5 months ago
The Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS) and SAVVY Contemporary’s UNITED SCREENS are pleased to present Think Well 3.0: Toward Sympoietic Systems for Film Circulation, a symposium which took place at Flutgraben Berlin from September 30 to October 2.
Watch the stream of the symposium. Discover the full program here.
Sympoiesis: a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. — Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Julio Linarez and Cem Degdelen © SAVVY Contemporary
Think Well 3.0 continues to take cue from reflections on film cultures powered by community practices. Over three days film practitioners and system thinkers came together to imagine tools, methodologies, value metrics and network logics for the circulation of alternative cinema and video art.
Flutgraben was our playground to experiment with simulated scenarios, marked with rich discussions, and moments of collective decision making. Think Well 3.0 takes on an immersive game format to help us address issues common and urgent to all of us, and weighs on our collective intelligence and imaginaries to mandate – sympoietically – for a film circulation ecosystem that encompasses a pluriverse of stories.
Think Well is a vocal resistance coined by South African writer, playwright, filmmaker Puleng Lange-Stewart diverting from etymology which resonated with overtones of crisis and desperation (think tank). She urges us to move towards a “well” where we can find respite, collectively. Believing that our groundwaters are connected, Think Well initiates flows between cinema practitioners and filmmakers from the South to imagine a new film ecosystem powered by community-led technological imaginaries.
Tiara Roxanne © SAVVY Contemporary
With keynote speeches by Tiara Roxanne, Jean Pierre Bekolo, and Kwago Publishing, and discussions between Cem Dagdelen and Julio Linarez, Fanny Huc and Mohamed Frini.
Curation by Laura Kloeckner, Abhishek Nilamber, Jowe Harfouche, & Sabine Abi Saber.
Game Design by Pekko Koskinen & Salam Yousry.
In collaboration with Economic Space Agency/ XORG, Wekalet Behna (Egypt), AVEC – L’Association de Volontariats, Échange Culturel et Action des Jeunes (Tunisia), Estación Terrena (Colombia), and ARKIPEL - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (Indonesia).
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.
