Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, April 1 at 7pm for a screening of Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023), a film by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, followed by an in-person conversation with the artists.

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is the latest film in the “Elemental Cinema” series, which Neuman and Ferreira da Silva started to conceive in 2016; and for which the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as a starting point. Part documentary and part personal essay, each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four classical elements: earth, water, fire, and air, which is the element chosen in Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims.

Blending poetics and critical theory, the film offers a sensuous, poignant, and emotional exploration of the ethical and political challenges of the global present from both human and nonhuman perspectives. Its aim is to undermine the ways of thinking about and relating to the Earth inherited from European colonial modernity.

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023, 49 minutes)
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims follows the wind and what it carries—from dust to clouds, ideas, stories, and voices—as a guide and an analytical framework. Filmed in the Chilean Atacama desert, it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past, present, and future, in this site. Taking us on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism, and their dissemination. Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries acts as a prism that reveals what is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion, and human extractivism.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery, The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Arnhem Museum (Netherland), and more. Their films have been screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Images Festival Toronto, Docslisboa, Pravo Lujdski and more. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Belkin Museum Collection. In 2023, they showed the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Barcelona) and they premiered their new film Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims at Kunsthalle Wien.

Bios

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org, a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e-flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022), amongst many other titles.

For more information, please contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom