Join Visualizations of Revolution at @maydayspace for a double-feature of Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum’s Introduction to the End of An Argument (1990) and Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo’s Agarrando Pueblo/The Vampires of Poverty (1977), two films that seek to undo a world where the “accumulation of images” reigns supreme.

The etymology of the word “image” can be traced back to the Greek “imago,” meaning “copy, imitation, [or] likeness.” More interestingly, “imago” also means “phantom, ghost, [or] apparition.” Introduction to the End of An Argument, Suleiman and Salloum’s collage-cum-documentary, traces the quixotic journey of Western media as it (un)makes the subject of the “Arab” into a “phantom, ghost, [or] apparition” that is to be feared, hated, and ultimately, conquered. Meanwhile, in Agarrando Pueblo, Ospina and Mayolo satirize the West’s fascination with poverty in the Global South. To do this, they use the structure of the mockumentary to directly engage with the genre of “pornomiseria,” or miseryporn, as a film crew (which includes Ospina and Mayolo), funded by a West German television station, traverses several Colombian cities to document the everyday “reality” of Colombians. Pornomiseria refers to an influx of European productions released in the late-1960s and early-1970s rife with images of starvation and misery, to the point of caricature. Regarding such productions, Ospina notes in his autobiography, La Vida de Mi Cine y Mi Televisión, “…they descended on the poor with their cameras, believing that with the simple act of filming, they were making a document about reality.” Pornomiseria, much like Orientalism, function as systems of obfuscation and restructuring. They are, I argue, modes of discourse, disciplining discourses, that seek to mold an entire part of the world as lesser-than.

In screening these two films side by side, I am hoping to spur a conversation about recent developments in both Palestine and Colombia, the intertwined histories of both countries, and the question of what radical filmmaker and theorist Glauber Rocha refers to as the “aesthetics of hunger.”

Doors at 7pm, Films at 7:30pm