A screening of Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023) by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, followed by Q&A.
The third installment in a series of “elemental cinema” works by artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023) follows the wind and what it carries—from dust to clouds, ideas, stories, and voices—as a guide and an analytical framework.
Filmed in the Chilean Atacama desert, it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past, present, and future, in this site. Taking us on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism, and their dissemination. Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries acts as a prism that reveals what is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion, and human extractivism.
This event is part of Whose World? Whose Future? Whose Hope? Critical Fabulation for Pluriversal Futures, a public research series that brings together contemporary thinkers and artists whose work promotes abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist visions for articulating and actualising alternative worlds and futures.
The series is curated by Lilly Markaki and supported by the Humanities and Arts Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.