Free film screening in the Cube
From: Moss Arts Center
The Moss Arts Center presents a series of free film screenings in the Cube on Tuesday, Dec. 3 to Sunday, Dec. 8, running continuously during regular gallery hours – Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. These screenings are offered in conjunction with the center’s current exhibition, “Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections.”
The featured films are:
“Aequador” by Laura Huertas Millán
Interested in the hidden corners of exoticism and a reinterpretation of history as an aesthetic challenge, Colombian resident in France Laura Huertas Millán (Bogotá, 1983) presents in “Aequador” — in her own words — “a parallel present modified by virtual reality, an oneiric allegory, an uchronic dystopia.” With foundations in science fiction — uchronia as a source for an alternative history can actually be seen as a subgenre — “Aequador” establishes parallelisms, in a complex and deliberately fragmented way, between the (virtual) relics and ruins of an ideal 3D architecture embedded somewhere in the middle of the Colombian Amazonas and the everyday life of people inhabiting that area.
“Journey to a Land Otherwise Known” by Laura Huertas Millán
This work is a documentary fiction inspired by the colonial accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by conquistadors, missionaries, and scientists. Shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, France, the film uses both the architecture and the plants of this enclosed botanic garden as narrative supports. Led by the voiceover of an explorer, the film explores the notion of exoticism, evokes the violent origins of the so-called “New World,” and the endurance of the imagery they engendered.
“Corpo Fechado – The Devil’s Work” by Carlos Motta
This video relates the true story of José Francisco Pereira, an 18th-century man who was kidnapped from West Africa and sold into slavery in Brazil. As a means of survival, Pereira (played by Angolan actor Paulo Pascoal), along with others in enslaved communities, developed syncretic spiritual practices that mixed African and Christian traditions in the form of bolsas de mandinga, or amulets, to protect fellow enslaved persons from injury. In 1731, after Pereira was sold to a slaveholder in Portugal, the Lisbon Inquisition discovered his activities and tried him for sorcery.