Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition

The last film in Vidokle's trilogy on Cosmism is a meditation on the museum as the site of resurrection-a central idea for many Cosmist thinkers, scientists and avant-garde artists. Filmed at the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Zoological Museum, The Lenin Library, and the Museum of Revolution, the film looks at museological and archival techniques of collection, restoration and conservation as a means of the material restoration of life, following an essay penned by Nikolai Federov on this subject in the 1880s. The film follows a cast comprised of present-day followers of Federov, several actors, artists and a Pharaoh Hound that playfully enact a resurrection of a mummy, a close examination of Malevich's Black Square, Rodchenko's spatial constructions, taxidermied animals, artifacts of the Russian Revolution, skeletons, and mannequins in tableau vivant-like scenes, in order to create a contemporary visualization of the poetry implicit in Federov's writings.

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

With striking images and meticulous sound work, Burial reminds us of the paradoxical relationship between scientific development and the destruction of nature. Questioning the effects of human activity on the planet we inhabit and which we have put at risk, the film focuses on the unsolved issues of nuclear plants and nuclear activity.

a Rastafarian vampire film starring and co-written by Oba, an artist and musician based in Brooklyn. Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, human trafficking and blood sucking, the film reimagines Oba’s origin story. In the late 15th century, Oba is shipped as cargo from West Africa to the Caribbean, where he is seduced by the vampire Christopher Columbus, ensuring his undying allegiance to the colonial project. As the centuries blow by, Oba and Columbus work behind the scenes, pulling the strings of ‘new world’ geopolitics as they spread vampirism across the Western Hemisphere. Combining film forms and genre tropes, Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. Ultimately, the film tackles an uncomfortable question: How can you decolonise yourself, if it’s in your blood?

The second installment of Anton Vidokle’s trilogy on Russian cosmism, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, looks at the poetic dimension of the solar cosmology of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky. Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was imprisoned and later exiled, the film introduces Сhizhevsky’s research into the impact of solar emissions on human sociology, psychology, politics, and economics in the form of wars, revolutions, epidemics, and other upheavals. It aligns the life of post-Soviet rural residents and the futurological projects of Russian cosmism to emphasize that the goal of the early Soviet breakthroughs aimed at the conquest of outer space was not so much technical acceleration, but the common cause of humankind in their struggle against the limitations of earthly life.

INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.

Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.

Considered a staple of Florida tourism, alligator wrestling has been performed by members of the Seminole Tribe for over a century. As the practice has changed over the years, Halpate profiles the hazards and history of the spectacle through the words of the tribe's alligator wrestlers themselves and what it has meant to their people's survival.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.

Efforts to “decolonize” institutions are embodied in ritual acts of acknowledging Indigenous presence and claims to territory. However, without continuous commitment to serve as accomplices to Indigenous people, institutional gestures of acknowledgement risk reconciling “settler guilt and complicity” and rescuing “settler futurity”’ How can we escape this entrapment and allow acknowledgement to retain its potential to unsettle? What must we do to begin to undertake a process of endless acknowledgement?

In this moment when the believability of our reality continues to stretch - blue people are hoping to enter into our reality environment.