Practices for Slow Encounters: A Festival for Camera & Body

The Inter-view, Thursday March 11, 6 – 7:30pm

In 2018, artist and archivist Cori Olinghouse and UMBC Assistant Professor of Visual Art Jules Rosskam formed a long-term research collaboration. Bringing their respective forms of documentary filmmaking and performance into conversation they ask: “How do we look with the body, not at the body?” Rosskam and Olinghouse will engage the diverse learning community of UMBC in their praxis-based research through a series of public programs including a screening of short film/video works and an experimental lecture. 

The Inter-view is a presentation on one facet of the research Jules Rosskam and Cori Olinghouse carried out for Practices for Slow Encounters. Over the course of this collaboration, ‘the interview’ surfaced as a character, slipping through multiple sites and manifestations. Pulling in ideas and practices from a multitude of sources, Olinghouse and Rosskam explore what might constitute an embodied witnessing, what strategies produce a slow encounter, and how to make present rather than represent. After the event, they will participate in a live Q&A, covering all aspects of the three-part program.

Sensate Cinema, Thursday, February 18, 6 – 7:30pm, Vimeo Live

Photograph by Simon Liu, pictured: Fallen Arches (2018)

[Image Description: A 35mm film still with collage-like layers. Saturated reds and pinks fill the frame. A small lamp with yellowish light glows against what looks to be a curtain. The image of a window appears like a portal in the background.]

Sensate Cinema is a program of contemporary short film and video works that use the cinema as a space for exploring connections between sensation and perception. Works by Mel Baggs, Sky Hopinka, Steffani Jemison, Simon Liu, Elliot Montague, and Jordan Lord blur oppositions between subject/object, orality/textuality, legibility/illegibility, and orientation/disorientation. Collectively they trace varied and distinct encounters on a horizon of co-presence.
List of films:
  • Mel Baggs, In My Language (2007, 8:37 min, video)
  • Sky Hopinka, When you’re lost in the rain (2018, 5:05 min, HD video)
  • Steffani Jemison, In Succession (2019) (2019, 18:19 min, HD video)
  • Simon Liu, Fallen Arches (2018, 10:30 min, digitized from 35mm )
  • Elliot Montague, Well Dressed (2006, 10 minutes, digitized from color super-8 film)
  • Jordan Lord, After… After… (Access) (2018, 15:52 min, HD video)
Curators Cori Olinghouse and Jules Rosskam say this about the program:
This program exists as part of our on-going research project, Practices for Slow Encounters. As such, we have created–in collaboration with other artists and scholars–supplementary ‘playlists’ for each of the works in the above program. We do this, in part, to highlight the interdisciplinary thinking that undergirds our research methodologies, and as an offering to the filmmakers for participating in this program. These playlists are a practice (and process) of world-making; one we hope you will join in building. Each film currently has a Google Folder, where you will find materials that relate–sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely–to the work. Instructions for participation can be found inside the folder.
 
Access information:
Open captioning in English will be provided at all times. Video introductions will additionally feature ASL interpretation. Fallen Arches contains rapidly changing, flashing images. After…After… (Access) includes audio description in English and a stroboscopic effect at around 8 minutes
Camera-Body, a workshop for cinematic arts and dance makers, March 10, 2020

This interdisciplinary workshop brings students together in a hands-on, movement oriented laboratory. Students will work with legendary club dancer Archie Burnett, Olinghouse, and Rosskam to explore the relationship between the empowered body and the responsive camera. Archie Burnett, known for his individual freestyle of voguing, waacking, and hustle, is a pioneer of Old Way Vogue, a style innovated also by his friend and collaborator, Willi Ninja, the grandfather of Voguing. Moving between fluid expressions of gender, and rhythmic stops and poses, Burnett angles his body in silky spirals, using “contrapposto” to perform for an imagined camera. Interweaving practices of embodiment and visual storytelling, this workshop explores the ways cinematic images are co-constituted between performers and filmmakers.

Cori Olinghouse is an artist, archivist, and curator working with performance and time-based media. Her work has been shown at Abrons Art Center, BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Danspace Project, Knockdown Center, Lincoln Center, Microscope Gallery, New York Live Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Movement Research. In 2017 she founded The Portal, an artist-run initiative dedicated to poetic and creative forms of archiving. Recently, she collaborated with video artist Charles Atlas on a moving image installation of Trisha Brown’s archival materials for “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Last year, she collaborated with Autumn Knight and the Studio Museum in Harlem on the performance acquisition and restaging of Autumn Knight’s WALL—the first performance work to enter their permanent collection. She formally served as archive director for the Trisha Brown Dance Company (2009-2018), a company she danced for from 2002-2006. She holds an MA in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University and serves as visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Jules Rosskam is an award-winning filmmaker, educator and interdisciplinary artist interested in liminal spaces: the space between male and female, between documentary and fiction, between moving image and still. He is the director of transparent (2005), against a trans narrative (2009), Thick Relations (2012), Something to Cry About (2018), Paternal Rites (2018) and Dance, Dance, Evolution (2019). His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the British Film Institute, Arsenal Berlin, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the Queens Museum of Art, the Museum of Moving Images, and hundreds of film festivals worldwide. He has participated in residencies at Yaddo, ISSUE Project Room, Marble House, PLAYA and ACRE. Rosskam’s scholarly work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Somatechnics, Women and Performance, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Rosskam received a 2021 Creative Capital Award.