Content Warnings
A series of hypnotic, fragmentary encounters reflecting on creativity, desire, identity and transformation. Forms of transgressive potentiality are explored through poppers training videos, VHS tapes documenting an esoteric musical subculture, and a night of ritual shapeshifting in a Boston parking lot.
Followed by a Q&A with Jamie Crewe, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka, and Luis Arnías
False Wife
False Wife is a work that leads its visitors through an ordeal of transformation. A poppers training video is typically a user-made compilation of pornographic clips paired with text, hypnotic music, voice-overs and instructions for action. False Wife is a poppers training video, but its material is ambiguous and obscure. Its narrative, drawn from a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs, reflects on themes of desire, shame, transgression and the longing for change.
Signal to Noise
Signal to Noise concludes a number of projects related to the surviving videotapes of schwimmen – an early 1990s teenage experimental industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk. The film creates a dialogue between the established archival record and the slippery poetics of an esoteric culture that inherently resists attempts to be (re)represented or deconstructed – celebrating the grand utopian impulses of marginal artistic practices and forms of life lived otherwise.
Terror Has no Shape
At night in Boston, a bodega cat is the only witness to an alien rock crash-landing in an empty parking lot. A viscous white humanoid, rendered in crude special effects, is stalked by a figure on a motorcycle, and the encounter ends in ritual fire. A burning effigy and a Senegalese call to prayer usher modes of Afro-Venezuelan spiritual resistance into an ambiguous present – condensing the experience of colonialism into a series of fragments from first encounter to long-haunted aftermath.