Undoing Images III

Mohamed Gawad, Editor und Filmemacher, präsentiert im Rahmen des Pilotprojekts NEW CURATORS eine Auswahl an Kurz- und Langfilmen.

FILMPROGRAMM
OCCIDENTE (2015, 15'), Ana Vaz
Filmed in Lisbon in search for the originals of our colonial history I found copies. Brazilians, the new worlders fluent in glitz, entertain the Portuguese in awe and discomfort, colonial norms applied and reapplied. Chinese porcelain seem to signal the hybrids to come: the Chinese dressed as Europeans, the Brazilian maid dressed as an European 19th century servant. 15th century porcelain becomes reproducible readymades that set the tables for the new colonies - a trans-Atlantic calling. Ouro novo reads new money. As a poem without full stops, as a breathe without breathing, the voyage travels eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table.

ERASED, ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE (2018, 76'), Ghassan Halwani
2014 on a wall in the city of Beirut are spread layers over layers of hundreds of torn posters.
Selling lines and ripped images jump to the eye: apartments, pastries, concerts, loans, restaurants, plumbing, religious tours for the faithful.. anything!
Suddenly, in the middle of this rubble, a glimpse: the partial picture of a face. Only a moustache, the trace of a shy smile, a chin, and part of an ear. Also noticeable in the photo, the fragments of a black leather jacket.
A vagabond with a pencil sets to heal the rest of the face, restoring its missing traits.
"The image of a man whose features were convincing took shape in front of me! But who is that man?"
On his unsettled journey through Beirut, various encounters and incidents constantly put the vagabond back on track, on the trail of the people gone missing during the Lebanese civil war.
But the vagabond faces a city striving by all possible means to erase those traces beyond recovery, to a point of no return.

© Occidente