Program Details

Thursday, April 20, 2023
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Mirjam Linschooten and Sameer Farooq,
Sophia Gallisá Muriente
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Please join us for a conversation with Sameer Farooq and Jaclyn Quaresma after the screening
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented with Art Museum, University of Toronto
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This program was presented in-cinema with open captions

The founding principles of modernity and coloniality, as defined by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in her book Hospicing Modernity, are separation, ownership, and hierarchy. These three principles ground the interrelated condition of  modernity/coloniality’s ways of being and remove the intrinsic value from life by expropriation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides. Vanessa goes on to say: 

While equity, diversity and inclusion within modernity can be important in the short term, neither inclusion nor representation is a viable response in the long run: modern institutions or capitalism [regardless of the intersecting identities of those participating in them] cannot be the end game because it would still reproduce the harms necessary for sustaining modernity. [1]

In other words, while the current landscape of reform that seeks recognition, redistribution, and representation is essential to reducing harm, the social institutions that were founded under modernity/coloniality cannot be mended by adding more participants.. Vanessa’s argument underwrites the three works presented in this screening. The Museum Visits a Therapist by Mirjam Linschooten and Sameer Farooq, Moune Ô by Maxime Jean-Baptiste, and Celaje (Cloudscape) by Sofia Gallisá Muriente pinpoint some of the ways culturally celebrated institutions remain complicit in supporting the violence of modernity and coloniality. 

Footnotes
1. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books, 2021. (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2021).

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Program Schedule

Moune Ô, Maxime Jean-Baptiste. CANADIAN PREMIERE | FRENCH GUIANA/FRANCE/BELGIUM | 2022 | DIGITAL | 17 MIN | FRENCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

Moune Ô is an examination of the premiere of the 1990 film Jean Galmot, aventurier, in which the filmmaker’s father played a role. This starting point leads to an investigation of how colonial continuities intertwined with family histories.

The Museum Visits a Therapist, Mirjam Linschooten and Sameer Farooq. CANADIAN PREMIERE | CANADA/NETHERLANDS | 2021 | DIGITAL |
19 MIN | DUTCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

The Museum Visits a Therapist navigates the history of violence, religion, and trade that shaped the collection of Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. By focusing on a holding of bisj poles from the Asmat people of Papua, the film offers a nuanced critique while imagining new forms of reparation within museum spaces.

Celaje (Cloudscape), Sofia Gallisá Muriente. PUERTO RICO | 2020 | DIGITAL VIDEO | 41 MIN | SPANISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

Celaje oscillates between chronicle, dream, and document using nature’s times to interpret human cycles amidst the sedimentation of disasters in Puerto Rico. Memories move like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process become visible, like ghosts, on the film and in the country.