Episode Three: Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
þ thorns þ
In this episode, Arjuna and Denise plan the next film in their Elemental Cinema series, centred on fire as both combustion and a site for conspiratorial gathering.
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who works with the essay form in a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where the ‘essay’ is inherently future-oriented and experimental. Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher, writer and filmmaker whose practices reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. In this episode, Arjuna and Denise plan the next film in their Elemental Cinema series, centred on fire as both combustion and a site for conspiratorial gathering. They discuss their ongoing collaboration, rebellion against the return of fascism, and the necessary optimism of the imagination that can ignite hope in darkened times.
Find out more about Arjuna and Denise on our People page.
To the Glossary, Arjuna donates Tremolo 
This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.
The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.
Transcript
Martin
Hello and welcome to the first series of 
As part of the ongoing imagination of the school
In this episode, we're going to hear from long time collaborators, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. Denise is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. In her artistic and academic work, she reflects and speculates on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who works with the essay form, where the essay is inherently future oriented and experimental. This becomes the guiding principle for his research and production.
Arjuna and Denise have been working together for a few years on a project called Elemental Cinema. Each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four elements. Their work aims to undermine patterns of thinking about, and relating to, the Earth, that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident to us, underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. The films they have made so far are called Sootbreath / Corpus Infinitum, 4 Waters - Deep Implicancy, and Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. In this conversation, Denise and Arjuna are planning their next film, which will focus on the final element in their series, fire.
The transitional sounds you will hear in this episode come from Denise and Arjuna's field recordings from around the world. Among other noises, you will hear the crashing Atlantic Ocean waves in Devon, England, and a distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.
Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.
Arjuna
So, Denise and I are currently working, brainstorming, our next film, following the element of fire. And it's our fifth film, but it's the fourth film in our Elemental Cinema series. We just completed the Air film called Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. Before that we made Sootbreath/Corpus Infinitum, and that follows the element of Earth. Do you want to say the other ones?
Denise
And 4 Waters - Deep Implicancy with the element correspondence is the element of Water. And Serpent Rain which had all four elements in it.
Arjuna
The overarching subject of this podcast is the element of fire, as we plan and brainstorm the next film. What word were you thinking?
Denise
The word that's been with me for a while now is rebelry
Arjuna
…Igniting, igniting in the wind.
Denise
Yeah, It's something. Yeah, Rebelry
Arjuna
Is rebelry…is it a real word? Or is it a mix of rebellion and revelry?
Denise
No, it's a real word that, of course OED, Oxford English Dictionary, says nobody uses it anymore, so also that's why I like it! That is a thing called revelry, a quality, or something that you attribute to something, or a thing in itself, a noun or an adjective, that we don't use anymore.
Arjuna
Yeah. For me, I wasn't sure, I didn't look it up and I was thinking it might've been like a revelry and rebellion combination because I mean, it raises that association in my mind, rebelry.
Denise
Rebelry, yeah it could be, right? Because V and B, like the phonemes.
Arjuna
Yeah. They're often interchangeable. And revelry means kind of like partying or carnival, or celebration, procession, fun, right?
Denise
Disorderliness, again.
Arjuna
Disorderly fun.
Denise
Disorderly fun. That's an important element in thinking about rebellions, right? It is precisely the ludic part of it, maybe, as it's happening, but also in terms of, anticipating what is to come, if things change radically.
Arjuna
Yeah, kind of spontaneity. Yeah, like a spontaneous rebellion. I guess you need both modes, kind of, spontaneous and planned.
Transition sounds: The crashing Atlantic Ocean waves in Devon, England.
Arjuna
One of the ways we came to rebelry
Denise
Yes, so I held the International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Paris 8, Department of Philosophy last spring. So, I was there about a year ago, I was arriving in Paris, and I stayed until June. And that coincided with the action against the increase of the retirement age by Macron.
I was supposed to teach two seminars, which I taught. Each seminar was going to have eight meetings, but it ended up that we didn't have all the meetings because all the action days, the strike days, almost all of them fell on the days I was teaching. So, what happened is that I went to the protests in Paris with other professors at Paris 8 and the students, you know, we were all there. And that feeling, that exhilaration, the feeling of the rebellion against neoliberalism, right, because folks in France were saying they’re rebelling against that change, but actually they were rebelling against decades of neoliberal transformation of the French economy. And then also of the disappearance of the French state, like the state of rights, et cetera. So that was kind of like the last straw that changed, in the retirement age.
And there's probably those of you who saw what was happening in Paris, that the protests, so folks were setting things on fire, different things were set on fire, but fire was always present there, not as this big thing, but actually as a crucial element, like a signature of the stakes. And Arjuna came, we did some filming for the last film in Paris at Luxembourg Garden, and I was talking about the next film, fire. It has to be about rebellion, it has to be about rebelry, but we had no idea until very recently, we had no idea about how.
Arjuna
Yeah, definitely. And I think like, often in Q&As after our films, but also in a lot of talks, I go to like talks around politics, talks around the state of the world, there's always a question of what can we do? On the one hand, it's not our job to come up with that. But on the other hand, I think there is a zeitgeist or…it's a very common question. And I think a lot of people are very politically activated, especially right now, but are finding modes of protest, open letters, some of these things that are happening, not quite working or hasn't been working for years. There’s a certain like mode of organised protest, where you get permission from the police, and it can go until 6pm and it's all very kind of sanitised.
So, Denise, when you suggested rebellion, it immediately seemed right. It immediately seemed like this is something that we should focus on, and what I think other people are focusing on, and where we're at globally. Especially in relationship to the partnership, the kind of new developments in both neoliberalism and fascism or the far-right, and their kind of partnership. It also seemed to make sense because our last film was focusing on that partnership, kind of studying the history of neoliberalism and fascism as an incorporation, as a strategic incorporation. That it makes sense to move from that, in Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, to thinking about ways to resist it, to rebel against it, to subvert it.
When we were making Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims about a year ago, already the signs were there, but I think in the last six months, and certainly the last three months, this kind of fascism and neoliberalism, I mean neoliberalism has always been there, but the kind of explosion of fascism in particular, the kind of ethnonationalism happening in Israel, the kind of genocide under a kind of ethnonationalist approach. And then, of course, in the U.S., the rising and returning of Trump…I don't know, there's so many...and then in Germany, the rising of AfD.
Denise
Yeah.
Arjuna
There's so many new fronts of fascism.
Denise
New fronts of something that is old, right? I mean, we trace fascism and neoliberalism, showing up a hundred years ago, so the neoliberalism with Hayek and others in Vienna, and fascism in Italy, Germany and elsewhere, like Brazil even, so it's not that it was isolated in Europe.
Two things that I think, it's going to be unavoidable to deal with in, in the next film. On the one hand, this eternal return, eternal in the last 200 years, but it's still this return of an authoritarian - authoritarian is not necessarily a fascist, but fascism is, they are of the same family - so the return of certain kinds of authoritarianism and fascism in response to demands for equality, so we are talking about something that's very characteristic of the last 200 years. And we can go back to the romantic reactions to the formal philosophy, so the romantic philosophers reactions to the Kantian philosophy, which was also a romantic reaction to the Haitian revolution, if you think with some arguments about the Hegelian philosophy, which is extremely conservative.
So, demands for equality from the late-18th century, from the mid-19th century, have been met with, on the one hand, this authoritarian strand which takes over the state or, proposed to take over the state, and the concept of the nation is being the crucial one at the end of the 19th century. And then on the other hand, an economic project that says the state should stay out, so it's the state that will control the population, the people, but leave capital to do its thing however it wants to do it at a certain point. So, here we are dealing with that again. And then at the same time, on the other hand, there is the fact that, our demands for justice, whether it's for rights or whether it is for equality, those demands that’re also addressing that same state and under its rules, under what it allows us to do. So no wonder every time we get something from the state, and then the wave of neoliberal competition or fascist domination, they come back and they take the state away from us. So there must be a way to break that cycle.
Arjuna
That loop, yeah.
Denise
Yeah, there must be. And that's what I think rebelry
Transition sounds: Birdsong (Kakadu).
Arjuna
It's made me think of two things, certainly at the level of imagination, certainly thinking about left-wing despair, something I've been hearing a lot, a feeling of despair, a feeling of like, things aren't working. And that is sort of a failure of imagination or failure of economic, cultural, philosophical ways to move forward. But I do think that is shared symmetrically, not equally, but symmetrically with what's happening on the right, that that kind of fascism is also despairing. Like Trump is quite calling through desperation, or rallying through despair and desperation and its sort of ends up looking backwards.
I was watching this talk about how older fascism was very much looking forward, you know, this kind of accelerating into the superhuman Superman. Whereas today, a lot of the fascism is looking back, even like Middle East ISIS fascism was looking back. And then, I know it's interesting that the looking back type of fascism works much better with neoliberalism. There was always partnership between capitalism and fascism, but the kind of future-oriented fascism, seemed to be in response to a crisis of capitalism. We know that's not exactly true, but that is one kind of explanation, at least in the German context; combination of humiliation and crisis of capitalism. But a kind of retrograde fascism, incorporated with neoliberalism, which doesn't have any kind of past, present, or future.
Denise
The image we need is, it's not, maybe not so much of that line, right, that it goes back. So maybe that is a way of presenting this relationship between capital, the state, fascism, and this libertarian aspect of neoliberalism. That it's kind of like, whenever capital needs, it activates a particular kind of state through the nation, through fascism. Oh, I should say, through some kind of non-rational, and not non-rational because it's irrational, but non-rational because it's said, it's spiritual connection that gives that. And then on the other hand, it's also working to then facilitate economically whatever is needed, because it's a moment of crisis, or because it's just a moment of reshifting the relationship, the economic structure. And then the people have to be put under control, even if it is the control of something like Trump or Milei or Bolsonaro.
Arjuna
I was just thinking and reading about the Houthi and how large a global impact they're having with the naval blockade. And this morning I read that they're threatening to cut the fibre-optic cables that connect the Middle East and parts of Asia and the West as a mode of protest. They're not aiming to be violent, they're not aiming to kill people, they're just aiming to interrupt the flow of goods and information. That for me seems, I mean, it shows how fragile or how, almost easy in a way it is to disrupt global capital.
Denise
Yeah. Yeah, but we don't things we don't do. I remembered in 2011, I was living in London and there were the Occupy protests, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, and folks were camping. There was occupying things at St. Paul's. And then I kept thinking, every time I went to Canary Wharf, or I was in cities, like, why aren't we occupying the banks? Why is Canary Wharf not occupied, with all those financial companies there? So it never made sense to me. It's like, why don't we occupy the banks and just, don't let people come in, do something, or occupy it in person or online! But then, of course, I think it's connected to what you said about the Houthi. That is something about the ways in which we protest, which, we want it to be big and to make an impression, and to be visible. And the larger it is, the better it's supposed to be, right? That's our image of protest; it has to be public, you have to be seen, you need to see lots and lots of people out in the streets - which is important because it gives a sense of the degree of mobilisation, but maybe it's time to think differently, right? About what the protest is? What is that we want to achieve? It's not like we shouldn't protest visibly anymore. But we need to figure out other ways to respond to this attack, that are more effective, and that's what I want to say.
Arjuna
I went to the Iraq war protests. I don't know when that was...
Denise
2001...2002?
Arjuna
Yeah. And there was a million people or something like, the largest for this stuff, and nothing came of it. And it's not to say... I mean, lots came from it. But no concrete political…there was a sense of solidarity. What you're saying exactly, is like, trying to be hyper visible versus maybe identifying the weak links and there are so many weak links in global capital. This we learned during the pandemic, that how small interruptions in the global supply chain, suddenly, there was missing one part for the car, and suddenly it was impossible to buy cars or rent cars. And then it's the same that the Houthi has managed to close down two factories in Germany, Tesla and another one with only like a few weeks of action. I mean, I think if you were a labour strike at one of those factories, it still wouldn't close it down.
So I think like, recognising the different modes of strike or rebellion. This Houthi thing made me think of what we spoke about in 4 Waters, with how the earthquake made the slaves realise, during the earthquake everything shut down and the slaves kind of escaped, momentarily they realised how much power they actually had, and how fragile the situation actually was. And it was a natural disaster that disrupted everything significantly enough for that realisation. And maybe something similar, I mean, maybe the pandemic was a significant enough semi-natural disaster, that we've learned how fragile global supply chains are, and where the weak links are. So I don't know, I mean, just thinking about these kind of relationships between natural disaster and what we learn, in terms of a mode of rebellion, or mode of protest.
Denise
Yeah, it just made me think of, during the pandemic, with the Black Lives Matter movement, that we saw global mobilisation, right? And then, I think that was the first big one. And then also, because people were responding to the fact that the governments were just not doing, there was lots of frustration in there. So on the one hand, it was a, you know, “natural disaster”. But then it, but also, there was acknowledgement that it was not that natural. That decisions by governments led to people, too many people should die, that shouldn't have happened.
On the other hand, there is the actual political disaster, which is the fact that over 150,000 people died in Yemen over the past years, and absolutely nobody's paying attention. So, there is also that disaster, that is happening to them, right, in this ongoing disaster, which is not natural, which is political, in the way that the U.S. and Saudis and the UAE, they're all involved. Which is connected with the whole situation that created something like the Houthis.
So maybe, I mean, it's always a combination of, something unprecedented and unacceptable that happens, and the acknowledgment that the political frameworks that are there, be that the states or the UN framework, they become a bit useless or they are totally compromised, like in the case of the pandemic, in which the governments were totally compromised in their decisions to mitigate instead of stop the virus altogether.
So maybe this is... such moments open up the possibility for rebelry
Transition sounds: Riverside in Haiti.
Denise
I mean in terms of the film itself, right, how can we do this?
Arjuna
This is a good question!
Denise
It's fun because it's fire, and then I have these images of transition. Transitions, like we did in 4 Waters, right? We're all about the phase transitions. So the first image of fire that came to me, was precisely like of heat. So things that are solid, that have been assembled, so the connections will break apart, so they will unfold somehow. Things being diluted in water, but as they heat up and disintegrated.
You asked the question about which pre-Socratic philosopher thought the world was made of tetrahedrons? And tetrahedrons, by the way, is the platonic solid image for fire and we have those solids in 4 Waters and in Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. I was just reminded of Heraclitus. And the interesting thing about Heraclitus is that, he's a pre-Socratic philosopher for whom fire is, what Aristotle said, ‘the first principle’, the basic element, but usually folks talk about Heraclitus in terms of the unity of opposites, and then…so nobody steps in the same waters of the river or in the same river twice or something…some ways in which people refer to his philosophy, but actually he's a philosopher of fire.
So, it's not so much that there are two separate solid things that are united, it's just the thing, that through heat, fire, things go from one shape to another. Thinking about fire and the possibility of transformation from the most simple and direct, and maybe as you mentioned in your notes, the most intimate, to the most radical and dramatic, like nuclear fusion inside of stars or something.
Arjuna
Also, you made me think of this type of tree in central California, called the fire cypress.
Denise
Ah.
Arjuna
And it is only through fire that the pinecone opens it's, I don't know what they're called, the round things on a pinecone that open up and then the seeds fall out, it is only through fire, that that happens. And yeah, I just... it's a kind of moment of propagation, fire as a moment of propagation, of transformation and propagation. And I think a lot of people forget that fire is part of the planet. We often think of it as technology, as a sort of technology with Prometheus, or Frankenstein, or like this kind of, human making a fire to cook meat, or I don't know, all of these theories of technology. But, we know that fire is part of the natural landscape, from lightning, from fires as kind of regeneration, but also, fires as an essential part of an ecosystem, as opening pinecones.
Denise
Yeah, and then the core of the planet is on fire! Yeah, this thing about thinking of the fire as an invention, right? It is the first, you know, it's invented. When did humans invent the fire? That's a question in these encyclopaedias for kids. So, if we shift it, it would be maybe a way of, we had talked about having a known anti-Prometheus, Promethean kind of approach, enough of this thing!
The different ways in which we can counter that myth, and then at the same time recognise that this investment in the myth, has brought us to this catastrophe that is global warming, right? And everything associated with it. And the colonial, racial violence that makes capital possible. So that illusion, that story, that humans invented fire, or discovered how to make fire…yeah.
Arjuna
Also, it's kind of... it’s role, following that myth, through to the present moment. I mean, I’m not doing the long history of Prometheus, but you have the combustion engines and guns and explosives and how that...trains and engines as a mode of connection, but also as a mode of conquer colonisation, but then that becomes, kind of, lithium, stored energy, as opposed to the combustion and creation of reaction based energy. And then now, we have, kind of, lithium in our cars and in our phones and laptops, stored energy, which our last film was about, the kind of destruction of lithium mining. But that sense of combustion or explosion, is still inherent in the, I guess, epistemology of technology and in the kind of myth of Prometheus, and it's like asking this question where that, where does that combustion happen? So, if it's not, no longer in the engines of our laptops and phones and cars, it's actually, the combustion happens through the interface with the users, maybe. And maybe that's a kind of analogy for how inflammatory and polemical the kind of the role technology plays in creating very reduced, simplified notions of history, of politics, of, our current moment is so defined by antagonism and…
Denise
…yeah. So, you're making me think about maybe the shift, that it's, you know, taking place. It's been taking place for a while now, but maybe it's coming close to some crucial point now, which is precisely the leaving fossil fuels behind, so leaving combustion, which requires a form of living things, organic matter, right?
Arjuna
Mmm.
Denise
From the coal to petroleum, and now something else. And that that, maybe, it may just be that life, life is no longer needed for, capital doesn't need life anymore, it has used life for 200 years. It doesn't need life anymore. Right?, what has been living, it doesn't need the organic anymore. It's after something else.
So many of the things that we have been seeing now, like the destruction of life and souls in Palestine, which we are forced to watch, to witness without saying, without doing anything. So, that is an idea of humanity that has ruled the last 70 years, that's now being absolutely ignored. Claims on the basis of humanity, are ignored and people are being punished for making such claims. So, that signals a shift, and humanity has appeared as a crucial moral concept, and has remained it throughout this combustion age of industrial capital. So, you know, there's a connection there with the economic and the ethical, that wars are so good at destroying, what humans value. It's something that we have to consider and pay attention, because our political demands are in the name of humanity.
Arjuna
I was talking to someone about the, kind of, violent return of history, but then how technology, social media, isn't equipped to deal with any kind of history, like, I don't know, when you scroll it just loads a split second, and you see all the current whatever, the current news. You don't see what happened last week, let alone what happened 50, 100, 200, 300 years ago, so like, social media and phones are not equipped to deal with history. So, when history comes back, as it will in some capacity, it's coming back like a funhouse mirror, everything is distorted, squeezed, and twisted, and upside down, and back to front. And yeah, I think like those old tools, human rights, I don't know, it sort of somehow doesn't fit the funhouse hall of mirrors.
Denise
Yeah. So that takes us back to the political organising, right? What would be the basis for organising politically, if those concepts such as dignity, equality, liberty, that are still crucial in the political vocabulary, our experience, our techno virtual experiences do not feed them, do not cultivate them. Yeah, that's another moment.
Transition sounds: A billabong in Australia.
Arjuna
Sort of switching rather than describing how bad everything is, maybe we try and think a bit of I don't know, like, I thought about, the kind of, sitting around a fire, not with a romantic return to a kind of palaeolithic lifestyle, but sitting around where the fire, where the heart, where the hearth, hearth, hearth, where the kind of intimate space…I don't know. I was talking to someone about fire, and he said, he used to sleep by the radiator, or by like, the gas fire heater in his house. And I was like, yeah, I did too when I was a kid. I would roll up in front of the gas heater, which probably wasn't so good for my brain cells, but that was one of the cosiest places in my childhood house.
So, this kind of warmth, hearth, heart of the house, fireplace, like this kind of thinking. And then, what would a part of the film or like the heart of the film, just like the centre of the earth, what would it be to make a film, kind of, sitting around a fireplace?
Denise
Yeah. Well, we could also think about the glow, the glow of the flame and the fireplace, and the glow of the computer screen, and all those other screens. What happens when you are around the fireplace, with darkness around, surrounding you, and that glow. And then, I mean, there is intimacy, but there is also conspiracy that happens. And things need that kind of closeness. Certain things need that everything else be kept the dark, and only some faces are lit. There is no conspiracy on Facebook. I mean, only the conspiracies that people talk about…
Arjuna and Denise laugh.
Arjuna
Yeah, there are certain types of theory, but not conspiring. The conspiring happens when those faces are lit, and the flames are moving, but there's such a, a three-dimensionality, like there's a spatiality to it. Which, when you go to a coffee shop and four people sitting a round table with four laptops, it's a very different…although it's similar visually, there's something very different about the kind of spatiality of sitting around a bonfire.
Denise
Yeah. So, we have the first image. Conspiring on Facebook! It's like…
Arjuna and Denise laugh.
Arjuna
Yeah. Conspiring on Facebook versus sitting around a fireplace, making marshmallows
Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.
Arjuna
I know, you were talking, or writing about, the kind of intensity of combustion, like, the lightning, which is very high, rapid intensity.
Denise
Uh, yeah, the lightning that like, the plasma, the…I don't know, gamma rays of that plasma that…so that shifts, right? Like that transforms at the level of cold, the level of, the quantic level, which is fire. And then the infrared, not the gamma rays, but the low, the lowest one, the infrared kind of, of change, which is the composition, right? Which is just, the heat, that then will…so things, thinking of organic matter, that things die, and then they get cold. But then, if you leave them, if you don't put them in something really cold, then they will decompose because of the warmth.
So, which means then, I was thinking about fire, about the electromagnetics as a spectrum of fire. And also, because one of the things that keeps showing up, and it's crucial to the films, is the emphasis on materiality, right? So, we are talking about transformation here, but transformation as a material, in material terms, not transformation in the conceptual, in conceptual terms. So, what guides the ways in which the elements are operating in the films, is precisely their materiality and how we can figure transformation that way or not.
Something else that came to me, I keep saying that black light, which is UV rays, that black light goes from the UV to ultra red. So, we had ultra red in Sootbreath, like a reference to black light, while we had ultraviolet in 4 Waters. And then I just assumed because, yeah, so black light, it's there, ultraviolet, X rays, gamma rays, uh, radio, microwaves, and ultra red. And I just did something like, okay, if I combine blue and red, so blue is the last band in the visible light spectrum, and red is the first one, and if you combine the two of them, what you get? You get violet, you get purple, so you got black light. So, there is also this play with black light, as something that allows us to maybe cut through some things, which would be nice if we could figure.
Arjuna
The thing I would like to work out, how to cut through, and it's, I mean, it's a very big task, but just like this kind of fake news and the gaslighting, like, I feel like that's common across left and right. I don't know, it feels like...it gives me a lot of fear and despair. Just the, the blatant lies that happen, I don't know. I would like to think about cutting through.
Denise
This is a difficult one, isn't it?
Arjuna
It is a difficult challenge.
Denise
Because I think, I don't think the lies convince anyone, they just make us not want to pay attention anymore!
Arjuna
No. That’s the thing, no one is buying it! No one is buying it and it creates like fatigue and disillusionment or just kind of, yeah despair. It creates despair.
Denise
It's an attack on the soul. It is like…yeah…
Arjuna
Yeah. It's like offensive because it's not even a good lie, it's not a convincing lie, and it just sort of allows things to proceed…
Denise
Yeah, let's think about it. Let's play with it. Because we know that the line is not effective, so it does something. So how do we figure and cut through what it does. I mean, so the fact, because all those things, there is a result. So, how do we cut and undermine that result? Since, if we can't undermine the process.
Arjuna
Yeah, you can't undermine the process, but undermine the response to kind of despair. I mean, we should be precise. We have to think about it more, but be precise about what exactly the effect of that is. I mean, we can say quickly despair and disillusionment, but like, sort of narrowing in.
Denise
Yeah.
Arjuna
On what? Yeah.
Denise
Because one of the things I have been thinking about is self-defence, auto-defence as a form of refusal. So, refusal to become desperate, refusal to engage in this thing. What are the ways through which people have done that? Over, I don't know, forever? Because despair is not, it always shows up, in under circumstances. That again is the imagination, isn't it? Because you have to project something else right now. Not in the future, but right now.
Arjuna
Yeah. In the media.
Denise
Yeah. It is as if you were called to live in two different realities, this madness and then something else that can prevent you from just giving up.
Arjuna
Yeah, I think so.
Denise
Maybe the film, it could have that ongoing, something else.
Arjuna
It’s kind of doubling, simultaneous, I think the doubling is important. I think if it was just utopic…
Denise
No.
Arjuna
…It's problematic. I think it has to acknowledge the reality of what's going on, at the same time as imagining it differently.
Denise
And with the instances, examples of things, of people trying to do it some other way right now, or at the same time, not only the possibility, but the reality of something else, even if minor, right? Even if it cannot, will never have, affect billions of people, but if people everywhere are engaged in it, so something else, some other way of living in the world differently is happening. Um, must be happening.
Arjuna
Mm, yeah. Living and feeling some other way of…because I think like the right is capitalising on despair and it is using that. And so, if cutting out the despair, or at least addressing the despair, then it might not, then the kind of, consequences of that, might be, it might be like a bifurcation. It might lead to a different, different outcome.
Denise
Yes, not, yes. It's not only that they're, they're counting on it and doing it, it’s that during the pandemic, this thing that appeared about mental health. It's not that people did not suffer or anything, but there was like a, like an industry of evolving doctors and researchers, about how there was a cognitive dissonance, or a mental health problem, related to our inability to plan and project into the future, because of the pandemic. And there was an increase in talking about mental health issues. That it made me wonder, it's like, so now they're inventing…you could see, not in the invention, but the actual production of a new disease, a new illness, but it's not because it wasn't true, it's also because the conditions lead to despair and other things, right?
So, I think the question is also how do we present it? The two things, the conditions are horrible, it's amazing how so many of us still function given those conditions. And yet, it's not that much…and yet, it is possible to shift without having to go somewhere else, or without having to wait for some other time, but just shifting right here, and then what people are doing, to create their own self defence, little protections.
I'm thinking about that Philip K. Dick story with a person that has this suit, that you shift into different things, so people don't see you!
Arjuna
I like this idea of changing form.
Denise
Scramble suit, yes. It is A scanner darkly! Scramble suit.
Arjuna
It kind of jams the way of being identified.
Denise
Yes, yeah.
Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.
Arjuna
I want to come back to one thing you said, about, what are the ways in which people have been resisting in the past? And I sort of had this idea of asking friends, and colleagues and like…we've done interviews before, and then we did a bit of a script based on encounters. Just thinking about the dialogue, and what if we made it slightly more collaborative, and asked people to make short audio recordings describing the ways in which they are resisting and rebelling and…
Denise
I love this.
Arjuna
…and this could be kind of across from philosophers to activists and sort of.
Denise
I love this, because I was thinking also, about like reading some passages. I was reading something by Césaire that I thought like, oh wow! You could have somebody reading these too, like, in the film. So, yeah. And then just having the voices, something else that came to my mind is that, we could also do it, we could have two people talking at the same time, but in ways that you can understand. But then at the same time, people saying something, and then the other one completing the idea, like, instead of having separate voices, actually having this sense of the voices being inseparable.
Arjuna
Yeah, overlapping and intertwining, yeah.
Denise
Yeah, yeah.
Arjuna
So, I guess we should make a list of people, living and dead, that we would, kind of, invite to make, I don't know, like a two-minute, three-minute recording.
Denise
That would be fantastic. And then we can also have it in different languages.
Arjuna
Yeah, or moving between languages.
Denise
Between languages, yeah. Since everything ends up translated into English!
Arjuna
Yeah! And, that's kind of like sitting around a fireplace or a bonfire.
Denise
Especially if we have other sounds kind of quieting the voices. Then some conspiracy, conspiring mood.
Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.
Arjuna
Yeah, my word for the glossary, the word that I was thinking about, but I've been thinking about for a while, is tremolo
Arjuna and Denise laugh.
Denise
You are in California, of course, it takes you to Latin America. So, how's it called tremolo
Arjuna
T R E M O L O, like trembling.
Denise
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Arjuna
It's this effect that rapidly, very rapidly, switches either the volume, or an on off switch essentially. And, when paired with a little bit of reverb, it creates this trembling effect, that I seem to think, twins the way that when you're over-, overflowing with emotion, your voice also sort of trembles, also sort of shakes. And thinking about the space that is created through trembling, through overflowing of emotion.
And you hear it a lot in types of music which have roots, shared roots, in indigenous and slavery traditions or soul music. Going back to the blues, going back to the Choctaw, and in Cumbia, and the various different lineages that lead to Cumbia.
Denise
Okay, I have to play a little, let me just listen…
Arjuna
I have a Tremolo
Denise sings to herself.
Denise
Okay.
Arjuna
It's a good song!
Denise
Yeah. La Razon De Mi Existir.
Arjuna and Denise laugh.
Arjuna
I'm learning more about Cumbia, and some people have the theory that it, the beat is from horse riding.
Denise
Mm-Hmm.
Arjuna
But then other people have the theory that it's, um, from dancing, from slaves being able to dance and shackles. So, they created a beat that is quick and short enough for a quick shuffle step. Thinking of music as one of those modes of rebellion.
Denise
Yeah, and of creating…yeah, creating this space for breathing, right? This little maroon space for existing on that unbearable, deadly situations. Yeah, yeah.
Arjuna
I know there are many ways to think of, like, the falsetto, or think of tremolo
Denise
Mm-Hmm. Some other ways, a way also, of conceiving of life, and being alive, and existing. So, use the title of the song, it's a mode of existing, of rebelry
Arjuna
I think we should ask them to make a song for us.
Denise laughs.
Arjuna
Grupo Quintanna.
Denise
That would be some, some shift!
Arjuna
Yeah!
Arjuna laughs.
Denise
Ah! Juego De Amor, I found La Razon De Mi Existir. I see. Okay, I think we're closing with that.
Arjuna
Yeah, I think this is a good place to wind it down.
Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.
Martin
Thanks Denise and Arjuna for allowing us to eavesdrop on your planning for your next film. We look forward to watching it together.
In the next episode, we'll hear a conversation between Leo Boix and Pablo Bronstein. If you'd like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com.
This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. It's hosted by me, Martin Hargreaves, produced and edited by Hester Cant, co-curated with Emma McCormick Goodhart, and the Assistant Producer is Izzy Galbraith. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.
Bibliography
Books:
Dick, P.K. (2012). A scanner darkly. London: Phoenix.
Projects:
Films and Music:
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims
La Razon De Mi Existir (Juego De Amor) - Single by Grupo Quintanna
People:
Protests and Movements:
Other References:
Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis