We hold where study - overlapping projections simulation
a film by
fred moten and wu tsang
"we hold where study is a short experimental film that takes a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning.
The film enacts a series of duets, both within and between images, featuring choreography by boychild with Josh Johnson and by Ligia Lewis with Jonathan Gonzalez, both to original music score by Bendik Giske. The work is rooted in Tsang’s ongoing dialog with collaborators Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, authors of The Undercommons, and in particular on their recent essay called “Leave Our Mics Alone.” This essay posits an (im)possible set of images of resistance, through poetic notions of blackness (and/or transness and/or queerness) as an improvisational mode of being, in common with others, working through and of the environment. The hyphenate terms blackness and/or transness and/or queerness are not interchangeable according to this proposal; rather they are irreducibly entangled, and film aims to enact that difference without separability.
Considering one of Moten’s analogies, if constructions of Western/European whiteness can be understood as the set of (separate, individual) interpersonal relationships, then one can propose a notion of blackness (and/or transness and/or queerness) as being the entanglement. Entanglement is unavailable to the image. But at the same time, entanglement has the potential to manifest in every image. It cannot be depicted but at the same time it infuses the image. Wu Tsang’s film seeks passage to sociality through the opening of impossible images. What if the camera was not an omniscient eye or master narrator – but instead just another element of the entanglement? As the artist points out in her notes on a conversation with Moten: if we want to talk about the socio-ecological disaster, images of violence and planetary destruction might first come to mind. But we could also talk about autophagy (the process that allows the orderly degradation and recycling of cellular components), and the idea that the structure and the nature of life is violence to itself, a constant degeneration and regeneration. What if we were to understand violence not simply in terms of attacks on black and trans bodies, or toxic waste eroding the earth, but in terms of differentiations of violence? In terms of an ethics of sustainable destruction? What kind of interventions can today cut through the usual representations and understandings of “the environment”? As Wu Tsang proposes with her work, what is urgent now is not to address tragedy, but to talk about how we live. What we need is a lot of ‘reverse-engineer’ thinking, a lot of inverting of powerful formulations that entrap imagination" (text written by Nadja Argyropoulou for the Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative website - it can be found at this address).
STILLS FROM WE HOLD WHERE STUDY
