Son[i]a
Enzo Traverso
Italian historian Enzo Traverso talks about post-fascism and the emptying of the political, about the transformation of antisemitism, the politics of memory, the eclipse of utopias, and about some other collateral effects of early 21st century neoliberalism.
Matthew Fuller
Matthew Fuller talks about sleep, procedural imperialism, big data, post-humanity, and what he calls “denial of service attacks on people’s brains”.
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.
Marysia Lewandowska
Marysia Lewandowska talks about the Women’s Audio Archive, about the crucial need to generate counter-narratives in totalitarian regimes, about networking before networks, about the boundaries between the private and the public, the negotiations generated by the shift from one sphere to another, the responsibilities of the archive, and the potential to generate conversation through art.
Mitra Azar
The Italian artist Mitra Azar talks about points of view and the disembodiment of the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism, never-ending archives, processes, the “artropocene”, and conflict zones as a breeding ground for creative practices.