Public Knowledge: F(r)ictions - Camden Art Centre

F(r)ictions is a screening space for experimental film and video work, making room for imperfections, unfinished work, left-field pieces, and diy work. The screening series is a space for feminist film, putting an emphasis on work by queer and trans people of colour

F(r)ictions is invested in the risks audio-visual works take: film can play on time and create abstractions in ways that hint at multiple possibilities/differences/contexts and provoke curiosity and questioning. At its best, film builds networks of escape and paints out new worlds and imaginations.

This programme explores ideas around generational reverberations, queerness and nature, gender and labour, poetry as film, and more. These films were released in groups on a theme, every Wednesday over a period of three weeks during June.

The regular F(r)ictions film-night has screened music videos, 30-second clips, excerpts from larger films, classic short films, personal archive footage, and more. Accessibility is an important axis in how the programme is run. F(r)ictions is curated and hosted by Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer and was shortlisted for the MEAD fellowship in 2018. Find out more about F(r)ictions via their website, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

 

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 The Artists

Labour, reproduction, repetition

Sam Lanchin: Me Soplaron las Pupusas
Me Soplaron las Pupusas is an exercise in making. Sam makes a tortilla in his bedroom. Around him, sus hermanas make tortillas in the little country which makes them. These reference points do not always align, but he tries to make them fit… intuitively, like making tortillas.

 

Katerina Mimikou: While doing what my mom told me to
Why do I have to put the dirty towel to the laundry?
Why do I have to separate the socks to dark and white?
Why do I have to select the correct cycle?
Why do I have to iron?
Why is my brother watching me watching television while I am ironing his pyjamas?
Because that’s what my mom told me to do.

 

Rehana Zaman: Lourdes
Lourdes is a new work developed from a residency in Tepito, Mexico, centering upon a discussion with a market trader called Lourdes. Interviewed about her experience of running the stall and the politics of the barrio, Lourdes’ dry and humorous responses elucidate her influence and situation as a woman in the marketplace and within wider society, describing the strategies the female community use in their attempts to destabilise power. In her discussion of Albures, a form of double entendre laden speech specific to Mexico, a non-oppositional form of resistance posited around vulgarity and pleasure is traced.

Motion and time

Joanne Lee: 9-16
A film I made when I was feeling very uncertain and still living at home. I shot places I had visited previously during the summer, the view outside of my room, places I passed by on the way to uni. Throughout the film I explored notions of the peripheral gaze, I wanted to look at how identity and place can be represented through a gentler way.

 

Nicky Chue and Florence Low: woodland
A conversation between a Pisces and a Capricorn about stifling isolation and nurturing solitude.

 

Summer M: Prelude
‘Prelude’ is a lost fragment from an essay film entitled ‘A Bridge of Light.’ Amidst increased reports of paranormal activity and haunted by ‘the spectre of a world that could be free’, the film’s protagonist embarks upon a journey across London. A speculative theory tool = layers of the past begin to emerge – mix with the present – & form the beginnings of liberatory new futures.

 

April Lin: R Rest
Here; come, restore, replenish, relax. Crafting a better world is not an easy adventure. Rest with me.

Psychogeographies and poetics 

Morisha Moodley: The Princess of the Dunes
This film is an experiment in storytelling and narrative tropes

 

Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer: corridors, highways
maybe people like us live in the past and through it, murmurs of places and memories that we didn’t even live ourselves, constant convergence of reality and could-be’s and parallel stories. but in the instance of trying to live life and get through the day it’s been pulling me back hard, with each day it pulls further back because i let it. why should diaspora mean holding my fingers before my eyes in order to pause forever to try to see what I was once told. I need to depart somehow — or arrive.

 

Edmund Hardy: SK Delivery
SK Delivery is a film about encompassing the inverse. Icy solidarities. Commitment but burned out; camaraderie but distanced; an action film but static. Half Japanese but living in England, I often think about the same but parallel: of being half English but living in Japan, within a different representation of mixedness (hāfu / half-ness). So the starting point for this film was to lie beside a chalk pit in Aichi prefecture, ten years in the future, and then be pulled back on the plot of an action sci fi. How many Solidarity Keys do you need for worldwide revolution? Who donated so large a sum to the strike fund? And when did the blossom wars finally end?

The Artists

Samuel Lanchin is an artist based in Leeds, working primarily with mixed-media installations. He can be found performing as one half of samOne samTwo, an artist duo also based in Leeds or DJing as Papi Chulo, mixing music from Latin America and its diaspora.

Katerina Mimikou studies Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts London. The context of her work consists of the ideas of power, hierarchy, and authority as those are created through gender, family, and language. The artist’s personal experiences and stories give substance to a combination of cultural and societal beliefs, gender and social stereotypes and come together in order to bring the viewers into a place of questioning their own position.

Rehana Zaman (b 1982, Heckmondwike UK) is based in London, working with moving image and performance. Her work is concerned with the effect of multiple social dynamics on how individuals and groups relate. These narrative based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. A driving question within Zaman’s work is how socio-political concerns, in addition to providing content, can structure how an artwork is produced.

Joanne Lee lives and works in Glasgow. Her practice is interested in using moving image as a way of translating the subjective experience of being and experiencing into a cinematic reality. Using the framework of autoethnography to give space to uncertainty and new articulations, questioning what it means to make and see from the periphery. Joanne has performed, exhibited and screened work at venues including Platform, The Pipe Factory, Intermedia Gallery and 16th Nicholson Street. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art with BA (Hons) in Sculpture and Environmental Art 2019.

Nicky Chue is a queer BPOC filmmaker from Berlin who spends a lot of their time sitting in nature and identifying bees. Florence Low is a queer British Armenian artist, graphic designer, photographer, drag king and dreamy Pisces. They are currently obsessed with Kate Bush, cats, queer space in London, astrology and attachment styles.

Summer M is a visual artist living in London. Their work moves between personal and collective experiences of desire, hope and despair. Immersed in these transformative edges of loss, other worlds marked by new ways of being together slowly emerge.

April Lin is an artist and filmmaker investigating the pluralities of truths constructed, contained, and disseminated via image-making. Merging experimental techniques with a commitment to centring marginalised knowledges, they approach the moving image as a tool to remember forgotten pasts, honour erased presents, and imagine new futures.

Morisha Moodley is an artist working at the intersection between writing and video. They use their work to negotiate with the world, so it often traverses the lines of identity and experience.

Anuka is a Georgian-German filmmaker, working in sound and multimedia. Their work questions themes of displacement, translation, diaspora, gossip, bodybuilding, dysphoria. They attempt to work against ethnocentricism, in particular in terms of West Asia and the diaspora, disentangling ideas of ‘the (near) East’.

YOKAI / Edmund Hardy is a film maker and writer currently based in London. He wrote a book about poetry called ‘Complex Crosses’, often writes about Marxism and race, and is working on a long film called ‘Negative Worlds’ – about the search for another world within this one. Born in Tokyo, he is Japanese-English.