An Experiential Conversation About How We Gather

When we gather together to consider the big issues facing our field, we usually try to think our way out of certain problems. We try to treat the symptom, such as addressing exclusion by focusing on access, but what might we be overlooking with this type of understanding? Take the issues of programming, distribution, and exhibition: they are often enacted as the transfer of films to audiences by connecting "exceptional" filmmakers with "mortal" audiences.

What if film circulation was instead an embodied gesture connecting filmmaker, film, audience, and the world—as the failures of traditional prestige spaces to hold space for the divisions, the contradictions, and grief of this moment in history become ever clearer. This session will be led by Abhishek Nilamber, Laura Kloeckner of SAVVY contemporary in Berlin and keynote speaker Jemma Desai to imagine beyond the norms embedded in traditional spaces of screening and circulation. Based on their participatory research into models of kinship and community outside transactional models, and strategies of somatic knowledge production, this experiential conversation will think about how the screening space can function beyond hierarchical spectacle and display towards a more meaningful space of embodied connection and gathering.

Facilitators: Abhishek Nilamber (Cultural worker), Laura Kloeckner (Curator, Producer), Jemma Desai (Writer, Cultural worker)