Wednesday, 26 April 2023, 7.30 to about 10 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Screening and conversation organised by
The Cursed Assembly
More often than we know it, the surface of things encapsulates a deviant story or materiality that flees from the present time or from expected modes of perception. Be it as ways to maintain power, as fossilized expressions of marginalization or as delusions, we see secrets as an important motif to critically approach History, Science and all modes of accumulated knowledge.
As part of The Cursed Assembly‘s programme, a new series of gatherings will facilitate a discussion around secrets & secrecy, taking films as a starting point for a conversation. We will gather on every last Wednesday of the month, and each gathering will focus on a different mode through which secrets come to be.
Each session will consist of a short contextualization of a movie, a screening, and a discussion. We want to create a space to watch movies together, but we also emphasize the discussion-based part of it. We want to know what you think! The discussion will follow the film, but the topic will most likely feed forward into the viewing of the film itself.
22 February 2023 – #1 SEXUALITY Conspirators of Pleasure
29 March 2023 – #2 TIME The Last Angel of History
26 April 2023 – #3 SCIENCE & HISTORY Nostalgia for the Light
[An axis built out of two scientific approaches: the archeological and the astronomical one. Both looking for answers stretching our questions into the secrets of the past. One downwards, the other upwards.
In the Atacama desert in Chile, where the Earth’s atmosphere is especially thin, astronomers observe the Sky in search of evidence for theorems and hypotheses. At the same location, Chilean women observe the soil, in search of the lost bodies of their children, imprisoned, killed and buried during Pinochet’s dictatorship.
A search for a materiality that, while constituting the mere leftovers of what once was, gives us the reassurance of the present state: a “mnemonic” materiality. Are we looking for hidden secrets or have we become the endless seeking-practice itself?
The movie contains references to torture, murder and death.]
31 May 2023 – #4 TRAUMA Audition
28 June 2023 – #5 IDENTITY The Watermelon Woman
26 July 2023 – #6 INSURRECTION & POWER Punishment Park
