A Disaster by Alison O’Daniel
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Alison O’Daniel’s latest project grows out of research into the weaponization of sound, such as the phenomenon targeting North American government officials known as Havana syndrome, or the ways high-frequency sounds and music are used to discourage loitering. For this screening, O’Daniel will present an interstitial film project that builds toward her next feature. Using the soundtracks of disaster movies as material, A Disaster is an almost entirely imageless film; comprised of sound and text, it is centered on the physical comprehension of subsonic frequencies, tactile sound, and how experiences of sonic violence mirror the relentless ubiquity of ableism. 2025, US, DCP, 60 min.
A conversation between O’Daniel and Evan Calder Williams, associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, follows the screening.
Filmmaker and visual artist Alison O’Daniel is the director of The Tuba Thieves, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2023, was broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS and Arte in France, and screened at festivals across the globe, including CPH:DOX, MoMA Doc Fortnight, SFFILM, Biografilm, Doc Leipzig, and IDFA. O’Daniel is d/Deaf and builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary in her work that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the ear. A U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, she has received grants from Ford Foundation, Sundance, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, ITVS, Chicken & Egg, and SFFILM. She has developed projects in various labs, including Points North, Sundance Talent Forum, True/False/Catapult Editing Lab, and has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. O’Daniel was included in Filmmaker magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film issue. Represented by Commonwealth and Council Gallery in Los Angeles, she is an associate professor in the film program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Evan Calder Williams is associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program. He is a contributing editor to e-flux Journal and the author of the books Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and, forthcoming in July 2025, Inhuman Resources. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of a new edition of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism, and his writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, Cultural Politics, Journal of American Studies, Frieze, WdW Review, The Italianist, La Furia Umana, World Picture, Mute, Estetica, and numerous exhibition catalogues. He received his doctoral degree from the University of California Santa Cruz and was a Fulbright Fellow in Italy. Williams’s novel The Losing Team is forthcoming with Riverhead Books.
This film has open captions. The discussion and introduction will have ASL interpretation.
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For more information or to request additional accommodations, call 612-375-7564 or email access@walkerart.org.
A Disaster is commissioned by the Walker with support provided by Lois and John Rogers. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
