FILM, CLIMATE JUSTICE AND DECOLONIAL IMAGINATION | conversation and screenings

In On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (2022) the  late Bruno Latour and Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, sketch  an ecological manifesto, which envisions the coming together of  different class constituencies against the toxic effect  of planetary capitalism. A similar argument is made by Matthew Huber for  whom the emergence of a transnational alliance of energy workers, is a  fundamental step towards ecological justice.

But how would such  intersectional class alliance look like in the real world? And  can suchemphasis on ‘class’ and ‘justice’ avoid being too narrow or  Eurocentric, and capture not just the structural relation  between pollution and colonialism (Liboiron, 2023) but  also differentunderstandings of the environment, not just as a precious  resource, but as a living being?

Departing from  Fanon’s claim that all decolonial struggles are as much material as they  are struggles for self-representation, this workshop interrogates how  cinema addresses ecological justice, in conversation  with filmmakers Oliver Ressler and Filipa César.

The two  filmmakers’ long-established engagement with environmentalism and the  issue of political representation, follow slightly different  strategies. Ressler, directly engages with  specific environmental issues, collaborating with diverse climate  justice movements and communities, and opening a space  of poetic prefiguration of grassroots political processes; César casts a  broader view of ‘the environment’, intended as a polyphonic space  loaded with political, ancestral, material, and poetic  resonances, developing long-term collaborations with the community of Malafo, in  Guinea Bissau, whereby filming is a process of consolidating  relatedness – a form of cine-kinship.

These two approaches interrogate in  different ways the power of film as tool of counter-information and of  production of new imaginaries of struggle.

Film excerpts from Oliver Ressler’ following films will be screened:

• Ancestral Future Rising, 20 min., 2023
• The Desert Lives, 55 min., 2022
• Not Sinking, Swarming, 37 min., 2021

Film excerpts from Filipa César’s following films will be screened:

• Resonance Spiral,92 min., 2024.
• Mangrove School,35 min., 2022
• Spell Reel,96 min., 2017

Filipa César iBerlin-based artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the fictional  aspects of documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its  reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving images. Her  praxis takes media as a means to expand and expose counter narratives of  resistance to historicism. Since 2011, César has been looking into the  origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau as part of the African Liberation  Movement and its imaginaries and cognitive potencies, developing that  research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda. She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15)  both organised by Arsenal—Berlin. Selected film festivals include  Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Curtas Vila do Conde; Forum Expanded-Berlinale;  IFFR, Rotterdam, and Cinéma du Réel. Selected exhibitions and  screenings include: SFMOMA; São Paulo Biennial; Manifesta 8, Cartagena;  Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstwerke,  Berlin; NBK, Berlin; Hordaland Art Center, Bergen; Futura, Prague;  Khiasma, Paris; Tensta konsthall, Spånga; Mumok, Vienna; MoMA, New York;  Harvard Film Museum, Boston.

Oliver Ressler is  an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public  space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the  climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has  had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of  Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid;  Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space,  Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Wyspa  Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de  Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; MNAC –  National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; and Cultural Centre of  Belgrade. Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions,  including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven;  MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in  Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon  (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec  (2014), Helsinki (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and  Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition  organized by EMST). Ressler has completed forty-two films that have been  screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions  and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre  d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013. In 2002, Ressler won the first prize  at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and he is  the first prize winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016. For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011-2016).2019–2023 Ressler has directed Barricading the Ice Sheets, a  research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the  Austrian Science Fund. Configurations of the project were solo  exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb  (2022); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2022); Tallinn Art  Hall, Tallinn (2022); LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial,  Gijón (2023); The Showroom, London (2023).