The Ground Still Hasn't Stopped Shaking
Moune Ô
Maxime Jean-BaptisteMoune 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.
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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.
[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).
Please join us for a conversation with Sameer Farooq following the screening.
Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker based between Brussels and Paris. He was born and raised to a French mother and Guyanese father in the context of the Guyanese and Antillean diaspora in France. His interest as an artist is to dig inside the complexity of Western colonial history by detecting the survival of traumas from the past in the present. His work focuses on archives and forms of reenactment to conceive a vivid and embodied memory.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist whose work resists colonial forces of erasure and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. She employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.
Mirjam Linschooten is a Dutch artist and cultural researcher living and working in Amsterdam. As a research artist, her work is concerned with tactics of representation, questioning the ways memory and history are constructed through various forms of collecting, interpreting, and display. Mirjam has participated in international residency programs and exhibited in Canada, Egypt, France, Morocco, Netherlands and Turkey. She completed her Bachelor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and her MA at the Dutch Art Institute.
Sameer Farooq is a Canadian artist of Pakistani and Ugandan-Indian descent. His interdisciplinary practice investigates tactics of representation to explore various forms of collecting, interpreting, and display. With exhibitions and screenings at institutions around the world, Farooq was longlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award, one of Canada’s preeminent showcases for contemporary art.