Ambika P3, 19 – 20 MAY 2022

Ecological Futurisms returns with more talks, screenings and performances over two days to mark the new MIRAJ Ecologies issue and to celebrate the recent publication of CREAM PhD alumni Guilherme Carréra’s monograph, Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins.

MIRAJ Ecologies Issue Launch; talks, screenings and performance

Thursday 19 May 2022 at Ambika P3, 18:00 GMT 

Please join us for MIRAJ journal’s launch of its new issue. The Ecologies Double Issue imagines and examines how practices in artists’ film and video can be transformed by a dedicated attention to notions of the ecological in its many expanded forms. 

This event is held together with the launch of Catherine Elwes’s new book Landscape and the Moving Image. Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day.  

TJ Demos will be in virtual conversation with Matthias Kispert, followed by in person conversations between Catherine Elwes and Colin Perry; Becca Voelcker, Tom Cuthbertson and Lucy Reynolds. 

The evening ends with a rare screening of Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan Cycle Episode 7, introduced by the artist in conversation with Michael Mazière. Rebecca Birch will present a short performance based on her ongoing work with anti-fracking protestors at Preston New Road, followed by a Q&A with Maria Walsh.

Find tickets and more information here. 

Geographies of Ruins in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema; screening and conversation

Friday 20 May 2022 at Ambika P3, 15:00 GMT 

Please join us to celebrate the recent publication of CREAM PhD alumni Guilherme Carréra’s monograph, Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins. 

Brazilian cinema in recent years has seen the rise of unconventional documentaries articulating critiques of notions of progress and (under)development in the country through portrayals of its contemporary geographies and spaces. This event will unpack ideas around urban and ecological ruins presented in recent films, which offer radical depictions of the afterlives of neo-colonisation and neo-liberalisation.  

There will be a rare screening of Hu Enigma (Pedro Urano and Joana Traub Csekö, 2011), a cinematic portrait of the University Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, part public hospital and part ruin, serving as a metaphor for utopia and dystopia. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Carréra and Mariana Cunha, Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Westminster. 

Find tickets and more information here.