A speculative and poetic exploration of the entanglements and overlaps of historical events in the Atacama Desert (Chile), the film, told from the perspective of the wind, takes us on a visual journey, floating freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama. Exploring some of the largest lithium mines in the world; hovering above the remnants of colonial labour camps reactivated under the Pinochet regime, and slipping inside the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s camera uncovers material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain invisible to the many.
By pointing at how these trajectories mutated and expanded into aspects of modern geopolitical issues, “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims” exposes pillars of western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism while simultaneously proposing another worldview, one that is carried and echoed by the wind.
“’Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims’ is the latest film in a series called “Elemental Cinema”, which we began to conceive in 2016; and for which we have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as a starting point. Part documentary and part personal essay, each film in this series, is dedicated to one of the four classical elements: earth, water, fire, and air which is the element chosen in “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims”, a film that follows the wind and what it carries as a guide and an analytical framework. Merging poetics and critical theory, this work proposes a sensuous, poignant and emotional take on the ethico-political challenges of the global present, through human and nonhuman perspectives. Our aim, then, is to undermine ways of thinking about, and relating to the Earth which have been inherited from European colonial modernity.”
Biography
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of “Toward a Global Idea of Race” (2007), “Unpayable Debt” (2022) amongst many other titles.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film “Serpent Rain” (2016), “4 Waters-Deep Implicancy” (2018), “Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum” (2020), “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims” (2023).
Their films have been exhibited at major art venues such as MACBA (Barcelona); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and more. In Februrary 2024, they opened a retrospective of their work at the Munch Museum in Oslo; in May 2024 the Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp opened a solo exhibition of their work. They have a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books.
