Broken Time: film program

Revisiting Histories: Specters in Images, Archives, and Public Spaces

Film Program in the framework of the exhibition BROKEN TIME: and the World is Made Again by What It Forgets

Cinema hall

The screening will be in English

Maria Christoforidou, ΜΑΛΘΑ: The Thrice Burnt Archives of Unreliable Prophecies (2021), 15’

The ΜΑΛΘΑ Archive is a video essay that tampers with and speculates on cultural memory. By creating temporary truths and promoting new myths that engage social, technical, and linguistic networks, the work refuses a stereotyped perception of Greek identity and instead seeks to expand it. Departing from mainstream Greek imagery and the subsequent hegemonic subjugation of those who do not fit a ‘Greek imaginary’, the ΜΑΛΘΑ Archive works to affirm the presence of people with African descent in Greece, and demonstrates how a fluid identity is shaped by the ‘afterlife of antiquity’. The archive draws from a collection of images assembled with photo organising software by Christoforidou–who borrows ideas from feminist collage practices. Poignant links are created from museum artifact photography, tourist souvenirs, postcards, popular cultural images, and AfroGreek family albums, that are then combined in slippery, glitchy, failed panels. The outcome remaps layers of Greek history, antiquity, and image-culture to decolonise the relationships between the African diaspora in Greece.

Maria Christoforidou (b.1979) is a Zambian Greek artist, writer, and Fine Art lecturer at Falmouth University, UK. Listening to the body, ‘speaking nearby’ archives, Maria is motivated by a hope to create pauses that allow minor stories, ghost voices, more than human comrades to evade classification, come to rest, undoing unspeakable knots of otherness. Maria was born in Zambia, grew up in Greece and has spent most of her adult life in the UK. The insoluble differences of these environments are powerful incentives toward theory. She combines research and collaboration in different formats – lectures, workshops, events, written and visual essays, publishing – to explore the political, physical and performative implications of writing and photography. Maria uses fiction and metaphor as tools that interrogate archives, peeling back intersectional legacies of colonialism to revaluate the images that direct attitudes towards the ‘more than human world’, national and personal identities.

Diego Crux and Gian Spina, Calabouço and the Rrazing When I Die/Hill [morro], 19’ 

The essay-film departs from the first public space in Latin America (Passeio Público) constructed by an enslaved population that was kept imprisoned inside the Calabouços (dungeons) in Colonial Rio de Janeiro. By analyzing how the word/place Calabouço became normalized in the urban fabric along with the city’s reforms to keep parts of its population outside of specific areas, the film constructs an abstract narrative which unveils silenced pasts and histories. The overlapping of meanings contained in the word Calabouço are multiple: from a student restaurant, the scene of the murder of a racialized young man during the military dictatorship, to an airport, a beach and primarily a place for torturing the enslaved population in Rio de Janeiro. The filmmakers juxtapose old document texts, historic images and voice notes to address the complex character of the subject and its fundamental relation with contemporary and ancient Brazilian society.

A quasi-artist born and raised on the edge, in Parada de Taipas, Diego Crux now lives São Paulo’s downtown area. He works with arts among others in different places. He is the grandson of Rosa and Esmeraldo; it’s the color that reminds one of memory. He researches intimate and personal summons, collective experiences, representations, identity and its limits, unknowns and contradictions in these intersections. Imagine and build; question and review. He uses a variety of means in his processes, such as appropriation, photography, video, design, visual samples, words. He participated in exhibitions in São Paulo, Curitiba, Copenhagen (DK) and Accra (GH), and in the Pivô residencies (2020) accompanied by Thiago de Paula Souza and MAM Rio (2021), coordinated by Camilla Rocha Campos.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Gian Spina is a writer, researcher, sometimes an artist. He has worked and taught in pedagogical experiments, such as International Art Academy Palestine, Escola da Cidade (São Paulo), the Ionion Center for Arts and Culture (Greece), as well as CILAS (Cairo). Today he is learning Arabic, speaks five other languages and is constructing an interdisciplinary body of work on the materialization of power in history, narrative and the public sphere. He was part of residency programs as Capacete and documenta 14 in Athens (2017), MMAG Foundation in Amman (2018), as well as GEGENWARTE/PRESENCES in Chemnitz, Germany (2020). Lately, he participated on the Sheffield Film Festival, Les Rencontre d’Arles and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. He has written articles for Mada Masr, Folha de São Paulo, Arts Everywhere, World Policy Institute, and several other independent publications. His work can be seen at http://gianspina.com