Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Stoffel Debuysere – Fictions of the Real – Introduction by Mirna Belina

24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

With an introduction by Mirna Belina.

What has happened to the cinematic fictions that set out to make sense of our times? That is to say: what has happened to fiction as the construction of both an arrangement of events and a relation of a referential world to alternative worlds? In accordance with the laws of verisimilitude and rationality that aim to make situations identifiable and intelligible, which also means acceptable and credible, fiction in cinema is commonly made up of calculated entanglements of recognition effects and effects of surprise that attest to the real, so that fiction is, in turn, attested by the real. How to break out of this circle of mutual attestation, which tends to get stuck in endless oscillations between the conforming familiar and the familiar nonconforming? Perhaps it is this sense of consensual sterility that has enkindled the recent intensification of fictions that no longer treat the real as something to attest to, but as something to attend to. No longer as an effect to be produced, but as a world of unnamed emotions and boundless virtualities to explore and prolong. Against the logic that is grounded in the ‘real of fiction’, where the unexpected is always already accounted for, these fictions look for the unexpected where it is not supposed to be, thereby calling into question the way in which things are commonly expected. We could call them ‘fictions of the real’.

Stoffel Debuysere is a Brussels-based researcher and curator of cinema and audiovisual arts. He has organised numerous film programmes in collaboration with a variety of organisations and institutions. He is a head programmer for the Courtisane collective and a lecturer in Critical Film Studies at the KASK School of Art, Ghent, where he recently obtained a PhD with the project Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema).

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Filipa César, Jin Mustafa – Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral's Agro-Poetics of Liberation – Introduction by Mirna Belina

24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic writings exposes substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. This visual and sonic reading explores the definitions of soil and erosion that Cabral developed as an agronomist, as well as his reports on colonial land exploitation and analysis of the trade economy, to unearth his double agency as a state soil scientist and as a ‘seeder’ of African liberation. Cabral understood agronomy not merely as a discipline combining geology, soil science, agriculture, biology and economics but as a means to gain materialist and situated knowledge about peoples’ lived conditions under colonialism. The scientific data he generated during his work as an agronomist, along with his poetry, were critical to his theoretical arguments in which he denounced the injustices perpetrated on colonised land, and it later informed his warfare strategies.

Cabral used his role as an agronomist for the Portuguese colonial government subversively to further anti-colonial struggle. Cabral’s process of decolonisation was understood as a project of soil reclamation and national reconstruction in the postcolony. His agency as an agronaut ventures through soil cosmologies, mesologies, meteorisations, ‘atmos-lithos’ conflict zones, celluloid compost, violence of imperial consumption — the sugar question. Humble derives from Humus.

Performative lecture by Filipa César with sound by Jin Mustafa and images from Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, 1974, Cape Verde.

This iteration of the lecture has been commissioned by Sonic Acts as a part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economies, politics and poetics inherent to cinema praxis. Characterised by rigorous structural and lyrical elements, her multiform meditations often focus on Portuguese colonialism and the liberation of Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s. This research developed into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Yet Over). She gained an MA Art in Context at the University of Arts, Berlin. Selected exhibitions and screenings include at the São Paulo Biennial, Manifesta 8, Cartagena, and the Contour 8 Biennial in Mechelen, Belgium, and Gasworks, London. Festival screenings include the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde, Forum Expanded at the Berlinale and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Jin Mustafa is a Stockholm-based visual artist, DJ and electronic music producer. Her work shifts between media, often taking the form of moving images, objects, sound and music. She is interested in the relationship between technology, imaginary spaces and questions of personal and collective memory. Recent exhibitions include I’m fine, on my way home now at Mossutställningar, Stockholm (2017); Ripple at Alta Art Space in collaboration with Signal, Malmö; If she wanted I would have been there once, twice or again at Zeller Van Almsick Gallery, Vienna; and a collaborative work with Natália Rebelo for Chart Emerging at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2018).

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