interrogate the construction of a ‘civilisation’ and its racist ‘origin’ stories that define people into categories: some as human and neutral, others as non-human and/or abnormal.
In the film, Achiampong and Blandy employ motifs, such as the recurring gleaming pyramid as an image of order and hard simplicity, and 3D models of Australopithecine skulls (extinct close relatives of humans who lived around two million years ago). The film also features a fragment of a letter from William Du Bois, author of the seminal book about race and society The Souls of Black Folk, rebuking one of the pioneers of modern archaeology, William Petrie.
Dust to Data explores how science has been used to justify prejudice. This can be found in the origins of archeology, exposing the archaic mathematical tactics employed by Petrie to justify his own assertions about white supremacy. Although debunked by his contemporaries, Petrie embraced eugenics – the practice of altering or ‘improving’ the human species through selective breeding – as a tool for social control. This view was integral to the birth of archaeology, and its pseudo-scientific legacy still permeates fractious assumptions within the field and in wider culture today.
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets
By Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys
USA, 2017, digital, color, sound, 9:45
Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The video is an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice.
