WAR, INSUBMISSION, ART

In collaboration with Université Grenoble Alpes and Escola Massana, Barcelona.

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  In times when war —open or hidden— is reconfigured across the territories of discourse, image, and memory, “Art, War, Insubmission” proposes a space for reflection and encounter around the power of cinema and the archive as forms of resistance. Inspired by the figure of René Vautier, an indomitable filmmaker and witness to anti-colonial struggles, this meeting with the students of Escola Massana explores the ways in which images can oppose the violence of hegemonic narratives, overflowing their boundaries and rewriting history through insubordination.
  
  Throughout the day, Raquel Schefer and Sonia Kerfa will address the relations between art and politics from different fronts: the construction of an archive of insubordination, the anti-colonial aesthetics of contemporary Palestinian cinema, and the memory of social and decolonial struggles in North Africa through the work of María Ruido.
  
  These conversations propose a dialogue between generations, geographies, and languages, in which cinema appears not only as testimony or tool of denunciation, but as an act of resistance and memory. Against the silence imposed by official history, art here asserts itself as a gesture of insubordination, as the possibility to imagine —and to film— other possible worlds.
  
  This encounter is addressed mainly to the community of Escola Massana and to all those interested in the arts. It seeks to open a space for exchange between research, creation, and artistic practice. The reflections of the speakers are not conceived as closed discourses, but as starting points for dialogue —invitations to think collectively about the forms of resistance and representation in contemporary art.
  
  We hope this session will be a source of inspiration and critical feedback, where young perspectives can challenge, extend, and transform the questions raised here. Because, as René Vautier taught us, insubordination does not only mean opposition, but the freedom to imagine and create.

   

  

   

  // Program //

  10:00 a.m.
  Simona Malatesta
  Presentation of the project "Art, War, and Insubmission"

  10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
  Raquel Schefer
  Poetics of the Political: The Anti-Colonial Aesthetics of Contemporary Palestinian Cinema

  In 1995, in a well-known interview of Mahmoud Darwish by Abbas Beydoun, the Palestinian poet said he believed that the “Palestinian theme,” which he defined as “both a call and a promise of freedom,” “would risk turning into a poetic cemetery if confined to its textuality… to a delimited space and historical moment,” thus maintaining a certain aesthetic independence of poetry from its content. Regarding René Vautier, Nicole Brenez highlighted his “constant formal ingenuity, thanks to which [the filmmaker] always overcame the practical difficulties inherent in socially engaged work.” If, historically, the decolonization project also involved the decolonization of representation —including cinematic representation, a gesture exemplified in Vautier’s work—, in this presentation I will examine, through the analysis of Kamal Aljafari’s filmography, how this question is posed in contemporary Palestinian cinema. Does an anti-colonial aesthetics exist in contemporary Palestinian cinema —expressed through experimental practices such as the reuse and profanation of colonial archives— and how does that aesthetics inscribe itself within the history of anti-colonial cinema, while also deconstructing it?

  12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
  Sonia Kerfa
  Thinking Cinema Through the Archive: An Emancipatory Proposal to Activate the Memory of Social and Decolonial Struggles in North Africa. The Case of María Ruido’s Cinema
  
  María Ruido’s cinema has always been interested in North Africa: since 2011, when she traveled to Tunisia in search of Frantz Fanon’s trace and filmed Le rêve est fini, to Morocco, where she conducted research (2014) for her documentary El ojo imperativo, the filmmaker understood the importance of this region in European history. Like René Vautier, she filmed ongoing revolutions and the inequality inherent to the colonial system, as well as workers’ struggles. Drawing from fragments of María Ruido’s work, we will explore the persistence of colonial and capitalist exploitation themes in her films, and how her use of the archive functions as a reactivation of memory.

  1:30 – 2:00 p.m.  Questions and discussion

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  Simona Malatesta from OVNI collective

  Sonia Kerfa is Professor of Visual Arts and Gender Studies at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA, France). She is a member of the ILCEA4 research unit and director of the Centre for Research and Studies of Hispanists (CERHIS). Her latest publications address the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (Monograma, online journal, with I. Castro) and documentary cinema made by women in Latin America and Spain: 1/ “Latin American feminist film and visual art collectives,”  Jump Cut: a review of contemporary media, n° 61, Fall 2022, with L. Cervera and E. Ramírez-Soto; and 2/ Le geste documentaire des réalisatrices. Amérique latine-Espagne, 2023, with D. Marchiori and A. Mateus. She is principal investigator of two research projects funded by the Ministry of Higher Education (2020–2025): one on women in artists’ collectives in Latin America (IDEX–Initiative of Excellence), and another on Franca Donda, a Venezuelan photographer of Italian origin (GIS–Institut du Genre, Paris).

  Raquel Schefer is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, where she completed her PhD. A filmmaker and curator specializing in cinema, she is also co-editor-in-chief of La Furia Umana, a quarterly journal on film theory and history. She holds a Master’s degree in Documentary Film from Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires and a BA in Communication Sciences from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has been a postdoctoral researcher for FCT at Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and the University of the Western Cape, and a visiting researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has also been a visiting professor at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, among other institutions. She is the author of El autorretrato en el documental: figuras, máquinas, imágenes (Ediciones Universidad del Cine, 2008) and numerous scholarly and critical articles. She has served as a programming advisor for EDOC and IDFA festivals and is currently preparing the program for the next edition of the Doc’s Kingdom Seminar. Her main research areas include the history and aesthetics of anti-colonial and militant cinema, as well as the intersections between experimental and ethnographic film.