SESSION 124, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Screening of Haçla (2004) by Tariq Teguia, Waiting (1972) by Faith Wilding and Il culto delle pietre (1967) by Luigi di Gianni, followed by a discussion. Session proposed by Carole Douillard.

Each of the three short films presented addresses a theme that is dear to me: the first one, Haçla (Tariq Teguia, 2004), deals with exile and the difficulty Algerians face in leaving a country that offers them very little chance of emancipation; the second one is an excerpt from Womanhouse (Johanna Demetrakas, 1974), which documents the performance Waiting (1972), in which feminist artist Faith Wilding confronts her physical loneliness with the existential fate of American women in the early 1970s; the third film Il culto delle pietre (Luigi di Gianni, 1967), explores a collective ritual practiced in the 1960s in southern Italy: the relationship between a community and a natural space —a place— through the sacred connection that humans can maintain with reality and the stories they tell themselves. Each of these sequences explores not only a specific era and a cultural and social context but also a very personal relation to space: that of the body and intimacy.

Carole Douillard is an artist, performer and researcher, who uses her presence or that of performers as sculpture for minimal interventions in space. Situated on the edge of the spectacular, while taking care to avoid it, her work calls for a redefinition of the spectator, the space of performance and the power struggle between the performers and the audience. Her work is often completed with documents, films, writings and photographs. For some years now, she has been particularly interested in the question of feminist archives, of the conservation, in time and space, of art memory and gestures. Her recent works have been performed among others at The Judith Foundation, CalArts & LACE, Los Angeles; Kadist, San Francisco and Beijing; Dance First Think Later, Les Communs, Geneva; within Douglas Gordon’s exhibition The Morning After, Institut Giacometti, Paris; and as part of Oslo Kommunes Collection & Oslo Biennalen 2019-2021, Oslo.