“Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims” by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva

2023 · colour · DE, AT · En, Es/en · 49’ · In competition

A speculative and poetic exploration of the entanglements and overlaps of historical events in the Atacama Desert (Chile), the film, told from the perspective of the wind, takes us on a visual journey, floating freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama.
Exploring some of the largest lithium mines in the world; hovering above the remnants of colonial labour camps reactivated under the Pinochet regime, and slipping inside the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility; Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s camera uncovers material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain invisible to the many.
By pointing at how these trajectories mutated and expanded into aspects of modern geopolitical issues, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, exposes pillars of western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism while simultaneously proposing another worldview, one that is carried and echoed by the wind.

Biography

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Critical Racial & Anti-Colonial Study Co-Laboratory at New York University and adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture, and Design (Australia). Her work artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.

She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His films and installations have been shown internationally, including the Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, Venice Biennial, Sharjah Biennial and in museums such as Centre Pompidou, Madre Museum, MAAT, MACBA, Kunsthalle Wien,Whitechapel Gallery, Kunsthal Extra City, and Munch Museum.

As a writer he has published works in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Art Voices, LEAP, Hearings Journal, World Records and e- flux.

He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery, The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Arnhem Museum (Netherland), and more. Their films have been screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Images Festival Toronto, Docslisboa, Pravo Lujdski and more. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Belkin Museum Collection. In 2023, they showed the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Barcelona) and they premiered their new film Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Ghosts at Kunsthalle Wien. In February 2024, they opened a retrospective of their work at the Munch Museum in Oslo; in May 2024 the Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp opened a solo exhibition of their work.

They have a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books.