Location: TAM’s Event Space
Start Time: 1pm
Filament is a moving image series at TAM conceived in dialogue with the exhibition Soft Power – a cinematic response to and reflection on the multivalent themes, both latent and tangible, in the textile-based artwork.
Program title: Warp and Weft: films by Basma Alsharif, Andrew Kim, Laura Huertas Millán, Abraham Ravett, and Sky Hopinka
Secondary program details: 2007-2021, digital video and 16mm film, TRT 75 min
Program description: A portrait of matriarchal weavers in Mexico whose traditional techniques are intertwined with their own sense of freedom; a meditation on impermanence and mortality from within a taxidermist’s studio; a 50 year old audio recording of a Pechanga language lesson between an artist’s grandmother and mother; a failed attempt at a love story told through images, letters and songs – these five artists’ films explore how material objects can be carriers of memory, familial history, ancestral traditions and how individuals locate themselves within collective experiences.
Film titles, details, and descriptions:
The Story of Milk and Honey (2011 | Lebanon | 10 min | SD video)
Basma Alsharif
The Story of Milk and Honey is a video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text, detailing an un-named individual’s failure to write a love story. Through voiceover narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a story of defeat transpires into a journey that explores how we collect and perceive information, understand facts, history, images, and sound and where the individual is to be found in the midst of the material.
The Peacock (2015 | US | 12 min | 16mm)
Andrew Kim
A meditation on our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence…”The peacock painted on the window will never dance or speak. It is only the peacock that lived in the forest which used to speak, dance, and walk in a sweet manner.” -Andrew Kim
La Libertad (2017 | France / Colombia / Mexico | 29 min | HD video)
Laura Huertas Millán
La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, whose backstrap loom – a pre-Hispanic technique preserved for centuries by Indigenous women in Mesoamerica – provides the formal structure for the film´s exploration of handicrafts and their ties to freedom. With echoes of the influential ethnographic work of Chick Strand, La Libertad combines astute observation, testimony, subtle transfers in scale, space and texture, as it weaves its own singular study of labor, creativity, and the mysterious traces that circulate between them. – Andréa Picard
Tziporah (2007 | US | 7 min | 16mm)
Abraham Ravett
Tziporah is the Hebrew word for ‘bird’ and a childhood nickname of Ravett’s mother. Created in response to his mother’s death, in Tziporah, Ravett presents a succession of close-up views of textiles and fabrics that belonged to her.
Kicking the Clouds (2021 | US | 16 min | 16mm to HD video)
Sky Hopinka
This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless. – Sky Hopinka
Upcoming Programming:
Free or by donation.