May 9 – 12, 2024 | Pérez Art Museum Miami & Koubek Center | Miami, FL ✦
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A speculative and poetic exploration of the entanglements and overlaps of historical events in the Atacama Desert (Chile), Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, told from the perspective of the wind, takes us on a visual journey, floating freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama. Exploring some of the largest lithium mines in the world; hovering above the remnants of colonial labor camps reactivated under the Pinochet regime, and slipping inside the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility; the filmmakers’ camera uncovers material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain invisible to the many. By pointing at how these trajectories mutated and expanded into aspects of modern geopolitical issues, the film exposes pillars of western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism while simultaneously proposing another worldview, one that is carried and echoed by the wind.
This film screens as part of the Combined Program: You Thought the World Was Yours When You Were Young but Now You Know It’s Disappearing.
Directors’ Statement
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is the latest film in a series called Elemental Cinema, which we began to conceive in 2016, and for which we have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as a starting point. Part documentary and part personal essay, each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four classical elements: earth, water, fire, and air, the element chosen in Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, a film that follows the wind and what it carries as a guide and an analytical framework. Merging poetics and critical theory, this work proposes a sensuous, poignant, and emotional take on the ethical-political challenges of the global present, through human and nonhuman perspectives. Our aim being to undermine ways of thinking about and relating to the Earth which have been inherited from European colonial modernity.
*A pre-recorded Q+A with Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva will be available for viewing.
2705 SW 3rd Street, Miami, FL 33135
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org, a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022) amongst many other titles.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), and Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020).
Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as Munch Museum, Oslo; MACBA (Barcelona); Kunsthalle Wien, (Vienna) the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow) and more.
