un Projects & recess present

Collection (spell)

a screening curated by Nadia Refaei and Olivia Koh

Friday 18 October 2024, Naarm/Melbourne and Nipaluna/Hobart

Films by Takani Clark, Noor Fawzi Alasswad, Rosalind Nashashibi, Pom Bunsermvicha, Jacqui Shelton

Image: Bím Caillte (mistranslated: I am usually, habitually, lost) (2023) Jacqui Shelton. (still)

un Projects and its editors, would like to acknowledge that these concurrent screenings are held on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land and Muwinina land, and that sovereignty of these lands was never ceded. We offer our sincere respects to the Elders of the Kulin Nations, past and present, and the Palawa/Pakana Elders of lutruwita. We extend these respects to the Elders of World Indigenous communities, acknowledging too, that their sovereignty over their lands was never ceded.

This short film program, Collection (spell), is co-curated by un Magazine guest editors Nadia Refaei and Olivia Koh, the current editors of upcoming issues 18.3 Sabaar and Other Counter Archives and 18.4 good grief. This screening is taking place concurrently in Nipaluna (Hobart) Lutruwita (Tasmania) and Naarm (Melbourne, Victoria). Thank you for supporting PARA (Palestine Australia Relief and Action Relief) through this screening. PARA helps Palestinian migrants and refugees settle in Australia and achieve their full potential – free from the barriers created by conflict and displacement.

Supported by the City of Yarra, Creative Victoria and Creative Australia

Film List:
film-list-collection-spell.pdf

Collection (spell)
by Olivia Koh


As we are sitting here at the Richmond Library, there are also a group of people gathering and watching the same films at the Soho Arts space. This idea is practical, but also a way to think about the moving image/video/film as a form of transmission – light particles are being projected and reconfigured across time and space – and as a form of resistance.

In a contribution to the incoming un magazine 18.4 good grief, Tamsen Hopkinson provides an ‘An expanded index, a response, a signal’.(1) This is a written document that is based on but used in a less technical sense than a standard index. Hopkinson writes on a selected term Synchronicity:

Synchronicity is a concept introduced by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, referring to the meaningful coincidence of events that seem unrelated but occur together in a way that is not due to chance. These events are connected by meaning rather than by cause and effect, suggesting that there is a deeper underlying order in the universe. Synchronicity highlights how personal experiences or external events align in a way that feels significant, often providing insight, guidance, or a sense of connection to something greater.

By co-curating this program to occur at the same time at different places, we wanted to find instances of synchronicity in the works we selected, to reflect on intersecting points in our respective magazine issues. Although intersections and correlations could be applied to almost any program of individual films that make up a new whole, this series of artist films engage with and challenge the thematic of a collection itself. The films counter traditional notions of loss and of the archive, as we question how loss is apprehended and history is named. What do we make with what remains? This program is an invitation to reimagine and reshape given attributes to individual and collective loss (as something irrecoverable, permanent and fixed).(2) Against hegemonic accounts of history, these artist films all differentially ask: who decides what is lost, what is collected and constitutes history, memory and story?

We start the screening with Elder of Shells (2019) by Takani Clark and Under the Lemon Tree (2020) by Noor Al-Asswad. These two short works respectively look to Elders – both women and matriarchs – that continue to practice cultural traditions and reflect on and share their connection to Country, to homeland. This is introduced in Elder of Shells by Lola Greeno and the ‘Kanalaritja’ tradition of making shell-necklaces. Lola Greeno grew up learning this practice of gathering shells with her Elders between truwana, Cape Barren Island and in lutruwita, Tasmania. She now passes on the practice to her own granddaughters, who appear in the film travelling to Wybalenna, a nineteenth century ‘reserve’ on Flinders Island, where their ancestors were exiled and detained by the British colonial forces newly arrived to ‘Australia’.

In Under the Lemon Tree, a different sense of cultural continuance resonates with the actions of Khaldieh, a Palestinian woman who describes a personal collection of objects that make a living archive: food items, a map and small rocks, lemon seeds, Palestinian coins. She prepares a simple breakfast in the morning light, and as night falls she is still sitting on a rug under a group of lemon trees; trees that grew from seeds from Palestine. Displaced, these living archives are a testament to what cannot be destroyed. Indigenous people have experienced profound loss through colonialism, neocolonialism and genocide. In these two films, older generations gently demonstrate a myriad of ways that they remember and pass down their own histories, language, grief and culture to create resistant, present, living and alternative archival forms.

The bracketed ‘(spell)’ from this program’s title originates from a description of Rosalind Nashashibi’s film Electrical Gaza (2015). (3) The work was commissioned by the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum and filmed in the Gaza Strip in 2014 just before Israel’s deadly ‘Operation Protective Edge’, a bombardment that occurred in July and August of that year. (4) At this time, press passes in Gaza had to be approved by both the IDF and Hamas. Travelling to the Gaza Strip with a cameraperson and producer, visiting with senior members of Hamas and filming Hamas campsites that treated the wounded and impoverished, Nashashibi unconventionally chose not to focus on depictions of despair and disaster which are so ingrained into the documentary and war film genres. Instead we are shown everyday scenes where Palestinian children bathe and wash horses in the sea, where Palestinian adolescents try to pose for the camera, Palestinian people sing and repose in a lounge room, a Palestinian driver smiles at a passerby and in another scene reverses down a narrow street. As a Palestinian and a British citizen, Nashashibi was asked to wrap up during this filming and promptly leave, by an envoy of the British consulate due to the imminence of the attacks by Israel.(5) Nashashibi reflects on the use of animation in her film; animated scenes which sketch and expand on the ones filmed on 16mm by cinematographer Emma Dalesman:

I had just been to see the animated movie My Neighbour Totoro at the cinema. There is a scene when Mei discovers Totoro by crawling under thick undergrowth and falling down a deep tunnel into the earth. This mysterious passage to a magical underworld seemed similar to the complex and obscure way we gained access to Gaza, and I thought enchantment was a good metaphor for the state of existence in Gaza, for the Israeli land, sea and air siege that the strip of land is under. Here enchantment is not meant in a positive way, as in ‘enchanting’, but means under a spell; because it exists, it existed, isolated by the world and on a different plane of reality to everything that surrounded it.

The animated black hole in one of the animated street scenes in Electrical Gaza very gradually expands outward on the picture plane. The slow pace of this orbs’ movement and its expansion ascribes it an ambiguity. The black spherical animation invites both a calming nullity and a sinister edge, it can be read as simultaneously representing an all-encasing void and a precarious bubble. The concurrent danger of allusion and escapism relates not only to the distant way Gaza is viewed by outside spectators, but is inherent to the mesmerising quality of the moving image as a medium itself, of which Nashashibi’s film is a reminder and a warning.

The history of the moving image, and subsequently film, has a foundational relationship to magic; originally inspiring fear and awe from its audience through analogue optical illusions. In Lemongrass Girl (2021) Pom Bunsermvicha creates a para-text by exploring a film set as an allegory to examine traditions in contemporary Thai society. Tottering between both factual and fictional spaces, Bunsermvicha industriously uses Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s actual film set – from her feature film Come Here (2021) – as a setting for Bunsermvicha’s own short film. Using real stage setups from Suwichakornpong’s larger feature film set and the same camera crew (who play either versions of their true selves, or fictional crew members), Bunsermvicha plays with her own role of director, as a novice to a more established filmmaker; Suwichakornpong. She playfully and daringly creates her own work from what could be construed as the remnants or offcuts of her mentor’s film, viewed from another angle, literally and figuratively.

As the writer credited in the screenplay of Lemongrass Girl, and by impersonating herself as a deadpan director, it seems Suwichakornpong is however, quite supportive of the young filmmaker and in on the joke.(7) We follow the young fictional intern Piano grapple with Thai superstition and tradition; as the resident ‘virgin’ of the film set, she is tasked by the others with the duty of warding off the rain and bad weather by replanting established segments of lemongrass in the ground and offering prayer. The short film subtly reflects on the dual labour required of Piano, this young film intern, who not only performs uncredited labour on set in the production of a product (she is everywhere and constantly called for on the walkie-talkie by the crew of the feature film) but is forced to expose the status of her intimate life to her colleagues while maintaining the traditional societal standards assigned to her as a female. Bunservicha’s gaze is coy but uncompromising, as the viewer, like the character Piano, are forced to endure the smiles and jokes about her virgin status by the crew and watch her gather and plant the lemongrass in a rural Thai setting (it is intimated and not explicitly stated that Piano, like the rest of the film crew, are cosmopolitan workers from a capital city like Bangkok and are personally unfamiliar or removed from the rural landscapes and local lives they are filming, expanding the intertextual layers of critique and complexity in this short film). It is not without humour that we are left watching the film crew and director waiting under a cover at the end of the film, forced to pause filming until the rain stops. This extended contemplation continues with the sound of the rain and storm at the end of Lemongrass Girl when the credits roll, a wry signalling that can either be interpreted as the disapproval of the spirits, or viewed atheistically; the inability of superstition to explain or determine external phenomena.

Rituals are ways to either perpetuate legacies or subvert them. (8) Jacqui Shelton’s Bím Caillte (mistranslated: I am usually, habitually, lost) (2023) further unpacks and enacts the title in this film program, where ‘spell’ is both a noun and a verb. Shelton engages with different languages and their translations as instruments, in order to play with and create sub-narratives to existing mythic figures and folklore. Travelling to Ireland to explore her connection and disconnection to her Irish ancestors and be ‘better immersed in the colonised minority language’ the unpictured artist (Shelton) ‘is met by a dead crane and an Irish-speaking, shape-shifting horse’.(9) The horse enchantingly and rapturously speaks as Gaeilge (in Gaelic) and is played by the Australian-Irish actor Claire Duncan. Duncan plays the role of an archetypal trickster named the Púca; a shape-shifter who intercepts locals’ fate and often takes the shape of a horse. The Púca speak to the new visitor of these lands over an alluring and melancholy soundtrack of strings and voice, composed by Conor O’Hanlon and featuring Danika Nesbitt singing traditional Irish song, Coaineadh Na dtri Múire. Shelton returned from Ireland to Australia and collaborated with her fellow diaspora who are investigating language and cultural recovery.

The Púca’s words dance around the screen in green subtitles as well as Gaelic and English translations in white. This intertextual approach continues with the landscape footage and sound recordings that are montaged and collaged speedily onto the picture plane; horses in small housing paddocks with farm dogs, Google map directions, close ups of bones sitting at the bottom of sea water. Filmed in the Counties of Tipperary, Limerick, Cork, Kerry, Galway and Belfast in Ireland, Shelton, like Bunsermvicha in Lemongrass Girl, plays with her own factual journey of cultural research and discovery; her simultaneous role as an artist and a person of diaspora engaging with stories of her ancestor’s connection to place and language. In one segment, the artist travels to and films an apparently significant road intersection where her ancestors and fellow IRB volunteers had ambushed loyalist police forces, who upheld and enforced colonial rule in the area.

The artist later realises that this visited location was a mistake of geo-mapping, she has filmed and travelled to a nearby but incorrect location. Across visuals of these mistaken roads are collaged moving images of the inspection of the inside of a human mouth and a horse’s mouth; an allusion to the trickster mythic figure Shelton has conjured, as well as evoking the bare-bone material of teeth and gums.

The image of a horse’s mouth put on a intersecting plane to the humans’ draws an eerie comparison; horses’ mouths are both like a human’s and not, domesticated by industrial agriculture, stained and evocative of the violence associated with language loss and survival in the wake of colonising forces and their languages. In Bím Caillte, Shelton the violence associated with language loss and survival in the wake of colonising forces and their languages. Shelton graciously accounts for the mistranslations and out-of-placeness of one engaging with their linguistic and cultural inheritance: the inability to fully understand the cultural matter of the past, while still connecting genuinely with what remains.

This group of artist films is a collection and a spell, an assemblage of words, objects, images and sounds that enchant and deceive the viewer. The artist films in this program actively engage the viewer to gather and consider how we can be active participants in the shaping of our own stories and refute dominant narratives; through such acts of sharing materials and forming connections.

(1) ‘An expanded index, a response, a signal’ was originally distributed as a textual response to SIGNAL DETECTION, an exhibition curated by Tamsen Hopkinson MEJIA 4-25 May 2024 in Naarm, Victoria. In un Magazine 18.4, Hopkinson’s index is one that is employed to form broader connections and correlations to different ideas and works across the magazine. It is propositional; the approach to the index is expansive as the index that can be added to by any reader.
(2) This idea is inspired by the anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2001) edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian.
(3) As described on the LUX website. LUX distribution collection is the UK’s largest collection of films and videos made by artists. Accessed: 17th October 2024, https://lux.org.uk/event/electrical-gaza-rosalind-nashashibi/
(4) The scenes in Electrical Gaza were Filmed before ‘more than two thousand Palestinians and seventy-two Israelis were killed, most of them civilians and nearly five hundred of them children.’ Rosalind Nashashibi by Anne Godfrey Larmon in Artforum, Accessed: 17th October 2024, https://www.artforum.com/events/rosalind-nashashibi-6-224176/
(5) Artist text, Rosalind Nashashibi, October 2023. Accessed: 17th October 2024, https://lux.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Electrical-Gaza-Rosalind-Nashashibi-October-2023.pdf
(6) Ibid.
(7) Both directors are part of the independent film company, Electric Eel Films based in Bangkok, Thailand. Accessed 14th October 2024, https://www.electriceelfilms.com/filmmakers.
(8) This is an observation made by Nadia Refaei on reading this text.
(9) Artist Statement, Jacqui Shelton, 2023. Accessed 18 October: https://www.jacquishelton.com/bim-caillte-1