5 months ago
For the third edition of RUSHES, The Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS) is happy to engage in a conversation that attempts to frame the digital move for the arts and culture with:
Rana Yazaji: researcher, trainer, cultural manager, Ettijahat (Syria)
Joey Shea: non resident fellow at Tahrir Institute of Middle East Policy, digital rights, information controls and the impact of technology across the region
Leil Zahra Mortada: transfeminist queer researcher and filmmaker, focused on anti-racism, colonialism, gender, sexualities, documentation, protest movements and migration
Yazan Khalili: architect, artist, cultural producer, co-chair of the Photography Development at MFA College New York & PHD candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Jowe Harfouche (NAAS Executive Director, curatorial team United Screens) is moderating the conversation. It took place online, on November 12th, 2020.
Watch the streaming of the event here. Read more information on the speakers’ profile.
The fierce digitization of cinema – in both its production and dissemination – expedited by a pandemic brings about severe challenges to cultural policy. We will be collectively thinking about the opportunities this moment affords the arts and cultural sector in rethinking its channels of access, security, flow of capital, and governance models and practices? NAAS proposes this conversation around the limitations and possibilities of the moment, centering independent cinemas as a space for collectivity and critical thinking, and network models as “technologies of solidarity”.
The conversation takes place in English and Arabic (Arabic subtitled version to follow).
Rana Yazaji, Joey Shea, Leil Zahra Mortada, Yazan Khalili and Jowe Harfouch in conversation © SAVVY Contemporary
RUSHES are virtual conversations organised as part of the project UNITED SCREENS: NEAR EAST, MIDDLE EAST, FAR EAST. Contemplations on Contemporary Cinema – in collaboration with Wekalet Behna (Egypt), AVEC Association de volontariat, échange culturel et action des jeunes (Tunisia), NAAS – Network of Arab Alternative Screens (Lebanon), Estación Terrena (Colombia), and others.
This project is supported by Arab Funds for Art & Culture (AFAC).
UNITED SCREENS is a long-term research, networking, and exhibition project conceived by SAVVY Contemporary - The Laboratory of Form Ideas intending to create an alliance of community cinema programmers, both loving independent film and sharing realities of political and economic fragility.
Through this project, UNITED SCREENS aims to critically examine and reimagine technologies, methodologies, value metrics and network logics for community cinema to circulate alternative films and video art across the South. Drawing lessons from the combined spirit of the anti-neocolonial Third Cinema proposition of South America, film cooperatives of South Asia, avant-garde movements of Eastern Europe, as well as decolonial resistances of the African continent, UNITED SCREENS aspires to be a decentralized, peer-promoted think-well on film culture.
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