We See, Will See, Are Seen, Have Scene: EUROPA + Q&A with So Mayer for GIFC

We See, Will See, Are Seen, Have Scene

Collaborative poetic visions of past / present / future / othernows

EUROPA (Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, 1932, after the poem by Anatol Stern, 12 mins)

QUEERING DI TEKNOLOJIK (a kollaborative projekt by Teresa Cisneros, So Mayer, Timothy Smith, Valentino Vecchietti, Campbell X, narrated by their kollective digital voice, 2019, 8 mins)

wūûūwūûū (Rae-Yen Song, 2021, 3 mins)

CASTOROSCENE (George Finlay Ramsay and Alex Hetherington, 2021, 11 mins)

Full programme: 100 mins

Warnings and invitations from the past, present, future and othernows – four collaborative films that are generous with their form and practices, calling us to share them and share in them. Films that are poems that are films, mixing up visual and verbal languages to reach us where we are, broadcasting on all channels. Films that reach out to us in plural and more-than-human voices, spoken and written and interpreted, across times and spaces that are re-joined by inventive editing. Films that think with animacy as a principle of liveliness drawing on lived experience, soliciting our attention to what matters, what is and how we are matter, in the world that we all too precariously share.

EUROPA is a ‘lost’ film found, a legendary poem-film by Polish avant-garde filmmakers Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, who became political exiles in London at the start of WWII. Europa was believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis: a print of the film was only found in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin in 2019, and restored by Fixafilm, Warsaw. Originally made in the Themersons’ bedroom, the film includes animation, ’trick table’ cameraless shots that show grass growing and a beating heart, and Brechtian gestural performances by the filmmakers’ friends: all striking strategies for locating a visual language equivalent to the poem it adapts, Anatol Stern’s famous cry against power.

QUEERING DI TEKNOLOJIK is a collaborative film that speaks from a possible collective future, asking for intergenerational collaboration to realise the possibility. Influenced by queer and feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism, the film blends documentary of contemporary protests, archive footage and digital animation as the future collective speaks back to us in the language of our visual archive, and an equally collaged verbal language. The voice-over is narrated by an AI trained on multiple voices varied across genders, age and ethnicities, the voice of the collective who together shaped the film’s message of hope and urgency.

​‘wūûūwūûū’ offers a mutating, ever-shifting vision of worlds within worlds within worlds. It introduces a cast of obscure, interconnected creatures, who variously consume, inhabit and host each other, in an ongoing, cyclical symbiosis of survival. Bodies do what bodies do: eat and excrete; sing and dance; come and go. Moments of levity and menace combine with elemental forces and unstoppable motions to form a distinctive, disorientating, but somehow harmonious process.

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After humans have destroyed the world (again) an unnamed beast swims up from a forgotten swamp and rebuilds the world from zilch. CASTOROCENE, shifting between essay and semi-fictionalised nature documentary, is a ​‘film pome’ dedicated to one of nature’s great architects. Depicting wetlands as the living entity that they are, the camera dwells on a landscape of viscous textures, organic debris and nonhuman sculptures, considering parities between acts of borrowing, rewilding and animal world building. Filmed by artist Alexander Hetherington on 16mm film in the wetlands at Bamff in East Perthshire, Scotland.

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About GAMIS:

Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios (GAMIS) is a charitable organisation committed to supporting experimental arts and community-focused film programming in Govanhill.

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Programmed as part of Govanhill International Festival and Carnival 2022

Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and by Scotland Loves Local