The Consonant Unknown: Film Screening Curated by Shen Xin

If one could enact senses from a place of accountability, of the unknown, what would it look like? This screening program explores relationships that uphold the unknown as much as the known: to invite participation in experimenting with perceptions of sound and language (Yashaswini Raghunandan and Arianna Zuanazzi), to put one’s body and movement in dialogue with the unknown (Leila Awadallah), to draw aerial scenes of birth through symbiosis of the miraculous Luzi Yang), to hold the preservation and therefore the manifestation of the unknown as a witness and creator (Ali Van), to allow the animated to inherit time in liquid forms (Tulapop Saenjaroen), and to emerge from the materiality of what can be submerged into (Wang Xiaolu). These works resonate with the ghostly presence and the narratives around iodine in Shen Xin’s five-channel video installation work Brine Lake (A New Body), where the unknown is present to carve spaces for new values to surface and for the desire toward multitudes to be pronounced.

I invite you by Yashaswini Raghunandan and Arianna Zuanazzi (4:50 min.)

In October 2021, Arianna Zuanazzi, a neuroscience researcher who studies how the brain processes language, and Yashaswini Raghunandan, a filmmaker with a special interest in the stories that sound can tell, were remotely paired for one week to produce a science-inspired film on the topic of “resistance” for the 2021 Symbiosis competition (New York). Their short film I invite you is a sensory journey that illustrates the challenges that our brain faces every day when listening to language. Viewers are invited to participate as laboratory subjects in a cinematic experiment, where language and sound perception are challenged by noisy speech, ambiguous words, and dislocated sentences, to illustrate how understanding is a process of resistance. I invite you is the winner of the 2021 Symbiosis competition: “The parallels in the experimentalism of the film structure and the exercise we participate in is a fascinating way to explore the concept of resistance in communication.”

Sea Nonna See Teta by Leila Awadallah (10:15 min.)

When asked to share something for a hybrid performance, I decided against making a film or trying to perform through the computer but instead share a window into the process of improvising, writing, and reflecting on what personal findings are revealed to me inside Body Watani’s practice. I have been engaging with this work for the past few years, often filming only to record a record (so this presentation is simply, that). Ongoing ruminatings of what I learn from embodied research beside the Mediterranean Sea, where my body born from lineages of Palestinian and Sicilian tetas and nonnas feels the strongest sense of home. And beyond my own body, into the collective memory, and ongoing forces present within that space, in terms of movement, migration, and home searching. The performance Making Home took place at the Brava Theater in San Francisco and virtually (2022). Curated and presented by Golden Thread Productions.

What Miracles Took Place When You Were Born by Luzi Yang (7:47 min)

What Miracles Took Place When You Were Born may be summed up as a story about a growing island. The film grew out of an ancient world where there are songs, parables, and arias. In this world you will meet miracles, psalms, and jokes disguised as psalms. Sometimes you will encounter lucked-out survivors, rags-to-riches musicians, and upside-down pilgrims. In a tour that wanders through narrative signposts and mythological landmarks, the film discusses various types of miracle birth (and rebirth) stories with changing feelings of wonder, amusement, and sadness. Birth has sometimes been described as a process with dramatic turns and twists to overcome unforeseeable danger; at other times, it’s been portrayed as a tranquil event accompanied by signs of purported numinousness. With shifting rhythm, the film asks if the miraculous aspects often found in the birth stories of the so-called saints, prophets, and sages actually originated from the birth processes of common life forms, rather than the opposite. The moment of birth contains seemingly incorruptible newness and potential, even though in a different, oft-told myth, “future” is mutilated by “history” while “history” is slain by “future,” or the opposite.

Die Fermentierten by Ali Van (31:43 min.)

A maculate held positions together with time, wayside and contrariwise. Like allies, disclosing sap of death, desiring mead with sun, burrowing free for wild transfers. Playing to become more alive, infinite by day, principally open through reverse of stillness, release, mass recourse, and energetic habitation. Preserving dreams, weather, cravings, and a material circulation through metabolic love. In gesture unto monodigit language, Die Fermentierten | les ferments, 20xx-22.

Squish! by Tulapop Saenjaroen (17:31 min.)

Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate “movements.” By extrapolating and redefining the terms of movement, be it through psychological, physical, or political understandings, the work interweaves the medium of animation with a state of depression.

Wet Togetherness (work in progress) by Wang Xiaolu (6:51 min.)

The spirit of a drowned child leads Xiaolu on a pilgrimage to dismantle the fear of water. By visiting with humans and marine mammals who are exploring interdependence and collective organizing, new paradigms of engaging with the water and each other emerge.

Tulapop Saenjaroen is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Bangkok. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. In combining narrative and the essay film genre, he investigates subjects such as tourism, self-care, and free labor through remaking and reinterpreting produced images and their networks. Saenjaroen received his MFA in fine art media from the Slade School of Fine Art and an MA in aesthetics and politics from CalArts. Saenjaroen’s works have been shown in exhibitions and screenings internationally, including Locarno Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Images Festival, Toronto; DOK Leipzig; Image Forum, Tokyo; Conversations at the Edge at Gene Siskel Film Center Chicago; Harvard Film Archive; Curtas Villa do Conde; Abandon Normal Devices Festival, UK; FICVALDIVI, Chile; the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; 25FPS, Zagreb; Kasseler DokFest; Vancouver International Film Festival; CROSSROADS at SFMOMA; Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival; Display Gallery Prague; NUS Museum, Singapore; 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok; and others. Saenjaroen has won awards from Winterthur, Jakarta, Moscow, Singapore, and Thailand.

Xiaolu Wang is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and translator from the Hui Muslim Autonomous Region of China, whose practice is based in the mapping of interiority, with the use of video, poetry, memory, translations, and a decolonial lens. Their work has been screened at local venues and international film festivals. They contributed translations to journals including 單讀. They are a recipient of the 2019 Jerome Film and Media Grant, and a fellow of DocX Archive Lab 2021–2022, organized by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. They are currently a part of the On Being Project’s inaugural artists-in-residence. Besides being a practicing cinephile, they occasionally host podcasts, and frequently read the Tao Te Ching. Their work has been generously supported by Metropolitan Regional Arts Council of Minnesota, Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, Jerome Foundation, Women Make Movies, and UnionDocs. They live on Dakota land (present-day Minneapolis) with two cats, Marvin and Moto, who sleep on separate couches.

Leila Awadallah (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and film wanderer based between Minneapolis and Beirut. Her work in movement centers the body and its relation to land/place/peoples, rooted in the context of her own skin as an indigenous Palestinian, Arab-American, SWANA, Sicilian, and mixed Mediterranean diasporic being. She is the founder of the Body Watani (body-as-homeland) dance project and practice, which began in 2020. Body Watani’s first work, TERRANEA is supported by National Performance Network, Goethe Institute, MSAB, ARENA, Links Hall, and the Arab American National Museum. She is a Jerome Hill Fellow (2021–2023), and previously a Springboard 20/20 and Daring Dances Fellow. Awadallah’s work has been supported through research residencies and performances at the Hammana Artist House, Amalgam, and Lebanese National Theatre (Lebanon), Camargo Foundation (France), Arab American National Museum (Michigan), and most widely across spaces and places in and around her home in the Twin Cities. Mentored by Ananya Chatterjea, she trained, taught, and performed with Ananya Dance Theatre as a company member (2014–2019). She has a BFA in dance from the University of Minnesota.

Luzi Yang was born in Hangzhou, China. They received their B.A. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2011 and were awarded a graduate scholarship by DAAD in the same year. They received their MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2016. They participated in the group shows Toward the Emergence of Resistance (Taikang Space, Beijing, 2016) and An Impulse to Turn (Inside-Out Museum, Beijing, 2020). Solo exhibitions include New Directions: Luzi Yang at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2018) and their personal exhibition The Double-Ended Cypress: Memory and Consciousness at C5 Space (Beijing, 2022).

The collaboration of Yashaswini Raghunandan and Arianna Zuanazzi sits at the intersection of human neuroscience and cinematic technologies of audio and video. Raghunandan is an artist and filmmaker based in India who has a special interest in the stories that sound can tell. Her films have been screened at various national and international festivals. Zuanazzi is a postdoctoral researcher working at NYU (US). She uses neuroimaging techniques such as magnetoencephalography to study how the brain processes spoken and written language and combines information to create meaning. In 2021, the collaborators produced the science-inspired film I invite you, which won the Symbiosis competition at the Imagine Science Film Festival. They are both currently working on a multisensory installation titled The Hidden Story. To date, Raghunandan and Zuanazzi have never met in person.

Ali Van practices axiology, moving within living architecture, gastronomic ancestry, silent geography, and manner song. She was born in New York, nurtured through Hong Kong, and appertains to Minnesota. Van received a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her work centers in languages of love and figures its radius with light and psyche. She has presented her work in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, the US, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. In wilderness, she heeds one.

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