A film screening curated by the first year MA Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art

Thursday 14 January 2010 at 6pm, running time 83 minutes
Lecture Theatre 1, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2EU

Free Admission

Hollis Frampton, Lemon (for Robert Huot), 1969

Marine Hugonnier, The Secretary of the Invisible, 2007
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, 2009
Filipa César, Allee der Kosmonauten, 2007
Beatrice Gibson, A Necessary Music, 2008

Fictional Geographies brings together five international artists and filmmakers who use film to explore alternative modes of engaging with space and place. The programme‘s starting point is Hollis Frampton's 1969 film Lemon, a meditation on the extraordinary that resides within the everyday. Recent films by Marine Hugonnier, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Filipa César and Beatrice Gibson further investigate the interplay between physical landscapes and their imaginary interpretation.

In The Secretary of the Invisible, Marine Hugonnier draws a parallel between cinema and an animist ritual of transformation. Shot on the River Niger, the film pays homage to the seminal French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917-2004) whose work famously challenged observational documentary. In her evocative film, Hugonnier suggests that the mythical constructs of a place are as real as its physical presence. The capacity of cinema to reveal the invisible also characterises Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. The film is set in Nabua, a sleepy village in northeast Thailand that was occupied by the national army from the 60s to the early 80s. Rather than presenting the violent memories of those who remember the military oppression, the film uncovers the layers of history sedimented in the landscape.

Adopting another set of strategies, Filipa César’s Allee der Kosmonauten also reveals a desire to give cinematic form to history. Shot on the ‘Street of the Cosmonauts’ in the former German Democratic Republic, César takes the viewer on a seemingly fantastical journey through the mundane. As the camera glides through this former East Berlin street, the utopian intentions informing its architecture are allowed to materialise one last time. In a similar way, Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music puts forward an imaginary representation of modernist social housing on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan. Unfolding through received accounts, the film evokes an image of the island in the voices of its inhabitants.

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UPCOMING FIRST YEAR MA CURATING CONTEMPORARY ART EVENTS

Where do we go from here?

Salon discussion, 27 January 2010, 6.30pm

Royal College of Art, Café

A salon discussion exploring the current and possible future strategies for navigating a recessional cultural landscape.