Part of COMBAT BREATHING

COMBAT BREATHING: INSURGENT POIESIS

Film Notes

Marking the opening of “Combat Breathing Vol. II”, this film program brings together contemporary artworks that emerge from commitments to or embeddedness within political struggles and streams of anti-imperialist thought. Here, moving images function as social productions made for collective engagement, transforming mere viewership into situated modes of cinematic “spect-actor-ship,” to borrow from theorist Augusto Boal. Taken together, these films, informed by various experimental and militant traditions of image-making, model the inseparability of and dynamic correspondences between form and content. Titled “Insurgent Poiesis”, the program simultaneously proposes the moving image as a means for agitational ideological dissemination and a space for poetic invention: a form capable of circulating ideas while remaining open to a multiplicity of meanings, unexpected encounters, and unbounded experimentation. Refusing the fiction of aesthetic autonomy, the film program begins with the recognition that all artistic and cultural productions are ideologically conditioned. The selected films by Tony Cokes, Filipa César, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Shiva Addanki, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Camila Galaz figure the political and philosophical entwinement of poiesis and revolutionary activity: bringing something into existence that did not exist before, producing “a world where many worlds fit – un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” by any means necessary.

Tony Cokes EVIL.35: CARLIN / OWNERS (2012, 8 min, DCP)
EVIL.35: CARLIN / OWNERS, like many of Tony Cokes’s recent works, is structured by a simple formal operation: the pairing of found text and found music. These audiovisual combinations, attuned to the historical and ideological convergences and divergences of their source materials, generate further meanings. In this work, Cokes pairs an excerpt from a characteristically cantankerous screed by the late stand-up comedian George Carlin with two songs by the British agit-prop post-punk group Gang of Four. Carlin’s words directly confront the contradictions of liberal capitalist democracy – the absurd state of affairs whereby a small ruling class owns and controls everything, from government officials to the workforce, despite the juridical pretense of universal political equality – while Gang of Four’s rebellious songs allude to the Irish anti-colonial struggle and the commodification of pleasure. Taken together, and aided by Cokes’s cinematic choreography of sound, background color, and text graphics, audiences are engaged as critical readers capable of piercing through neoliberal capitalism’s false naturalizations.

Filipa César TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES (2015, 30 min, DCP)
TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES belongs to a body of work by Filipa César concerned with the conditions and aftermaths of the anti-colonial struggle of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) against the Portuguese between 1963-74. Departing from the concept of the “Liberated Zones” – used to describe areas freed from colonial domination, and organized and managed by PAIGC guerrilla militants – the film partially reconstructs the memory of these autonomous spaces via archival documents and the contemporary testimonies of four Swedes (diplomat Folke Löfgren, filmmaker Lennart Malmer, filmmaker and psychologist Ingela Romare, and politician Birgitta Dahl), all of whom visited Guinea in the early 1970s. Deeply reflexive of the aesthetic and technological mediation of these insurgent histories, the documents and statements are performatively presented by and visually projected onto a young character in a dark room whose image is, in turn, multiplied as an infinite regression through César’s use of experimental optical effects. Through these inventive means, César’s work opens up struggles as contradictory sites of antagonism and solidarity while projecting the radioactive remnants of liberationist practice into the present and future.

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme OH SHINING STAR TESTIFY (2016-19, 10 min, DCP)
OH SHINING STAR TESTIFY is an audiovisual poem that seeks to account for and speculate on the possibilities of fugitive resurgences within, under, and beyond the ruins of colonial catastrophe. It invites us to consider the relation between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which those very bodies and images might once again reappear. The film recursively loops CCTV footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera. The footage – temporarily released online following a court injunction – depicts an incident from 2014 when 14-year-old Yusuf ­Shawamreh crossed the “separation fence” erected by the Israeli military, near Hebron, to pick some Akoub – an edible plant used in Palestinian cuisine, which blooms for short periods of time. After crossing the fence, Israeli forces ambushed and shot Yusuf dead. Layering poetic verses and evocative images upon one another, which are sampled from online recordings of quotidian acts of corporeal and infrastructural devastation as well as scenes of defiant social rituals and performances, Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s cine-poem critically situates the serial occurrences of such acts of state terror and their ongoing resistances. Formally guided by an accumulative logic, not unlike that which subjects Palestinian land and people to continual displacement and expropriation by a settler regime, OH SHINING STAR attunes viewers to the enduring, latent animacies of the oppressed and the ecological specter of return.

Shiva Addanki A PERMANENT OPIUM WAR (2026, 10 min, DCP)
A PERMANENT OPIUM WAR grapples with the historical and geographical underpinnings of statist, imperialist, and global-market infrastructures as they are evoked through the sprawl of the Greater New York metropolitan area. The work both poses and problematizes the presumed distinctions between the Global North and Global South, or First and Third Worlds, tracing how ideological, commercial, and political exchanges materialize across networks linking states and corporations. It approaches these infrastructures from the vantage point of the militant and revolutionary struggles that traverse, contest, and resist their hardwired and concretized forms. Charting connections across disparate coordinates – including Delaney Hall, a privately managed immigrant detention facility in Newark, New Jersey; the persecution of Assata Shakur following her capture after the 1973 Turnpike Shooting; commodity exchanges between poor and developed marketplaces; women’s Naxalite training by Maoist revolutionary insurgents in India; and political spectacles of Hindutva–Zionist alliance – the work assembles a constellation in which these violent structures and liberationist histories become materially and politically entangled.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos FACES IN THE CROWD 2: MEMORIAL (2019, 14 min, 16mm-to-DCP)
Shot on expired film stock by the anonymous filmmaking collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, FACES IN THE CROWD 2: MEMORIAL is an experimental audiovisual meditation on memory, neoliberal and colonial state violence in Mexico, and the forms of social resistance that emerge in response to it. The film moves through politically mobilized crowds, protest ephemera, and historical traces of organized violence with an expiring breath – as if these images and the memories they carry are themselves at risk of extinction. It embraces the material qualities of analog film through grainy textures, layered images, and an unstable frame, transforming the filmic surface into an alchemical site where memory is simultaneously preserved, fractured, and regenerated.

Centered on the fiftieth commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the nationwide leftist movement that led to it, the resulting work becomes a contemplation on how struggles reemerge and transform, and how protesting crowds become social bodies that carry historical memory and continually innovate practices of dissent. In the work, images and sounds fragment, overlap, and repeat, producing a dreamlike, almost trance-inducing experience rather than a linear or chronological account of events. Such formal disruptions reflect Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’s broader interest in challenging dominant audiovisual languages and resisting the ways mainstream media can organize, discipline, and control perception.

Camila Galaz VECINO, VECINO (2022, 20 min, DCP)
Set against the backdrop of Chile’s 2019 social uprising, VECINO VECINO returns to a 1986 French television documentary on MAPU Lautaro, a left-wing armed organization that resisted the Pinochet dictatorship. For filmmaker Camila Galaz, the archive is at once historical record and intimate inheritance, as her father was connected to this organization, binding her personal history to the political memory embedded within the footage. Moving between archival and newly filmed material, and incorporating annotations and choreographic scores, the film unsettles the authority of the documentary image by opening a mediated space where memory can be questioned, re-performed, and reimagined. The past emerges not as a fixed record, but as something continually reconstructed through fragments, gestures, and acts of translation. In the potent aftermath of the recent national uprising, VECINO VECINO traces the echoes between generations, reflecting on social and historical questions of inheritance while asking how histories of resistance are encountered, remembered, and embodied.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

Followed by a conversation between KJ Abudu, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Omar Berrada, Camila Galaz, and Adam HajYahia!