The title for this episode of the Short Shadows series, “A life that is only circulations,” is borrowed from Bay Area poet Juliana Spahr’s Transitory, Momentary, a poem about loss shot through with reflections on the power of words, songs, and stanzas, set against the backdrop of the Occupy movement and the global circulation of oil and capital. Alongside a reading by Spahr, the program features two films made almost five decades apart, Joyce Wieland’s Sailboat (1965) and The Otolith Group’s I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012). Both films operate at the boundary between language and image, framed by the sea as a visual, poetic, and structural metaphor for exile, longing, and global circulatory connection. 

An intimate portrait of artist and poet Etel Adnan as she reads from her book Sea and Fog in her apartment, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another explores the experiential gap between the act of reading and that of being read to. The camera intimately captures Adnan, closely framed and at oblique angles, allowing space for the poetry and poet to comingle. In comparison, Wieland’s lens focuses on a distant boat. The word “Sailboat” fills the sky, naming the film’s dialogic structure in a Godardian intersection of image and language. Like I See Infinite Distance, the film is at once intimate and distanced, technical and poetic, intertwining the lived experience at the moment of capture with a universal nostalgia for what has passed across the water. 

Theorist Svetlana Boym has succinctly described such nostalgia visible in cinema as “a double exposure or superimposition of two images” that can form a durational map of geographical displacement, an ability to “revisit time like space.” Both films expand spatial displacements through words and images (each artist has experienced geographical dislocation across oceans at different moments of their lives). Thus, a sense of dislocated simultaneity is present in the structure of the films, each deliberately juxtaposing ways of communicating—image versus language or listening versus reading—to produce alternate time-scales that act together in a single image.  

Whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each artwork presented in the Short Shadows series stretches beyond a singular moment or place to foreground the political importance of unexpected historical interconnections. Mostly produced within the last decade, the artists’ films, videos, poetry, and performances presented here shine a light on cultural and historical events that may otherwise remain in shadow. 

Program:

• Reading of Transitory, Momentary (2015)
• Juliana Spahr
• Sailboat (1965)
• Joyce Wieland
• I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012)
• Otolith Group

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Bahar Behbahani, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Dora Garcia, Basir Mahmood, Lucrecia Martel, Deimantas Narkevičius, The Otolith Group, Carissa Rodriguez, Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen and Steevens Simeon, Juliana Spahr, Clarissa Tossin, Jon Wang, Calum Walter, Joyce Wieland, and Agnès Varda

Shadows are intrinsically linked to the history of cinema, both technically (images are produced quite literally by light and shadow) and also in terms of its basic metaphors: from Plato’s Cave to the shadow plays and phantasmagoria of early proto- cinematic experiments. Our yearlong film series, Short Shadows, not only refers to the magic of cinema but also suggests the disruption of cinematic illusion, a strategy fundamental to artists’ moving image and experimental film practices. Short Shadows alludes to the communal experience of an onscreen shadow cast by the late-arriving audience member, and revels in the artists’ deliberate disruption of cinematic phantasm.

The artists presented in the series are concerned with unexpected historical interconnections and they advocate for a practice capable of attending to the political importance of such convergences. Mostly produced within the last decade, their films, videos, poems, and performances shine a light on cultural and historical events that may otherwise remain in shadow, and, whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each work stretches beyond a singular moment or place.

The first season of Short Shadows included such varied films as Lucrecia Martel’s restaging of a 1950s novel set in an 18th-century South American colony, Clarissa Tossin’s reflection of Mayan influence on California Modernism, Deimantas Narkevičius’s underground staging of Jesus Christ Superstar in early 1970s Vilnius, Dora Garcia’s fragmented reenactment of Buenos Aires happenings during the psychosis of the 1960s disappearances, and Basir Mahmood’s gestures of contemporary “Lollywood” cinema. In this second season, we move between Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s intimate Cuban revolutionary cinema and Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon’s traversal of a Port-au-Prince graveyard, to the sleek homes of American art collectors in Carissa Rodriguez’s The Maid. The dramaturgy of the series entangles cultural and political histories. In so doing, it aims to articulate the inseparability of aesthetic, social, political, linguistic, territorial, and technological conditions, yet attempts to resist treating that inseparability as simply a set of straightforward themes or plot lines.

Let ‘im Move You is a series of performance and visual works rooted in the J-Sette dance form. The most recent performance in the series, This Is a Formation, both agitates and plays with the energetic lead-and-follow form of dance, which originated in the Black femme communities of Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1970s and has been widely popularized by the Jackson State University Marching Band dance team, the Prancing J-Settes. 

Artists jumatatu m. poe and Jermone “Donte” Beacham are in residence at EMPAC to develop the next phase of the work, Let ‘im Move You: This is a Formation, designed as a three-part performance that will travel across historically Black neighborhoods, queer night clubs, and institutional art spaces and theaters. The artists will be joined by a team of collaborators, including seven dancers, lighting, audio, and visual media designers, as well as two ethical and artistic consultants, to expand the theatrical and technological elements of the work. The team will also conduct a series of workshops with Rensselaer students as part of the development of the piece.

Work-in-Progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.  

Thomas F. DeFrantz is an artist and scholar who works at the apex of dance, technology, and critical Black studies. His historiographic and aesthetic focus opens shapeshifting conversations about the curation of art, ideas, politics, and bodies. DeFrantz will be at EMPAC as an advisor and collaborator to jumatatu m. poe and Jermone “Donte” Beacham’s Let ‘im Move You: This is a Formation residency. In conjunction with that project, he will present this public talk on his research. 

DeFrantz is professor in the departments of African and African-American Studies and of Dance at Duke University. He is co-editor of Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings, and Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. 

In response to the (age-old) complaint that there's nothing new happening in music, EMPAC modestly announces New Nothing, a series of concerts featuring national and international musicians working in the hybridized terrain of experimental-leaning popular music. These groups exemplify a global reality in which music hasn't just crossed borders but made them irrelevant. Popular music will never be the same.

DANCE MOViES Commissions support new works that fuse dance with the technologies of the moving image; these world premieres were followed by a panel discussion with the artists. 

TAO (11 min, Argentina, 2013) is the third collaborative dance film between Argentinian filmmaker Cayetana Vidal and choreographer and dancer Sofia Mazza. In an illusory world, two lovers living parallel lives, day for one and night for the other, with seasons inverted, only meet in the artful interlocking of image and sound. Vidal is a film director and writer who has written, directed, and edited several dance-for-the-camera projects, often in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Sofía Mazza.

In The First Place… (US, 5 mins, 2013) is comprised of 10 short films, shot in Rome, that reframe the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (an Italian pastoral romance published in 1499). Each film is a decisive moment in which the protagonist must use landmarks to reorient himself while pursuing his beloved. The film features music by Erin Gee. A Lecoq-trained actor, Colin Gee was a principal clown for Cirque du Soleil, and the founding Whitney Live artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recent commissions have included works for SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum. He has frequently collaborated with sibling/composer Erin Gee, providing the libretto for her opera, SLEEP (2009), which premiered at the Zürich Opera House, and Mouthpiece XIII, Mathilde of Loci, Part I (2009) presented by the American Composer’s Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. 

Observer Effects invites thinkers to present their highly integrative work in dialogue with the fields of art and science. This series of talks takes its title from a popularized principle in physics that holds that the act of observation transforms the observed. Outside the natural sciences, the idea that the observer and the observed are linked in a web of reciprocal modification has been deeply influential in philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and politics.

Shadow Play is a series of films that tread nimbly between reality and illusion, acknowledging the artificial nature of cinema. Referencing the tradition of shadow puppetry, the origins of cinema in phantasmagoria, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” each film draws on the metaphors of light as reality and shadow as artifice.

In Plato’s The Republic, the allegory of the cave illustrates the difference between truth and illusion. Many writers have noted that “Allegory of the Cave” (written c. 360 BCE), bears great resemblance to the contemporary movie theater.

Orson Welles narrating the Allegory of the Cave

Pianist Marilyn Nonken and cellist Steven Marotto were in residence in EMPAC's Concert Hall to record composer Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981).