Many things collide in Riar Rizaldi’s Monisme: magic, science, indigenous knowledge systems, violence, and a tenuous boundary between the past and the future, fact and fiction. These all collide around Mount Merapi, one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, located in Java, Indonesia. Monisme’s multiple collisions ultimately illuminate the various modalities of relation between humans and nature.
The screening will be followed by a panel with Riar Rizaldi, Fern Silva, and Jasmine Nadua Trice and by a free dinner.
Curated by Jheanelle Brown.
Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between capital and technology, labour and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc) as well as NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, Centre Pompidou Paris, Times Museum Guangzhou, Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, Biennale Jogja, and National Gallery of Indonesia amongst others. His short film Tellurian Drama (2020) won Silver Screen Award for Best Southeast Asian Short Film at Singapore International Film Festival 2020 and awarded Honourable Mention at DOK Leipzig 2021.
Fern Silva (1982, USA/Portugal) is an artist who began working as an editor and cameraperson in NYC. His early films centered on his relationship to Portugal and have since expanded, underlining the global influence of industry on culture and the environment. For over a decade, his 16mm films have been screened widely in festivals, museums, and cinematheques including the Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, London, Melbourne, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals, MOMA PS1, New Museum, Anthology Film Archive, and the Harvard Film Archive. They’ve been awarded prizes from the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Gus Van Sant Award), 25FPS Festival (Grand Prix), and most recently, the Agora Post-Production Award from the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. His work has been featured in publications including Cinema Scope, Filmmaker Magazine, and Film Comment. He’s taught filmmaking at various institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Bard College, and Bennington College and has received support from the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He studied film at the Massachusetts College of Art and Bard College and is a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University.
Jasmine Nadua Trice is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila’s Alternative Film Culture, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. She is currently co-authoring Practices of Futurity: Spatial Transformation in Southeast Asian Film Collectives, with Philippa Lovatt (University of St. Andrews, Scotland). Based on research with four art/experimental/documentary film groups, The book discusses how the work of Forum Lenteng (Jakarta), Los Otros (Quezon City), Hanoi Doclab (Hanoi), and Anti-Archive (Phnom Penh) offers alternatives to top-down urban futurisms. Authored with Dr. Philippa Lovatt (University of St. Andrews, Scotland), the project began as a series of screening events programmed with the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas (ASEAC).
Jheanelle Brown, Los Angeles Filmforum board member is Project Director and Curator, leading project management, offering scholarly and curatorial guidance to project scholars, developing several film programs, developing the overall curatorial framework of the film series, and serving as co-editor of the resulting publication. Jheanelle is a film curator/programmer, lecturer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts. She has co-curated Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today and the traveling film showcase Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories from 2018 to 2019.
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world. Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe. The series will include eighteen screenings between September 2024 and February 2025, with films and digital works from 1874 to today from around the world, multiple guests, panels and wonderful collaborations that will reveal the possibilities and circumstances of cinema in this realm. See more at www.filmforumexperimentations.org
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is among more than 70 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art.
Major support for Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is provided by the Getty Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional Support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
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Monisme
By Riar Rizaldi
Indonesia, Qatar, 2023, digital, color, sound, 115 minutes
Repressed by the state-sponsored violence, a mystic is determined to stay in his land in the foothill of Mount Merapi. Nothing can change his determination to stay on his land and keep practicing his belief of being one with the mountain. On the other side of the mountain, a volcanologist keeps insisting that the end of the world is near. Although he is criticised heavily by his female assistant by questioning his worldview, this volcanologist insists that the only reality is a scientific one. Gaining knowledge from the earth-sensing technology, he declares that mitigation is the only way for humanity to survive from a colossal eruption of Merapi that he predicts. Not far from where volcanologists conducted their research in Merapi, the sand mining industry blooms. One miner, while documented by a filmmaker, contemplates the impact of sand mining and extraction economy for the community, the mountain, and his own psyche. In Merapi, everything is connected by the presence of paramilitaries. A form of state apparatus.
Formed in a spirit of collective filmmaking and between factual and fictional, future and past, material and incorporeal, scientific and magic, Monisme reflects the intermingled relationships between people in Mount Merapi: from a mystic who believes that Merapi is a God who gives him life and death, a volcanologist who sees Merapi as a threat to human existence, to a sand miner who treats Merapi as a source of livelihood because it provides him with resources to extract. Monisme trips to the place where actuality is intertwined with myth and legend
