OF SHADOWS, EXHAUSTION AND THE SUBJECT: Anarchiving and Decolonizing Subjectifying Proto-Surveillance
Paula Albuquerque
12 May – 14 May 2023

The Archive Series invites artists, curators, researchers and institutions from The Netherlands and abroad to participate in conversations around the nature of the archive and the impulse to collect information, ideas and materials. Stemming from Looiersgracht 60’s commitment to a dialogue surrounding preservation, the Archive Series’ is made up of unique, site-specific events investigating archives through installation, performance and conversations with artists and practitioners actively engaged in better understanding the past in our present.

For the eighth edition of the Archive Series, Looiersgracht 60 is pleased to present Of Shadows, Exhaustion and the Subject - Anarchiving and Decolonizing Subjectifying Proto-Surveillance, a presentation by artist and scholar Paula Albuquerque. This presentation brings together work-in-progress alongside previous films and installations from audiovisual archival materials. To launch this public presentation, there will be a programme of screenings and discussions on Friday May 12, led by Paula Albuquerque, Cíntia Garcia Gil from Artistic Differences (Uniondocs NY), and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, curator of Silent Film (EYE Film Museum).

Albuquerque has a developed practice working with both analogue and digital archives to examine filmic objects as forms of surveillance. Her work exposes and deconstructs the frameworks of representation that create gendered and racialized stereotypes of their subjects. Albuquerque sources her research materials from home movies of former Portuguese colonies, webcam footage, surveillance material, Deepfake media, and most recently, archival material from the Eye Film Museum’s colonial and silent film collections. Albuquerque revisits and reframes filmic archives to deconstruct and demystify the gendered and racialized stereotypes that have been propagated from cinematic gesture, performance and narrative.

Considering the medium of film as surveillance is a centralized theme in Paula Albuquerque's work, particularly in how these films capture and portray marginalized bodies at work. In her presentation at Looiersgracht 60, Albuquerque focuses this framework on how film can produce biases. One film focuses on how early cinema was used as a tool to promote labor efficiency, and subjugated indigenous bodies in colonized lands as another tool of production. Another work examines archives from silent fiction films where women and their exhausted bodies are represented at the beginning of the 20th century. The movies ‘Shoes’ by Lois Weber, (1916) and ‘Water Lillie’ (unknown filmmaker, 1911) are departure points as case-studies that both portray a specificity of gesture to signal gendered burnout, exhaustion and emotional collapse.

For Archive Event VIII, Albuquerque will show the new works-in-progress Like the Glitch of a Ghost (W.I.P. 2023), made in collaboration with artist José Miguel Biscaya, and Of Shoes and Water Lillie (W.I.P. 2023), a sketch based on an improvisation in collaboration with dancer Suzan Tunca, the latter exploring the pre-modernist and postmodernist expressions of female exhaustion in performance.

Public Programme:

Friday 12 May

ECHOES AND HAUNTINGS

Decolonizing Settler Non-Fiction and Desubjectifying Contemporary Algorithms

13:00 - 16:00

Film Screening and work session around the film, Like the Glitch of a Ghost by Paula Albuquerque (W.I.P. 2023) and Recollection by Kamal Aljafari with speakers Cíntia Garcia Gil from Artistic Differences (Uniondocs NY) and Paula Albuquerque. Seating is limited, please RSVP in advance to info@looiersgracht60.org.

17:00

Panel discussion with Cíntia Garcia Gil (Uniondocs NY), Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (Curator Silent Film EYE Film Museum) and Paula Albuquerque around the decolonizing of film archives, including the anarchival of gender and racial biases and exposure of the present-day subjectification of minorities and diaspora stemming from these archives. Seating is limited, please RSVP in advance to info@looiersgracht60.org.

The installation is open to the public from 12h-20h from Friday May 12 – Sunday May 14.