Late Screenings III

Beatrice Gibson

A Necessary Music

+

Ben Rivers

Slow Action

Thursday 17 October 2019, 8.00—10.00pm

Rhubaba is delighted to present the third instalment of our Late Screenings programme. Each evening of artists’ films will explore a different theme, selected by Rhubaba committee members. This instalment will include Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music and Ben River’s Slow Action, both films constructing and exploring utopian spaces for inhabitation.

This event is free and un-ticketed; refreshments and popcorn will be provided.

Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it. Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York’s Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Casting seventeen residents to enact these lines accompanied by a fictional narration take from Adolfo Bioy Casares‘ 1941 science fiction novel ‘The invention of Morel’, the film deploys fiction as a tool to frame and activate its site. Self-consciously dissolving from attempted realism to imagined narrative, what begins as a process concerned with sociality becomes instead an ethnographic fiction about place and community, and an investigation into representation itself.

Ben River’s Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography – the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat – to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.

Accessibility

This event is open to everyone.

If you have any accessibility requirements please let us know via info@rhubaba.org and we can advise if we are able to accommodate. Please note that unfortunately Rhubaba does not have a wheelchair accessible toilet or any baby changing facilities and has one gender neutral bathroom. The gallery space is accessible by wheelchair; please email in advance (or knock!) and staff will assist with the door. Assistance dogs are welcome.