In the words of its founders, the goal of Ellipsis is to provide “a space in which different contexts and modes of storytelling can build off one another,” with each program “geared towards connecting two languages, either aesthetic or literal,” invigorating both the cinema and the gallery with perspectives that look to horizons beyond the Western canon.

– Courtesy of Light Industry

MAY 04 / ELLIPSIS: REFRACTIONS

Ellipsis, a new moving image series that takes place every four months, debuts today at Spectacle Theater with Refractions, a selection of four short films that reinvigorate the language of landscape. Curated by Mariana Sanchez Bueno and Emir West, the series aims to connect moving image works across languages, either aesthetic or literal, and shift conversations of art-house cinema beyond the Western canon. Additional screenings this month include an evening at Light Industry and the Center for Performance Research.

Each of the artists in Refractions uses specific technicalities of their media to alter the possibilities of how the image is seen on screen and the ways it is experienced within the cinematic space. In El Laberinto’s montage of hand-held footage and clips of the American soap opera Dynasty, Laura Huertas Millan mediates on the insolvency of dreams built on smoke and mirrors. Following a man through the southern jungle of Colombia to the ruins of drug trafficker Evaristo Porras’ palace, the man narrates his experiences working for Porras as viewers are left to connect what little they can from the house’s scattered underpinnings. By pairing 16mm with reused television footage, Huertas Millan shifts the immediate feeling of nostalgia often produced by witnessing film to one of distance and curiosity. A similar feeling returns with Nuotama Bodomo’s short film Boneshaker. Both works could operate on different planes, yet there is a delicate balance between the pointed textual offerings of El Laberinto and Bodomo’s open-endedness that stresses a similar longing for closure. Boneshaker follows a West African family as they make their way through the American south to the church they hope will heal their problem child. Approaching the church her parents hope will heal all wounds, the young girl breaks free again and again to run unafraid into the woods surrounding them. With little dialogue, Boneshaker unearths the nuances of family, the space that brings them together and the space that keeps them apart.

Turning from narrative to myth, the immersive sonic experience of Basma Alsharif’s DEEP SLEEP draws on the fallacies of monument and ruin as opposite. Viewers are immediately implicated in an experience of what Alsharif coins “bi-locating,” using binaural resonances to shift one’s geographic location. Touring the monuments of Malta and Greece, Alsharif uses the sonic space from Gaza–a home Alsharif cannot access–to render the affinities between ancient civilizations not only seen but felt. Through the physical feeling of Alsharif’s work, the act of sighting can embody the act of being within “ the site.” Ojos Para Mis Enemigos uses the transformation of site more literally, as a point for the reclamation of culture, religion, and nature. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz studies the physical leftovers of a US-controlled military site in Puerto Rico, a man-made structure and product of US colonialism, that are overgrown with plants and animals that now claim homes there. This becomes a site of ritual in which santero and activist Pedro Ortiz may collect flowers for spiritual offerings. Refractions brings these works together to highlight the importance of geography not only as a structure for understanding one’s place in the world, but for questioning its boundaries and altering its forms through sound and image.

MAY 10 / ELLIPSIS: ECHOES

Ellipsis: Echoes is a double-bill of short films built around the locus of cultural resonance through labor. Curated by Mariana Sanchez Bueno and Emir West, the series aims to connect moving image works across languages, either aesthetic or literal, and shift conversations of art-house cinema beyond the Western canon.

In the absence of dialogue, both of these films emphasize a choreography around labor and labor histories. As a result, intimacy takes a central role in each film’s world. Kevin Jerome Everson’s Sound That follows employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for leaks in the infrastructure in Cuyahoga County. Moving through the city, the techniques for sourcing these leaks evolve into a sonic ritual and a form of communication between laborers and the city. O Peixe (The Fish), a short film and installation work by Jonathas de Andrade, focuses on fishermen from a village on the northeast coast of Brazil as they enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate gesture that accompanies the passage of death is a testament to a relationship between species that is imbued with strength, violence and domination. This film was made with a group of fishermen of Piaçabuçu and Coruripe, by the river São Francisco and the sea, Northeast of Brazil.
Ellipsis’ curators would like to thank Center for Performance Research, Trilobite-Arts DAC Picture Palace Pictures, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Jonathas de Andrade for their generosity and contribution to our program. Image credit and by-line courtesy of the artists’ studios.


MAY 15 / ELLIPSIS: Jorge Jácome's Flores + Basma Alsharif's Ouroboros
(TEXT COURTESY OF LIGHT INDUSTRY)

Light Industry hosts an evening with Ellipsis, a new quarterly screening series taking place in venues across New York City, organized by Mariana Sánchez Bueno and Ehm West. In the words of its founders, the goal of Ellipsis is to provide “a space in which different contexts and modes of storytelling can build off one another,” with each program “geared towards connecting two languages, either aesthetic or literal,” invigorating both the cinema and the gallery with perspectives that look to horizons beyond the Western canon.

Flores, Jorge Jácome, 2017, digital projection, 26 mins

A hypnagogic narrative rooted in both the speculations of science fiction and the investigative operations of documentary, Flores imagines an Azores that has become overrun with hydrangeas, a species already abundant in the region whose presence, in Jácome’s telling, has proliferated to the point of forcing all human inhabitants to emigrate to the Portuguese mainland. The story unfolds through the wanderings of a pair of soldiers who remain stationed on the islands, where they patrol a homeland now transformed into a flowery wilderness. Their military figures set against a tinted, lavender-blue landscape, the two young men become paradoxical emblems of tenderness and resilience, nostalgia and resignation.

Ouroboros, Basma Alsharif, 2017, digital projection, 74 mins

“An homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. An experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film’s central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into one single landscape.” - BA