screening
@PROJECT SPACE FESTIVAL BERLIN

screening

@PROJECT SPACE FESTIVAL BERLIN

Film still: Untitled by Sweatmother, 2022

Join us for the fifth edition of the screening series featuring participating artists from the 6x6 Project online platform, which will take place at Atelier Gardens *Arts Lab (Pink House) and as part of Project Space Festival Berlin.

Featuring films by Musquiqui Chihying, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Liz Rosenfeld, Sweatmother and Melanie Jame Wolf

Wednesday 12 June 2024
The event starts at 20:00

DJ set by VerbalVisual before the screening
The short film programme will start promptly at sunset

ATELIER GARDENS
Oberland Str. 26-35
12099 Berlin

Free Admission

Rather than providing a single overarching theme, the screening programme draws on a wide range of artists' film and moving image approaches on hand, attempting to uncover underlying tendencies and connections and thereby constructing a web of associations.

short film Programme

The Lighting
Musquiqui Chihying
21:00 min / 2021

Light is the spectre that hovers around photographic technologies. From analog to digital and from light-sensitive coating to computer algorithms, light always occupies an irreplaceable place in competing image-making technologies. Throughout the process of negotiating with light, however, it cannot be disputed that white supremacy in this competition has “unconsciously” and “imperceptibly” shaped human prejudices. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first white persons to (self-)reflect this crisis in the discourses of the former West: when he was invited to Mozambique assisting the country’s development of image in 1977-78, he realised that Kodak films that were mainstream of the time could not be accurately exposed for portraits featuring subjects of dark skin tones. We cannot simply attribute this technical failure to inadequate equipment for the reason that even the most advanced algorithms used today still show a rather high error rate when determining certain group of people and their skin tones.

The Lighting aims to revisit and clarify the issue of discrimination rooted in technological development and image production through an interdisciplinary exploration. The work comprises three narratives—three professional Togolese photographers explore how to use instruments to compensate for insufficient exposure for dark skin tones; a leading software engineer developing facial recognition algorithms at Taiwan’s MediaTek talks about how they have created a camera algorithm that is highly popular on the African continent; moreover, the artist uses Kodak’s Ektachrome, a popular film in the 70s, to produce a kung fu film in the style of exploitation film, using images of the famous Black martial art film star, Jim Kelly, in Bruce Lee’s movies in the 70s. The work is also interlaced with an animated Bruce Lee as the narrator trained by facial motion capture and a speech recognition algorithm.

Thieves
Michelle Williams Gamaker
27:00 min / 2023

Taking inspiration from early Hollywood and British cinema, Thieves is a thrilling fantasy adventure based on both the 1924 silent black-and-white and 1940 Technicolor films of the same name: The Thief of Bagdad. Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu, who starred in the original films as marginalised characters, become leading characters in Williams Gamaker’s compelling retelling.

The film sees a speculative union unfold between Anna May Wong and Sabu (acted by long-term Williams Gamaker collaborators Dahong Wang and Krishna Istha) where the performers are recast and reimagined as ‘brown protagonists’, claiming their leading roles through direct action.

Thieves evokes early cinema and Technicolor classics, blending practical and analogue methods of special effects with contemporary technology to combine past and present filmmaking.

Untitled
Sweatmother
09:00 min / 2022

Paul B. Preciado says “Trans bodies […] though living, speak in languages unknown to the colonizer, they have dreams psychoanalysts are unaware of”. In this live performance, the artist works with his synth methodology to synthesize a “woman” who is a reflection of their past self. Not only is this film technically using many tools and machines, it draws a parallel with the trans body and how our bodies are tools of equipment - tools to guard us, tools to help us “pass”, tools towards euphoria, discovery and experimentation.

The Creep
Melanie Jame Wolf
14:40 min / 2023

The Creep is a poetic meditation on power, storytelling, violence, masculinity, and things that creep. To creep is to move quietly, with stealth, to avoid detection. A creep is a person who produces feelings of discomfort and fear in others. Creeps creep. Their violence is experienced as affect - felt rather than seen - it is hard to quantify and therefore hard to prove, sometimes even hard to believe. People creep. So can institutions. Time creeps. So can pleasure. So can death. The film borrows the visual language of Sergio Leone's 1960's and 70's spaghetti westerns to explore Walter Benjamin's idea of mythic violence: wherein oppressive and fascist power is understood as being accumulated and maintained by disingenuously performing itself as natural law. The film plays out as a darkly humorous duet between an Outlaw (played by the artist themselves), and an unseen Mountain 'there yonder'.

White Sands Crystal Foxes
Liz Rosenfeld
34:00 min / 2022

WHITE SANDS CRYSTAL FOXES is an experimental cinema work created for both a 2D and 360° immersive experience starring Phoebe Patey-Ferguson. Approaching questions regarding queer sexuality in the face of the degeneration of nature and sustainable resources, Rosenfeld situates the audience within a cruising fallout shelter, where they are taken on a journey across the future of flesh, holes, crystals, and foxes. Humans have failed in providing a future with ecological resources and environmental survival, what happens when all they are left with is themselves?

WHITE SANDS CRYSTAL FOXES is the final work in a two year creative body of research in which Rosenfeld has been exploring and creating towards their first feature film FOXES. Through performance, short videos & films, drawings, collages and expanded cinema installations, Rosenfeld has been researching themes of queer desire, climate change, invisible genocide, and radical-positive apocalypse.

Atelier Gardens

Atelier Gardens is an iconic 6-acre film campus overlooking Berlin’s famous Tempelhof airport. Known as “UFA Studios Tempelhof” and later as “Berliner Union-Film” or “BUFA”, it has been home to the pioneers of film, and is steeped in more than 100 years of film and TV.

Project Space Festival

The Project Space Festival is an initiative of the independent visual arts scene in Berlin with a common interest in mutual support and visibility. The month-long programme of 30 events provides a comprehensive insight into the artistic and curatorial work of self-organised spaces. The festival events take place at 31 different venues in Berlin and are accessible free of charge.