Rosalia Engchuan will present a Visual Culture Colloquium
Tuesday March 30, 4:30pm
Cinematic Epistemologies from Within Problem Clusters Of Modernity (Commonly Referred To As Climate Change)
What are de-colonial strategies of visualizing, representing and acting on ecological crises, their causes, histories, and effects?
This lecture centers cinematic epistemologies from Southeast Asia in the study of climate change mitigation practices. Thinking with an archive of short films from Java, Indonesia this talk looks at situated issues pivoting around environmental crises—as experienced, made sense of, expressed, and acted upon by those who are affected by it. Using a processual gaze at the dialogical, social, and material nature of knowledge formation I will speculate on the inherent micro-political potential of cinematic practices, which lies not in putting forward alternative knowledges, but in alternative conventions of their production.
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialize knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South. She is the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart.
