in a plenum space

in a plenum space is a film program featuring two short works by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and a feature-length experimental documentary by Tatiana Mazú González.

A plenum space is an area of a building that supports air circulation, and plenum also denotes a social assembly, particularly a legislative body. This program's featured films reflect on social and material conditions through cinematically navigating visual latency (delays in the emergence of images and their recognition by viewers) and through the use of acousmatic sound (audio that invokes sources remaining withheld from view). Each dramatizes images as they move into circulation, as they become filmic.

The film processes in Nguyen-Chi’s Syncrisis (2018), which the artist considers a “cinematic libretto in six movements,” enact forms of submersion–the camera’s gaze is suspended in water, darkness, or the quiet expanse of a theater. Linger On Your Pale Blue Eyes (2016) imagines the inner life of a scientist as she flees East Germany by using astronavigation to swim west through the Black Sea.

In González’s Shady River (2020), the moving image has been iced over; images must thaw. The film is a slow revelation of a silenced labor history in a small mining town in Argentina. It details the physical, social, and emotional burdens carried by its workers—particularly its few female laborers. Shaped by the filmmaker’s inability to gain entrance to the mines due to her gender, the film’s scenes often hover on-screen like permafrost. González uses subtlety and controlled pacing to coax a story out of landscapes that appear numbed by suppressed emotions and histories. Gradually, voices of female miners and a vivid sound score animate Shady River’s fog-ridden expanses, cracking open its scene of extraction.

Tatiana Mazú González was born in 1989 in Buenos Aires. A feminist activist who once wanted to be a biologist or geographer, her work in documentary, experimental, and visual art explores the links between people and spaces, the microscopic and the immense, the personal and the political, the childish and the dark.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is an artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. In collaboration with characters in search of consciousness, language, and freedom, her recent work explores epistemological, aesthetic, and political possibilities of the moving image.

Program

• Program Syncrisis (2012)
• Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
• Linger On Your Pale Blue Eyes (2016)
• Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
• Shady River (Río Turbio) (2020)
• Tatiana Mazú González