Blog

Nov 17, 2023

Fluid Forms: Films by Philip Cartelli

Fluid Forms: Films by Philip Cartelli Philip Cartelli, Slow Return (still),

Fluid Forms: Films by Philip Cartelli

Philip Cartelli, Slow Return (still), 2021.

Admission starts at $5

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, June 27 at 7pm for a screening of works by Philip Cartelli, featuring Lampedusa (with Mariangela Ciccarello, 2015), France (with Mariangela Ciccarello, 2022), and Slow Return (2021), followed by a conversation with Cartelli, scholar Kenneth White, and curator Zachary B. Feldman. These three films explore diverse landscapes where the cinematic apparatus disturbs political borders, and those that occupy the terrain between past and present, solid and liquid, real and almost real. Cartelli's work blends landscape cinema with experimental ethnography in an uncanny evocation of space and place.

Films

Lampedusa (2015, 14 minutes, with Mariangela Ciccarello) Lampedusa contemplates a moment in history from the early 1830s in which a volcanic eruption created new land just off the coast of Sicily. European powers scrambled to claim the island, which was subsequently subsumed by the ocean only six months after its creation, leaving only a shallow underwater ledge.

France (2022, 6 minutes, with Mariangela Ciccarello) The formal simplicity of the hexagon, which refers to the idealized shape of metropolitan France, is countered by convoluted drawings and twisted branches of a coastal environment, evoking French colonial domination and the illusion of national unity and harmony.

Slow Return (2021, 80 minutes) A river flows out to sea through a network of wetlands, salt marshes, and petrochemical plants. A melting glacier, its surface covered in protective cloth, still attracts tourists. Slow Return bridges the Rhone River's extremities, where the natural environment is a resource and commodity, exploring shared legacies of dependence and exploitation embedded in their landscapes.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility –Two flights of stairs lead up to the building's front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. –For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. 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 Screening Room and this bathroom.

Philip Cartelli is a moving-image artist and researcher whose film and video work has been exhibited at Locarno Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Torino Film Festival, FID Marseille, and Film at Lincoln Center's Art of the Real, among others. Since 2013 he has also worked as one half of the duo Nusquam with Mariangela Ciccarello. He holds a PhD in Media Anthropology with a secondary emphasis in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University, where he was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and a PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). His writing has appeared in a variety of publications and he has presented his practice and research in international conferences and other venues. He is chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Wagner College where he teaches filmmaking.

Zachary B. Feldman is a New York-based curator, writer, and scholar of media art and is currently the visual arts and program curator for Goethe-Institut New York. He holds a joint-Ph.D. in Comparative Media and German Studies from Vanderbilt University, and was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2022-23. Feldman has previously held positions at the Frist Art Museum, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, and the National Gallery of Art.

Kenneth White is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at The New School, Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts. He was previously Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Faculty of Curatorial Studies in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP). His work examines art media cultures of the Cold War to the present, with particular focus on experimental/avant-garde cinema.