Ghost Night — screening session
In the frame of the 24th Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize, its curator Fernanda Brenner and the six nominated artists have put together a programme of screenings reflecting on the key question posed by this 2023 edition of the Prize: "Do You Believe In Ghosts?"
SCREENING PROGRAM
8 p.m - Welcoming
8:30 - COYOLXAUHQUI (dir. Los Ingrávidos)
8:50 - Sometimes it was Beautiful (dir. Christian Nyampeta)
9:35 - Island Song (dir. Charlemagne Palestine)
9:45 - Tres fantasmas (dir. Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa)
10 p.m - Break
10:15 - Semiotic Ghosts (dir. Los Ingrávidos)
10:25 - Mariner of the Mountains (dir. Karim Aïnouz)
Short, experimental films, and artists' videos will be screened throughout this Ghost Night, which will take place in the Foundation's auditorium from 8pm to midnight on Friday 30 June. The session will close with a screening of Mariner of the Mountain (2021), a feature-length film by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz.
"Some people see ghosts, while others never do. Either way, our sense of vision is challenged by them. It is not a matter of believing but rather of being haunted. The phantasmagoric stands for fundamental untimeliness, a return of the past not as a remembrance or history but in a contradictory experience of presence. Jacques Derrida once said in a famous interview for the Cahiers du Cinema in 1990 that “cinema is the art of ghosts.” Cinema’s materiality and paradoxical aspiration to immateriality are intrinsically connected to spectrality and its many definitions, from the earliest gimmicky optical devices to more recent discussions of experimental cinema and decolonial film theory.
Ghosts appear in sensitive borderlands and fault lines where the logic of a dominant system begins to fracture. This project takes this assumption as its starting point, invoking the poetic potential of liminal presences. The artists and filmmakers contributing to the twenty-fourth Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize have used words, sounds, images, and the dynamic stylistic abilities of cinema to engage viewers in non-linear stories, auto-fictional takes, and critical fabulations of many sorts. Radically different in form and context, they share a predilection for the phantasmatic as a fleeting and indeterminate figure who is always travelling back and forth, constantly in between, channeling ambiguities and raising questions about time, space, and identity.
Taking place a few months before the works produced for this year’s edition of the Prize are revealed and encounter audiences, this public program-film festival is based on the concept of marginalia. Deconstructionist and feminist critiques have focused on this activity, which refers to scribblings and commentaries that fall outside the official text. In a way, it points to the “marginal figure” and acknowledges the vital importance of what has been left aside or edited out in order for something to be considered “final.”
The films will be screened only once, during the evening festival, and require a certain degree of commitment and involvement to be fully experienced. The line-up is comprised of suggestions by the curator and some of the artists participating in the Prize, opening up new paths and possibilities for connection with what would be then perceived as the materialization of a long process. On this particular night – we could consider it a kind of opening night – we invite the audience to gather and embark on a willing suspension of disbelief while deliberately confronting ourselves with subjects and sensations that social and cultural systems typically work to efface."
— Fernanda Brenner, curator of 24th Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize
