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PROJECT


Powers of Kin

2016

Patricio Dávila, Dave Colangelo, Immony Men, Connall Desilva, Josh Green, Lisa Li, Taylor Martin, and Casey Mecija (Soundtrack)
Infuture Festival at Ontario Place, Cinesphere Theatre, Toronto, Canada

It’s ambitious, but it’s true: Understanding the relationship amongst all things is an essential task in an era of dwindling resources, offshoring, political and social violence, and extreme weather. This video work attempts to assemble a set of events in such a way that we can explore how things relate to each other. We look at zooming and scaling in the two films Powers of Ten (Eames and Eames) and Cosmic Zoom (Szasz) to problematize the linear logic inherent in this form of organization. Two films that represent our ability to imagine the sublime reaches of cosmological and subatomic scales and our technical ability to map and control bodies at these scales. We follow two of Donna Haraway’s notions that point to the intersection of environmental, economic and social crises. First, the “chthulucene” as an potential outcome of the anthropocene — where the earth’s forces will come back to reclaim a human-made environmental catastrophe. Second, the “making of kin” as a way of making relations between humans and nonhumans which provides a more responsive and accountable way of positioning ourselves in the world. We also work in the idiom of the essay film or video that emphasizes visual experimentation as way of making visual arguments. This is a way of critique that incorporates documentary, materiality and subjectivity.