Son[i]a #306
Isaac Julien
The work of Isaac Julien moves through liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction, documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative construction, and aesthetic forms.
The son of Caribbean immigrants, Isaac Julien was born in London in 1960. He was a key figure in the new wave of black independent film that emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was in power. He co-founded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, which was influenced by debate on post-colonialism and social theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall.
In his films and installations, Isaac Julien constructs a personal imaginary of black history and culture, as well as queer blackness. Through works like “Looking for Langston” (1989), “Young Soul Rebels” (1991), “Frantz Fanon: White Skin Black Mask” (1996), and “Lesson of the Hour” (2019), amongst others, he has developed what he calls an “aesthetics of reparation”. His work also casts a critical eye on the impact of globalisation, capital, migrations, and new forms of work in our world today.
In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, as a means of dismantling the hegemonising whiteness. He also discusses his constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film, expressed in media such as, through expanded cinema, choreographic montage, multiple screens, the movement of spectators and by breaking the flow of narrative and time. He talks about his working process based on constant revisions, with and thanks to the archive. And he confesses his mistrust of the promise of the radical nature of new technologies, while suggesting other ways of looking, with pleasure and beauty always at the centre.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Isaac Julien that we were unable to include the first time around.
Imani Mason Jordan
In this podcast interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor, curator and plant lover Imani Mason Jordan reflects on the conflicting meanings of community, which they sum up as “ a feeling and a relationship”. Finding guidance in the writings of Audre Lorde (and others)—through collective reading and listening—, Imani makes an urgent call for action, in order to disrupt and overcome the numbing of our emotions. Cadence, resonance, repetition and the bodily urgency of protest speeches operate in their artistic vocabulary as key tools for world-breaking, as well as world-making.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with FAKA that we were unable to include the first time around.
Élisabeth Lebovici
Élisabeth Lebovici reflects on the AIDS crisis during the eighties, and on the crucial role of conceptual art and activism in shaping the new visual and affective paradigms which gave voice to communities that the capitalist, liquefied society was (and still is) striving to smother. We also talk about poetry, pornography, and all that art that museums balk at hanging on their walls.
Faka
Desire Marea and Fela Gucci talk about performing masculinity and self-policing, vulnerability, Siyakaka feminism, South African pop culture in the 90s, racialised queer bodies, music as a medium and dealing with contradictions.
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she coined the notion of the “male gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.
Lizzie Borden
American filmmaker and activist Lizzie Borden talks about her first three films -"Re-grouping” (1976), "Born in Flames" (1983) i "Working Girls" (1986)-, about inductive and deductive filmmaking, about filming without a script, about the importance of editing, about style, about the use of documentary strategies in fiction films, about alternative distribution as a form of activism, about the lack of women in the film world and about her notion of television as the future of audiovisual media.
Lost Techno-Pop Weekend in Rural Midwestern America
This show takes a listen to techno-pop of the seventies and early eighties as a brief yet deliberate interruption into the realms of pop, rock, soul and R&B.