Since 2016, artist and filmmaker Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva have worked together on their Elemental Cinema series, thinking alongside fire, earth, and water to address pressing questions about environmental and political crisis through perspectives and temporalities beyond the human.
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023) is the latest installation of this series. Beginning with a reflection on the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, the film follows the wind towards Chile’s Atacama Desert. Here in the desert sands, successive eras of copper and lithium mining and the unmarked graves left by the Pinochet regime at the birth of neoliberalism signal this landscape’s material intimacy with planetary histories of extraction and with a current moment of political crisis. Thinking of these forms of colonial violence through atmospheres, minerals, and memories, the film gestures towards an “elemental sociality” and a new way of relating to our devices and to each other.
Please join us for a free screening of the film, open to the public. The film screening will be followed by a Q&A and a reception.
