Begin Again, Begin Again (I.1887-1929) (2015, 12 Min.)
by Renée Green
ED/HF (2017, 33 Min.) by Renée Green

Discussion: Renée Green, Ute Holl

Artworks, especially those that comprise documentary material, can offer a particularly challenging appeal to our thoughts about reality. While their indexical link to the reality they address grants images and sounds a specific credibility, the position of the artist, her aesthetic, thematic and political choices and self-reflexive stance, may generate a critical assessment of the very constitution of reality. At such a point, art meets philosophy. In order to reflect on the relationship between the factual world and its subjective appropriation, questioning hegemonic claims to objectivity and problematising the inherent contradictions of society are inherently philosophical issues. ‘Problematising reality – Encounters between art, cinema and philosophy’ is a series of projections and discussions that takes place in various cultural spaces in the city of Lisbon, starting in June 2018, in a partnership between IFILNOVA (CineLab) / FCSH / UNL, Goethe-Institut Portugal and Maumaus / Lumiar Cité and in collaboration with Apordoc / Doc’s Kingdom. These encounters between artists and researchers of international renown focus on the very moments where art, cinema and philosophy enter into a productive dialogue.

With the collaboration of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the first programme presents an exchange between artist Renée Green and researcher Ute Holl, accompanied by a screening of Green’s Begin Again, Begin Again (I.1887-1929), and the Portuguese premiere of her 2017 film, ED/HF. The first stanza of a homonymous longer film, Begin Again, Begin Again (I.1887-1929) is a probing passage through forms of inhabiting, occupying, and the myriad sensations and perceptions that flow through the process of staying alive. The Austrian architect R. M. Schindler is invoked via his 1912 Manifesto, “Modern Architecture: A Program”, yet the numbered pronouncements are interrupted by another consciousness’ musings on the strangeness of survival. Conceived as a ‘film as a conversation’, Green’s ED/HF is a cinematic meditation on lived experience, writing, film and ongoing becomings. At first glance, ED/HF could be described as a double portrait of Green and artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki, but ED/HF’s primary focus is guided less by a binary comparison of these two personas, than by the pair’s personal experiences of migration and the legacies of displacement that have affected both artists and their work. Questions of language, history, and image reproduction technologies are rendered into a touching threnody, a mournful celebration of the power of art, film and poetry.

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Green’s most recent project, Pacing, was a two-year engagement with the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge, Mass. Her work has been widely presented in museums and biennials around the world, including MAK Center for Art & Architecture (Los Angeles), Lumiar Cité (Lisbon), MoMA (New York), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts (Lausanne), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Portikus (Frankfurt), MOCA (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), ICA (London), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Manifesta 7 (Trento) and Documenta 11 (Kassel). Her recent books include Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (Duke University Press, 2014), and Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010). She’s the editor of Negotiations in the Contact Zone / Negociações na Zona de Contacto (Assírio & Alvim, 2003). Green is Professor at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture & Planning.

Ute Holl is a professor in media aesthetics at the University of Basel. She has worked on the epistemology of technical media, on anthropological and experimental cinema, and on a media history of acoustics, electro-acoustics, and radio theory. She is the author of several books, including Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), e Moses Complex: Freud, Schoenberg, Straub/ Huillet (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Memoryscapes: Filmformen der Erinnerung (with Matthias Wittmann, Diaphanes, 2014). Her current research projects include ‘Radiophonic Cultures - Sonic environments and archives in hybrid media systems’ and ‘Afterimages of Revolution and War. Trauma- and Memoryscapes in Iranian Postwar-Cinema’.