Center for Human Rights and the Arts

Miguel's War with director Eliane Raheb, in conversation with Sabine El Chamaa
2023-03-01 19:15 - 21:45 (America/New_York)
CHRA will be screening Miguel’s War (2021, 128 min) at Upstate Films, with director Eliane Raheb in person. The film will be introduced and discussed by CHRA Fellow and filmmaker Sabine El Chamaa.
Eliane Raheb’s hybrid documentary follows Miguel, a gay man exiled in Spain who returns to Lebanon after 37 years to reflect on his experience growing up during the civil war, and to remember the relationships that shaped him as a son, lover, and soldier.
Filmed in Lebanon and Spain, the film melds documentary, animation, theater and archive in order to play with our notions of biography.
Miguel’s War premiered in Berlinale 2021 where it won both the audience award and Teddy award. The film also won the Robert Bosch Production Prize and was included in La Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde, a co-production platform in the Cannes Film Festival.
For more information, please visit the Upstate Films website.

Baha Hilo: The Olives of Palestine
2023-02-24 12:00 - 13:30
Olive trees have been a major part of Baha’s practice as an educator and community organizer. His talk will focus on the significance, history, and place of olive trees in Palestine, as well as the different methods used by the state of Israel to destroy this ancestral staple and tradition. Baha will share his project Preserve, which is curated by Emily Jacir, and supported by CHRA. Preserve focuses on the preservation and repair of the olive terraces at Dar Jacir, an arts and education center in Bethlehem.

Danielle Purifoy: "Remote Control"—Plantations and Black Forest Ecologies in the Black Belt
2023-02-10 12:00 - 13:30
This talk examines how the contemporary timber industry reproduces plantation power. It explores the “remote control” of land — such as absentee land ownership, Black family land grabs, new markets for energy, and legal regimes designed to “devalue” common property in favor of individual ownership and profit. Multi-generation Black homeplaces and communities, rooted in alternative modes of land relations, sustain themselves despite the friction between the economic interests of racial capitalism and the ecological interests of long-standing forest interdependence. With the further concentration of forestland ownership and local divestment throughout the Alabama Black Belt and the US South, the reciprocal traditions of Black forest ecologies represent modes of land relation and intervention that are necessary for livable futures.

Tender Edges: Microfestival by First-Year M.A. Students in Human Rights & the Arts
2022-12-10 - 2022-12-12
Tender Edges is a microfestival of live art projects created by the first year M.A. students in Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. These works-in-progress are part of The Politics of Interactive Live Art course taught by Tania El Khoury. The microfestival takes place at various times and locations on campus on Saturday 10 December and Monday 12 December. It includes one-to-one performances, video and sound installations, lecture performances, live drawing, occupation of campus spaces and immersive experiences.
Saturday 10 December
My Mind in a Bathtub by Jina Rishmawi (Barringer House 12:00 PM)
Olovo by Nestor Rotsen (Campus Center 12:00 AM – 10:00 PM)
The Thread by Anastasia Dzutstsati (Campus Center 1:00 PM)
[TL;DR] by Aya Rebai (Stevenson Library 2:00 PM)
Opacities by Raneem Ayyad (Aspinwall Hallway 3:00 PM)
Me and the Other by Guzal Alimova (Resnick Studio, Fisher Center 4:00 PM)
Inner Rave by Luka Gotsiridze (Resnick Studio, Fisher Center 5:00 PM)
Horizons by Anas Alkhatib (Resnick Studio, Fisher Center 6:00 PM)

Monday 12 December
Center and Edge by Mayss Al Alami (Campus Center 12:00 PM)
Home Is A Place by Laila Sharif (Barringer House 1:00 PM)
As We Bleed by Ciko Sidzumo (Bard Chapel 3:00 PM)
Camp Is… by Immanuel Williams (Campus Center 3:30 PM)
Digital Dystopias by Mariia Pankova (George Alden’s Computer Teaching Lab 4:00 PM)
To the FSB Officer Who Attended my Events by KK (Stevenson Library 5:00PM)

Nicholas Galanin: Unshadowed Land
2022-12-02 12:00 - 13:30
Culture is rooted in connection to land; like land, culture cannot be contained. I am inspired by generations of Lingít & Unangax̂ creative production and knowledge connected to the land I belong to. From this perspective I engage across cultures with contemporary conditions. My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future. Using Indigenous and non-Indigenous technologies and materials I resist romanticization, categorization and limitation. I use my work to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, active cultural amnesia, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, connection to and disconnection from the land.

Jumana Manna: When A Goat Eats the Scene
2022-11-18 12:00 - 13:30
In her talk, Jumana Manna will speak about her dual practice as a sculptor and a filmmaker, and her ongoing inquiries into the contradictions of preservation and ruination. Manna will focus on her recent film, Foragers, which depicts the criminalization of Palestinian plant foraging traditions. The film challenges the logic of extinction debates under settler-colonial and neoliberal regimes, namely the hierarchies of who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on. Considering the interdependence of plant and human life, in ecological time and within the moving image, Manna will look at how art forms partake in the refusal of attempted erasures, and can instead re-ground and recode meaning and matter.

Michael Rakowitz: (G)hosting
2022-11-04 12:00 - 13:30
A talk about hosts, ghosts, hospitality, hostility, and the complicated nature of a good time. In this lecture, Rakowitz will discuss (g)hosting, a term he uses to explore the intersection of hospitality and hostility in his work, as well as the recuperation of disappeared objects, smells, tastes, customs, and relationships through reactivations and substitutes.

Juliana Steiner: Flood the river, grow the food: embodying food systems
2022-10-21 12:00 - 13:30
This talk will focus on the work of Ecotone: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones, a program curated by Juliana Steiner as part of the as part of Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food. By investigating and honoring food sovereignty and distinct foodways, Ecotone explores some examples of restorative and regenerative agricultural technologies in Colombia. The commissioned projects that comprise Ecotone strive to offer a meeting point where communities can share knowledge amongst themselves and others, with the aim of learning and unlearning from the natural world. The talk will explore the manifold ways that humans inhabit and relate to a diversity of ecosystems across Colombia.

Zayaan Khan: From Seed-as-Object to Seed-as-Relation in South Africa
2022-09-30 12:00 - 13:30
Governments in South Africa and beyond are working to ratify new laws that limit and criminalize seed access and use. In response, a local and global resistance movement is working to keep seeds free and accessible. The idea of freedom is inherent to a seed, its very purpose is to share itself as widely as possible to ensure the continuity of its species while also providing material for further use. Yet these laws claim the exact opposite: seed is objectified and not seen in relation to all that rely on it, across the spectrums of species. Zayaan’s talk will focus on her multidisciplinary work with seed, land and food, based in sociopolitical, ecological, and spiritual-political perspectives.

Erased, ___Ascent of the Invisible
2022-09-29 16:00 - 18:00
CHRA will be screening Erased, ___Ascent of the Invisible (1976) by Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Halwani at 4pm on Thursday, 29 September at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. The event is free and open to the public. The film screening is organized by CHRA’s 2022-2023 Fellow Sabine El Chamaa. A Q&A between Ghassan and Sabine will follow.

“Thirty-five years ago, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I know.
He has disappeared since.
Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking in the street, but I wasn’t sure it was him.
Parts of his face were torn off, but his features had remained unchanged since the incident. Yet something was different, as if he wasn’t the same man.”

Director Ghassan Halwani takes the viewer on a forensic paper chase, uncovering, layer by layer, the darkest chapters of Lebanese history on walls, in documents, and urban architecture.

The Utopian Prerogative
2022-09-07 17:30 - 19:00 | Bard College, Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 12504, United States
This event will take place on Wednesday, 7 September, 5:30pm ET at Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation (RKC) 103 at Bard College.

“Each day we are sold different versions of yesterday, but rarely offered a different tomorrow. The apocalypse streams into every household at a flat rate. In an era of dystopian forebodings, the future can no longer be taken for granted, and optimism is under siege. It seems high time for a reboot of utopian literature, in which a space that is not, may yet come to be in the future. We are near forgetting that history is not a foregone conclusion, and that fatalism is the last refuge of the coward. How we shape the future lies in our own hands, but with the prerequisite that we are ready to think ahead, into the unknown and uncertain, imagining alternatives to given paradigms. If the seeds of human progress are indeed planted by ideas before they can blossom into transformations, utopian narratives are of existential importance.” Our guest, Ilija Trojanow, has spent the past several years working on a utopian novel and exploring the history of Utopia. At a time when we reckon with our destruction of the natural world and of imagination, Trojanow’s work encourages us to scrub clear our overclouded skies and to ask ourselves: what is literature if not unshackled fancy?

Out of Place: Three Writers on Fiction, Language, Exile, and Utopia
2022-09-06 17:30 - 19:00
This event on Tuesday, September 6 at 5:30pm ET at Weis Cinema, Bard College, brings together in person three esteemed writers—Nuruddin Farah, Ilija Trojanow, and Aleksandar Hemon—to read from and discuss their work. As suggested by the titles North of Dawn (Farah) and Nowhere Man (Hemon), all three writers are concerned in their work with questions of place and displacement, of cultural difference and shared humanity, and of what Trojanow in his recent work calls “utopian narratives.” Each also has deep personal and professional connections to more than one language, and together they comprise a knowledge of literatures that is truly stunning in its diversity, including works composed in Arabic, Bulgarian, German, Serbo-Croation, and Somali, among other languages. All three authors are also active in a plurality of genres and media, which taken together includes novels, short stories, criticism, plays, film and television scripts, and music. On this evening, they will read and discuss their work and explore common concerns and points of difference, and will invite the audience to join in the conversation.
Nuruddin Farah is the author of many novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight and North of Dawn. He has also written extensively in other genres, including short stories, plays, and essays. His non-fiction work includesYesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora and in-depth interviews with literary authors. He is currently working on a book that deals with torture and the history of Ethiopia. His work has won prominent international awards, including the Premio Cavour, the Neustadt Prize, and the Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace, and he has recently been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently on leave from Bard College, where he is Distinguished Professor of Literature.
Ilija Trojanow is a writer, essayist, translator, editor, publisher, and filmmaker. His novels include Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around Us) and Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds). He is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including the Bertelsmann Literature Prize, Marburg Literature, and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. His writing has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Czech, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, Polish, and Arabic. As a political activist, he has recently founded Der utopische Raum, a multimedia platform for debate of visionary, provocative thinking.
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of the novelThe Lazarus Project and three collections of stories, Nowhere Man, The Question of Bruno, and Love and Obstacles and has published stories, essays, and criticism in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, and other venues. He has also written for television and is co-writer of the screenplay for Matrix Revolutions. Hemon has been has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award (twice). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Putting the Cooker on Low
2022-05-06 12:00 - 13:30
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Ama Josephine Budge and writer Dr. Chelsea M. Frazier, moderated by Dr. J.T. Roane (Arizona State University).
Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises. Putting the Cooker on Low intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black womxn artists internalize value-(as)-labour-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses and slippages these anti-erotic modes of survival engender – as felt by both human and non-human ecologies – remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low, that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.

UNDERCOOKED Works by MA in Human Rights & the Arts
2022-05-04 - 2022-05-11
Undercooked features works-in-progress by the current MA students at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Developed as part of their practice-based core course with Tania El Khoury this spring (HRA 504: Collaborations and Community-based Art), all of the projects engage in different ways with the politics of food and land. The work includes performance, music, sound, murals, and food. Some performances take place on Wednesday May 4th, others Wednesday May 11th, and others will be ongoing between the two dates.

Wednesday May 4th
Cacao Sanctuary: A Performance by Baitsai Luo
Studio North 2:30 pm
Market Price by Garrett Sager
Studio North 3:00pm
Kitchen Seminar by Ali Hussein Al-Adawy
Studio North 4:00 pm
Queer Kurultai by Pasha Zalevskii
7 Pine Street, Tivoli 6:00 pm
Wednesday May 11th

Fatal Morgana by Adam HajYahia
Bard Community Farm 12:30pm
Skins of Nature by Carol Montealegre
Bard Farm 2:30pm
Alone Time by Nour Annan
Studio North 3:00 pm
Lawn and Order by Isabella Indolfi
Fisher Center Lawn 4:00pm
The Drought by CEREBRO :.
Resnick Studio 6:00pm
Ongoing

Holy Grain by Maid Alrafie
Grafitti Wall, Campus Center
The Patapsco Inn by Hattie Wilder Karlstrom
thepatapscoinn.tumblr.com

Activism in Process: Projects from Afghanistan, Puerto Rico, and Tunisia
2022-04-29 12:00 - 13:30
Join us for a panel discussion with CHRA’s current collaborators in “Activism in Process”.
CHRA collaborates annually with a group of activists and organizers who are leading grassroots efforts in their communities. For our first “Activism in Process”, we are bringing together Badr Baabou from Damj (a LGBTQ++ rights organization based in Tunisia); Ernesto Pujol (a social choreographer based in Puerto Rico); and Elizabeth Rubin and Natasha Matteson from Last Exit Kabul (a global network supporting Afghan refugees).

Elizabeth Rubin and Natasha Matteson from Last Exit Kabul
Last Exit Kabul is a civic initiative made up of journalists and activists who came together to help Afghans, left behind by the U.S. withdrawal, escape and survive. It has become part of a transnational network for direct action that has arisen as a response to the U.S. government’s crime of indifference.
Ernesto Pujol is founder of The Listening School, which teaches deep-listening skills for the creation of conscious culture; The Savage Gardener Studio, which works to decolonize island ecology by designing native & edible gardens of sited memory; and Casa Pujol, an interdisciplinary residency for visiting scholars in San Juan. Ernesto is currently the Master Gardener at Hope Plantation, the Program Coordinator at Save a Sato Foundation animal shelter, and the Residency Director at Casa Pujol.
Badr Baabou from Damj
Damj is the first LGBTQ+ rights organization in Tunisia. Following a wave of arrests in 2008, Damj began its work by creating safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community in Tunisia and a legal support team to counter the arrests. Damj works towards a vision of a pluralistic, egalitarian and safe Tunisia. It focuses on abolishing law 230 of the penal code, which bans homosexuality. Dialogue and collaboration are at the heart of Damj, seeking to eradicate all forms of discrimination against minorities in Tunisia.
Photo by Yassine Gaidi.

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Activism and Freedom in Egypt
2022-04-27 17:00 - 18:30
CHRA is hosting the launch & discussion of Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s newly published book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated on Wednesday, April 27th, 5:00pm EDT at Weis Cinema, Bard College.
Join us for a conversation with filmmaker and activist Sanaa Seif and scholar Omnia Khalil as they reflect on the ongoing incarceration of activists in Egypt beyond the victimization of the detained, tracing how the singular experience becomes collective under the current Sisi regime.
Co-sponsored by the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Bard.
The event is free and open to the public.

Memory of the Earth: Land Dispossession, Violence, and War in Colombia
2022-04-20 19:45 - 22:15
CHRA will be screening Memory of the Earth: Land Dispossession, Violence, and War in Colombia, a program of three short films made in collaboration between the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture on Wednesday, April 20 at 7:45 pm EDT at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck NY. The films center around the issue of land dispossession in Urabá, a region in northwestern Colombia, which has been gripped by political violence since the 1980s. Paramilitary groups and massacres have driven away thousands from their homes and agricultural land. More than 4 million hectares in Colombia are now considered to be stolen from small campesinos as a result of 60 years of war.
Each of the films in this program offers a different insight into the complex dynamics of violence that produce dispossession. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the co-directors, Hannah Meszaros Martin and CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow, Oscar Pedraza Vargas.
The event is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made through this link.

The following films will be screened during this event:
Coquitos (43 min, 2021)
Coquitos explores the slow violence of dispossession. Sometimes this practice is backed by armed forces and physical threats to community members; other times, it is perpetrated through the slow movement of saltwater that seeps into the roots of plantains after a flood, rotting them from within. The film looks at the spectrum of violence that constitutes dispossession within the everyday lives of the residents of Coquitos. This violence is intimate, concerning the depth and width of the canal which borders their farms, which determines the flow of water that rises up and spills over, entering into the space of the home, their interior lives. The film looks at the future of dispossession as it is driven by the extreme precarity that the residents live with everyday, and embodied by the fragility of the land.
Honduras y La Negra (27 min, 2021)
The massacres of Honduras and La Negra occurred on March 4th, 1988. The victims were banana workers and union members. These massacres are emblematic in the history of the Colombian War, and exemplify the way in which state actors, as well as private and illegal sectors, plan and execute similar acts of violence. Honduras y La Negra uses archival materials, oral testimonies, aerial images, and 3D reconstructions to tell the story of the massacre and its reverberations throughout the country.
California (26 min, 2021)
California materializes the multiplicity of land dispossession. Farms, homes, fields, barracks, massacre sites are all continuously disappearing, erased by agroindustrial monocultures for exports to the U.S and Europe. While bananas visually capture the landscape, forming a uniform skin that wraps around the earth, an invisible web of intimate financial relations forms over this patchwork of fields and canals. This web is also a network of paramilitary control, which, along with and through the bananas, encloses and chokes this small community of campesinos.

Khar va Attar خار وعطار : The Thorn and the Healers
2022-04-15 12:00 - 13:30
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission and a text by Dr. Manijeh Moradian, featuring a Q&A with artist Amitis Motevalli.
For Khar va Attar, the artist takes on the challenge of channeling a conversation between 10th century Persian scholar and doctor, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), her uncle Manoucher Emrani, an agricultural engineer and botanist, and her friend, Soraya Medina, a recently departed food justice advocate. This surrealist séance takes the form of a performative video woven together with other digital media. Khar va Attar explores the various medicinal properties of the different parts of the rose as well as other foods and plants, creating a hybridized recipe for healing.
Moderated by Dr. Angela Harutyunyan (American University of Beirut)

Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years (Part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure)
2022-04-05 17:30 - 20:00
CHRA will be screening Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976) by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima on Tuesday, April 5th, 5:30pm EDT at Weis Cinema, Bard College. The event is free and open to the public. The film screening will be followed by post-screening discussions.

Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years is Part three of public film screening series Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure organized by CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow Nadine Fattaleh. Hosted in the Hudson Valley and online, the series considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.
A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics. In this light, the program will feature the film by Haile Gerima, which follows Omar Amiralay’s shorts (March 18), screened at Upstate Films at Rhinebeck, NY, and contemporaneous works by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (1939-2018) (April 5), screened online. The series develops a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the moment of the 1970s that mediate narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The film program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure. The series will culminate in a roundtable discussion later in the Spring. All events are free and open to the public.

Layli Long Soldier: My Art Is a Being: Building a Relationship to Art through Agreement, Ethics, and Pleasure
2022-04-01 12:00 - 13:30
By understanding our art as a being with whom we create a relationship, Layli Long Soldier explores the ways in which we can make commitments and agreements with our writing and art; uphold expectations and enact reciprocity, as one would do with a relative; and nourish our relationship through pleasure, playfulness, or enjoyment. These agreements with our art, in turn, lay a foundation of ethics that can protect us from capitalism and the dangers of becoming human art-machines! This will primarily be an artist talk in which Long Soldier will share images/videos of projects that have helped her build a practice based on relationship and reciprocity rather than productivity, alone.

Films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (Part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure)
2022-03-29 12:00 - 14:00
CHRA will be screening four short films by Egyptian filmmaker Ateyyat El Abnoudy on Tuesday, March 29th, 12pm EDT on Zoom (link). The event is free and open to the public. Four films will be shown on Zoom and followed by post-screening discussion with audiovisual archivist Yasmin Desouki (Chicago Film Archives, formerly Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Egypt).

حصان الطين Mud House (1970), 12 min
أغنية توحة الحزينة Sad Song of Touha (1972), 12 min
الساندوتش The Sandwich (1975), 12 min
بحار العطش Seas of Thirst (1981), 44 min

Films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy are part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure, a series of public film screenings organized by CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow Nadine Fattaleh. Hosted in the Hudson Valley and online, the series considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.

A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics. In this light, the program will feature short films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy, which follows Omar Amiralay’s shorts (March 18), and will be followed by a film by Haile Gerima (1946-), screened at Bard College on April 5. The series develops a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the moment of the 1970s that mediate narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The film program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure. The series will culminate in a roundtable discussion later in the Spring. All events are free and open to the public.

Films by Omar Amiralay (Part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure)
2022-03-17 19:45 - 21:30
CHRA will be screening three short films by Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay on Thursday, March 17th, 7:45pm EDT at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck NY. The event is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made through this link. The films will be followed by post-screening discussions:

محاولة عن سد الفرات Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970), 13 min
الدجاج The Chickens (1977), 41 min
طوفان في بلاد البعث A Flood in Ba‘ath Country (2003), 49 min

This screening of films by Omar Amiralay are part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure, a series of public film screenings organized by CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow Nadine Fattaleh. Hosted in the Hudson Valley and online, the series considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.
A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics. In this light, the program will first feature Omar Amiralay’s shorts (March 18), followed by contemporaneous works by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (1939-2018), screened online on March 29th, and film by Haile Gerima (1946-), screened at Bard College on April 5. The series develops a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the moment of the 1970s that mediate narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The film program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure. The series will culminate in a roundtable discussion later in the Spring. All events are free and open to the public.
