Event | ‘Spirits, Forests, and Screens’ – Workshop with Erik Bordeleau on the work of Apitchapong Wheerasethakul and Cosmological Cinema

Event | ‘Spirits, Forests, and Screens’ – Workshop with Erik Bordeleau on the work of Apitchapong Wheerasethakul and Cosmological Cinema
Date: 19 April 2023
Time: 16:00-19:30
Location: OT301, Cinema Space (Vereniging EHBK / OT301, Overtoom 301, 1054 HW, Amsterdam)
Organizers: Halbe Kuipers & Erica Biolchini
Contact & Registration: h.h.kuipers@uva.nl & e.biolchini@uva.nl
Registration deadline: 18 April 2023
Credits: 1 ECTS (details below)

During this film-philosophy workshop, we will engage with the work of Apitchapong Wheerasethakul and cosmological cinema together with dr. Erik Bordeleau. 

The workshop will consist of a screening of cosmological shorts in relation to Wheerasethakul work, followed by a talk by dr. Erik Bordeleau (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) and finally an open discussion. 

Forest of the Future Past: Immediating – Approximating Memoria (2021) 

«The forest binds the soul and holds it, safe and wild, in his cinema.»

Years before playing Jessica in Memoria (2021), an orchid cultivator on a journey to Colombia, Tilda Swinton thus evoked the liminal quality of Apichatpong’s films: the way they preserve forests of unknowing to be discovered without being uncovered; archeological and virtual sheets of time to be approximated with the circumspection of the diviner, as they turn viewers into seers, strangely concurring with what Michael Taussig, in his recent book Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (2020), calls «the amplification of the mimetic faculty». This idea suggests, among other things, a renewed, visceral sense of connectedness with the world, a care for sensuous and non-sensuous correspondances that, incidentally, extends to the «mimetically capacious machinery» of cinema. Deriving from Benjamin’s Doctrine of the Similar, and permeated with Ayahuasca meanderings, Taussig’s interest in mimetic excesses gives way to a form of transductive or immediating approach – a way of approximating phenomenons non-linearly and de proche en proche (little by little) – that seems particularly well suited for percolating through the forested weirdings of Memoria, foregrounding Apichatpong’s tender care that nothing be lost. 

Erik Bordeleau is a philosopher, writer, curator and cultural theorist. He works as a researcher at NOVA university in Lisbon and is also affiliated researcher at the Art, Business and Culture Center of Stockholm School of Economics. He has published and co-edited several books and articles in different languages at the intersection of political philosophy, contemporary art, world cinema, blockchain cultures, finance and media theory. In collaboration with Saloranta & De Vylder, he is developing The Sphere, a web 3.0 infrastructure for self-organisation in the performing arts. 

Schedule 

• 16:00-17:00 Screening of shorts (2021)
  The Ritual (10×10: Toon Wang, Taiwan, 2011) 

A Grocery Called Forever (10×10: Nien-Jen Wu, Taiwan, 2011) 

Xapirimuu: agir em espírito / to act as a spirit (Sebastian Wiedemanm, Colombia/Brazil, 2016) 

Hidden (Sebastian Wiedemanm, Colombia/Brazil, 2016) 

Luminous people (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2007)

• 17:15-17:45 Talk by dr. E. Bordeleau 
• 17:45-19:00++ Discussion 

Credit Details / Preparation

The film and texts will be send prior to the workshop.

Viewing

Memoria (2021)

Reading

• Preparatory Readings : Bordeleau, Erik. 2017. “(Dis)Enchanted Taiwanese Cinema, Schizoanalytic Belief, and the Acutality of Animism.” In Speculative Art Histories: Analysis at the Limits, edited by Sjoerd van Tuinen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Bordeleau, Érik. 2017. “Percolating the Elusive: Into Apichatpong’s Dreamscape.” In Nocturnal fabulations: ecology, vitality and opacity in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, by Toni Pape, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Adam Szymanski, and Érik Bordeleau.
• Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. “2. Living Thought.” In How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.