shadow circuits: film selectie bij WORM
As part of the current exhibition shadow circuits, we join forces with our next-door neighbour WORM for a movie night. Join us for a selection of short films that focus on journeys on cargo ships, against the backdrop of the current precarity of logistics in the context of inflation, the automation of labour and war. With the sea as a political and poetic landscape, the films explore globalisation, the pollution of our resources and the people who labour at different sites along the supply chain. With works by Natasa Efstathiadi, Rosalind Nashashibi, Diana Al Halabi and Mohamed Abdelkarim.
Program:
Working General Cargo with Gang 23, 1974
Brian Nelson, the Waterfront Writers and Artists
2 minutes 14 seconds
From the group’s beginnings in the late 1970s, the Waterfront Writers and Artists experimented with film as a way to document and interpret life on the docks. Early on, group members Brian Nelson, Frank Silva, and Michael Vawter created a double-carousel slideshow entitled Longshoremen at Work; the version below is a 1994 VHS transfer of that original production. The group’s other moving-image works were shot on Super 8 by Brian Nelson, extending the WWA’s efforts to record longshore workers’ experiences during a period of rapid change on the waterfront.
Mohamed Abdelkarim, A Song For The Loose Destiny, 15 minutes, 2022
In a distant future, a group of humans gather at a coal mining site to reflect on their past or our future. Against the backdrop of the abandoned Zollverein coal mining industrial site, they engage in dialogue and perform speeches, songs, and poems that convey a sense of sublimity, pain, and alienation. The film speculates on the complex relationship between technology, landscape, and the human body in a post-disaster world. The landscape bears witness to both progress and devastation, portraying potential emergences in the future.
Natasa Efstathiadi, Cotton Chronicles (2015).
Courtesy of Polygreen Contemporary Art Initiative PCAI
Cotton chronicles is what its title may describe, an account, a chronicle of an artist’s stay in Benin, a description of the workers’ activities at the working site, in a warehouse full of toxic and expired pesticide meant for cotton cultivation. A day to day travel-log of events, disparate impressions and landscapes, a celluloid journal edited on camera. One could consider this analogy: the celluloid short shots pasted one after the other are like an artist’s rough sketches on his sketchbook. Mystery can be found in small gestures, shot here and there, they could then be the verses of a poem..
Diana Al-Halabi, 26 minutes, The Disaster Cannot Be Contained – كان يمكن أن لا أكون
Departing from the port of Rotterdam to that of Beirut, the Lebanese artist/filmmaker takes us on a journey through her feminist dream to work on a tugboat in the port of Beirut. A passion for ports and ships turns into a generational trauma due to the aftermath of the port Blast in 2020. The film offers an intersectional narrative and brings together questions of loss, distance, death, and the undead.
Come visit shadow circuits in our showroom wed-sun from 14:00-19:00. Every first Friday of the month 14:00-21:00Open until May 3rd.
shadow circuits explores how gas, minerals and other raw materials move around the world and how these elemental flows are connected with our day-to-day lives. The exhibition shifts our attention from large-scale industrial images, such as sea containers in the Rotterdam harbour, to small and intimate stories—to people, plants and animals that slip through the cracks of global trade flows, such as ghost laborers on palm oil fields and invasive species caught on ships. In this way, shadow circuits bridges the gap between the unquestioned everyday use of mineral resources and the painfully hidden history of extraction and transport.
Ruby Reding is an artist based in Rotterdam. She works with sculpture, poetry, and moving image. In her practice, she explores our distance from raw material supply chains and infrastructure. Through field research at sites such as waterworks, mines, and factories, and by working with residual materials and archives, she makes the material reality behind extraction and global trade tangible.
