CIRCUIT CAST

"What's good for Māori is good for everyone" - Qiane Matata-Sipu

How do Māori and Pākeha relate to, and value whenua? What are their differing values and how do they intersect? What is the connection between generosity and Tino Rangitiratanga? In this conversation artists Martin Awa Clarke Langdon (Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Whāwhākia, Ngāti Hikairo, Kāi Tahu), Rebecca Hobbs and Qiane Matata-Sipu (Te Wai-o-hua, Waikato-Tainui) discuss art, activism and mutual wellbeing for Māori and Tauiwi. The conversation takes place in the context of recent disputes over Ihumātao, a North Island volcanic site currently the subject of dispute between land developers and mana whenua members whose families have resided in Ihumātao for many generations.

To learn more about Ihumātao:

S.O.U.L - Save Our Unique Landscape - https://www.protectihumatao.com/

In the second part of our podcast series Popular Glory: Contemporary Queerness and the Moving Image, host Robbie Handcock speaks to Laura Duffy and Aliyah Winter about recent collaborations, and how to image queer lives.

The pod begins with Winter and Duffy discussing the process of working with queer youth to create an exhibition for Te Uru Gallery. Duffy talks about her recent collaboration with Owen Connors at Blue Oyster Art Project Space entitled DUIRVIAS, and Winter discusses her research-driven processes, and subsequent performative gestures, which seek to summon and acknowledge queer histories.

Image: Aliyah Winter, Rage (2020)

Revisiting HADHAD - Part 3: The schism of Liberalism

In Part 3 of this conversation Sean Grattan and Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió discuss HADHAD as a virus analogous to Covid 19, “something that allows for change” and Sean’s forthcoming project about the contradictions of liberalism.

Part 1: Shooting the film, Horror as genre (26:07 mins)

Part 2: Language, Technology and Totalitarianism (26:57 mins)

Catalogue Notes

00:00 (MS): "Is HADHAD the quintessential revolutionary figure?"

02:00 (MS): Makes analogy with HADHAD and Covid 19 - "The virus could be seen in your movie as a positive, something that allows for change...not change within the existing accepted categories but new categories, and I find that really hopeful and really exciting"

03:54 (SG): “There might be a liberal fantasy of being liberated by the other … it’s connected to the oppressive regimes of past liberalism……by fact of who I am (a white Western male) I have that with me… ". Discusses Slavoj Žižek's statement that 'the most important step to begin is a ruthless self-critique'

07:00 (MS): "The big takeaway for me from this conversation is the kind of privilege that Art offers… the privilege and joy of being able to ask questions and not resolve them"

(SG): Discusses 8 years writing a script which addresses "the fundamental schism of liberalism". Describes the plot of a group of political agitators seeking to establish a utopia. Describes the films theme as " … the double sided nature of the liberal ideology….in the one hand you have market liberalism and on the other you have political liberalism… but they’re intertwined… you’re free to do what you want and live the life we choose, but you have to do it within a market economy that essentially has no community or compassion about it…at the same time you have to compete for resources"

Discusses eight year script writing process “I think it could still be a relevant work because the screws are getting tightened so much now"

11:30 (MS): Do you think the pandemic has exposed the fallacy of ... the market economy? ... Is your new movie more hopeful?"

13:30 (SG) Discusses the need to resist cyncism. Discusses US/UK liberal politicians of the past 20 years (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Thatcher / Reagan & Blair / Clinton) “Liberals in power are the ones who deserve the most scrutiny…they’re the enablers…"

(MS): "One of the most amazing things about your work is how you’re able to have these Macro level concerns with politics, philosophy, language and society, and yet you’re able to bring them down to earth with characters, plot lines, music and cinemtography"

17:24 End of Part 3

In Part 2 of this conversation Sean Grattan and Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió discuss language, technology and post-humanism in HADHAD. They explore the relationship between white supremacy and technology in the USA in 2020.

HADHAD (41:21 mins)

Part 1: Shooting the film, Horror as genre (26:07 mins)

Part 3: The schism of Liberalism (17:24 mins)

Catalogue Notes

00:00 (MS): Continued discussion of David Lynch as counterpoint - "… his movies speak to... the mask of normality in American suburbia...Your film is more about questions of technology, what is the human, and language itself?... What is the risk of accepting that our subjectivity may be be coded in technology?”

04:00 (SG): Language as the pre-eminent tool of communication, but also something hijacked by commercial interests. Notes aspirational commercial slogans ‘Be Yourself, ‘Choose Happiness’

07:00 (MS): Language, technology and post-humanism. “What you’re saying is language tainted by ideology…in it’s various forms, technological, artistic, natural..." "It’s a deep engagement with the problem of the enlightenment and (the question of) in what way can be become masters of our condition?”

(MS) Discusses HADHAD's ambiguous form "Is this thing a projection in their imagination? is this a physical manifestation of language itself? “Is it a concept, is it a metaphor or is it a different type of being?”

12:00 (SG): Describes the HADHAD as … this thing that disrupts but which is potentially creating a new thing…" He discusses evolution.

14:00 (SG) - On the enlightenment; "The idea of progress I find very confusing… establishment powers will manipulate that idea… it can be a very conservative…it can be a tool of oppression”

15:00 (MS) - Discussion on totalitarianism. (MS): "A mode of power where everyone is orientated to 1 way of being, 1 leader, 1 vision, 1 way of communicating." Discusses Frankfurt School philosophers claim that paradoxically the enlightenment had it’s last moment with the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, a rationality taken to an extreme.

Discusses white supremacy and technology in 2020. “There is a branch of white supremacism - certainly in the US - which has to do with technological evolution, which poses a kind of transhumanism… in a way the movie was prescient…all these things were there in 2012 but since then have become more acute…the technological monopolies have become more acute…white supremacism has become more overt and more dominant”

18:00 (SG) Discusses the current political moment. Describes HADHAD’S arrival in the movie as “a metaphor for how the totalitarian system is untenable” and how the movies extreme rationality is counterpointed with an alterity (HADHAD).

22:47 (SG) Liberalism and Western-style democracy. "Cynicism needs to be resisted at all times…but what we’re living in fosters cynicism… what happened with World War 2, is this what rationality brings us? Is that what liberalism brings us?"

26:57 End of Part 2

In Part 1 of this 3 part conversation Sean Grattan and Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió discuss the making of HADHAD, the relationship with the Horror genre and the influence of other film-makers and teachers on the making of the work.

HADHAD (41:21 mins)

Part 2: Language, Technology and Totalitarianism (26:07 mins)

Part 3: The schism of Liberalism (17:24 mins)

Catalogue Notes:

00:00 Welcome and Introduction from Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió

02:00 Background to making the work at CalArts in Los Angeles (2011/12). Shoot and location

04:36 Discussion of HADHAD’s high production values. Working on a budget with student labour whilst maintaining the film’s sense of horror and tension. Directing actors.

08:40 On the characters robotic personas. (MS) - “One of the ruses of the movie is that the characters may or may not already be Cyborgs… the tightness becomes a metaphor for the characters belief in the coming technological singularity…everything is stripped down to the bare essentials so there’s no room for human expression… technological determinism is so profound”

10:00 What is this movie about? How to describe what happens?

(SG) Describes the plot and the tropes of a traditional horror movie "A group of people, they may be strangers, they’ve gone in vacation to some kind of isolated environment...normally in a horror movie there’s some kind of transgressions, the teenagers will be punished…" Discusses removing stylistic elements of horror and making the intruder “more absurd”

13:00 (MS) - Characters and dialogue. “You remove the emotion, which you could argue is the core of horror..the emotional reaction is what draws audience to this kind of movie…the emotion doesn’t disappear, it gets heightened…why did you so that and why is it so successful?”

15:30 (SG) - Influence of theatre, analytical thinking and English upbringing on the dialogue. "The challenge was using the analytical script on to some other kind of cinematic framework...The tension gets created from putting elements together that don’t work together cinematically in a conventional sense… there’s this kind of humanity that I can’t scrub out…”

18:30 (MS) - Talks about the film discarding emotion but being “saturated with emotion”

21:00 (SG) Talks about Directors, Theorists and Teachers that inpsired the work; David Lynch, James Benning, Claire Denis, Charles Gaines who "rewrote my story of art" . The need to create ”a philosophy that’s embodied”, discusses merging cinema and critical theory to understand “…who are humans, what are they doing, what is our method of living, what is the dynamic between power and subjectivity?”

26:07 End of Part 1

In this interview film-maker M D Brown discusses three short films he made between 2000-2004 inspired by the stream of consciousness technique of modernist European writers including James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Each film featured the voice of a lone male, ruminating on late night memories of murky events and personal relationships whose character has been shaped by the passage of time. Using a visual technique of fleeting images interrupted by black, Brown sought to evoke the nature of memory as a subjective series of affective images flickering across the mind's eye. Interviewed by Mark Williams.

Watch the films on CIRCUIT:

https://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/m-d-brown

Popular Glory: Contemporary Queerness and the Moving Image is a new four-part podcast series hosted by Pōneke artist Robbie Handcock, in which he interviews a range of Aotearoa artists working in moving image who employ queerness as identity, content and strategy.

In Episode One, we speak to Berlin based Tāmaki Makaurau artist ZK Steiner-Fox. Here ZK speaks about their move from installation and sculpture through to video and performance, their experience at the Vada Artists Residency in California, and their reference to genre film as a departure point for exploring queer identities. Leading from their work Popular Glory, which came out of the residency, we discuss how the horror movie format—with all its tensions as well as its tropes—is used in ZK’s work to examine the impact of queer coding, classic Hollywood morality and the everyday terror of navigating contemporary media. ZK has previously shown at Artspace Aotearoa, Window Gallery, play_station, and was part of CIRCUIT’s presentation at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival 2020.

 

Robbie Handcock is a Pōneke based artist and facilitator at play_station gallery. He is also co-founder of the vlog Glad We Did That with co-host and fellow artist Elisabeth Pointon.

In this pod Moya Lawson speaks with Tanya Te Miringa Te Rorarangi Ruka and Martin Awa Clarke Langdon; two artists currently exhibiting public artworks in Wellington which celebrate Matariki, a star cluster used traditionally for ancestral navigation, timing the seasons and a marker of the Māori new year.

Listen to Martin discuss his illuminated stills on the Courtenay Place lightboxes, and Tanya discuss her video on Masons Screen.

Image: Tanya Te Miringa Te Rorarangi Ruka, Kohatu Tipua (detail) 2020. Commissioned by CIRCUIT with the support of Wellington City Council

In moments of change there is a window to act. How do we organise our politics around the new situation? How do we organise our institutions? What role should artists play in this? How do we move beyond short term solutions to long term ones? And if the next crisis - Climate Change - is going to change daily life for all of us, what do we need to put in place *now* for the long term? This podcast brings together three artists - Judy Darragh, Ary Jansen, Lisa Reihana - to discuss the future of art after Covid 19, and a new advocacy group for artists, Arts Makers Aotearoa. Hosted by Mark Williams.

http://www.artsmakersaotearoa.nz/

Lisa Reihana is a multi-disciplinary artist who represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2017 with the large scale video installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected].

https://www.lisareihana.com

Judy Darragh is an artist who uses found objects to create sculptural assemblages. She has also worked in paint and film.

https://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/judy-darragh

Ary Jansen is an artist and musician based in Auckland.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCInGwvU7ljDFAouv7Wzm9Cg

https://aryjansen.bandcamp.com/

Is time out the most productive time of all?

Darcell Apelu talks to Mark Williams about a recent residency in Yorkshire spent contemplating her practice. She also discusses a trip to her father's homeland of Niue, two resulting videos, and previous performance works which drew on the body, ideas of 'otherness' and her career as an international wood chopper.

Still from Saw (2011) detail, Darcell Apelu

Watch Darcell's video on CIRCUIT here: http://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/darcell-apelu