CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA PRESENTS:
THE FILMS OF FRANCI DURAN
With film maker Franci Duran presenting in person.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 6TH @ MONO NO AWARE : CINEMA ARTS NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION
33 FLATBUSH AVENUE, BROOKLYN NEW YORK - LIMITED ATTENDANCE TO 30 - MASKS AVAILABLE
DOORS 7PM – STARTS PROMPTLY AT 7:30PM – FREE OR $5 SUGGESTED DONATION

TRT, 75 minutes. Additional time for discussion / Q & A with Franci Duran IN PERSON

PROGRAM INCLUDES:

(Cuentos de mi niñez / Tales from my childhood) (1991, 16mm, 9:00) 
An experimental documentary in which the filmmaker recalls childhood memories, accompanied by imagery from 1990's Kingston and Toronto. The memories are sinister and morbid, of nightmares and suicide and dentists; the footage we see of snowy streets and a child playing and the seaside become foreboding. We learn how Francisca Duran escaped from Chile as a six-year old at the time of the bloody 1973 coup and how the death of democracy led to the death of innocence and truth. 

Boy (1999/2005, 16mm, 4:00) 
"What does it look like at the beginning? The first time he ever saw a table, the large foot of an adult stepping towards him, a window opening like a heart. Duran offers us rainy moments of Vancouver as an accompaniment to the birth of her first child. A slowly moving hail of abstract lights precedes a slow motion birth, recoloured and rephotographed from a TV screen. The artist’s voice offers up a series of dates along with the facts that accompany them, her son’s favourite book, animal and word (No). Each instance of looking arrives in fragments, there is no story to pull it all together, unless it is the story of memory itself, with its necessary omissions, its shorn away pieces and left-overs. The formal experimentalisms and material fetishes that inform this movie appear here as an analogue for memory itself, an inheritance of seeing in the dark. It makes me wonder: is every film the mother of its audience?" (Mike Hoolboom, Made in Canada: Projections of Beauty mikehoolboom.com/?p=242) 

Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights (Retrato Oficial #5) (2018, digital 18:03) (production 16mm, exhibition digital)
Suit of Lights is an experimental documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1983. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, transformed by microbes and contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens accept the harm done to others in their name.

Additional notes: Suit of Lights is an experimental film that probes the commonalities of the Franco and Pinochet regimes. The film also addresses themes of inequality, human rights, ecology, animal rights, colonialism and the roots of fascism. I buried 16mm film of a bullfight and spectators. Because film emulsion is made with gelatin, an animal product, microbes in the soil consume the images leaving their time-marks. I then rephotographed the decayed film many times using contact and optical-printing techniques and hand-processed those results. The footage was then transferred and composited and assembled digitally. The tension between the graphic violence in the opening sequence and the materiality of the film imagery calls into question at what point we turn away or refuse to see the results of humans’ presumed mastery over our fellow citizens, other-than-human-species and the land. 

In the kingdom of shadows (2006, 5:00) (production 16mm, exhibition digital) 
In the Kingdom of Shadows documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumiere Brothers’ film Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema. 

Beautiful lost things (2012, 2:39 animation, digital) (hand-drawn and collage animation with 16mm, exhibition digital)
Pigeons fly through landscapes towards an unknown destination. They are escapees from Muybridge's Animal locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements. 

It Matters What (2019, digital, 9:06) (production 16mm, exhibition digital)
Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction. The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact-prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant material and dried for hours in direct sunlight. 

Gift of a dream: dreamer #3 (2020, digital, 1:04) (production 16mm, exhibition digital)
A sketch created from a dream gifted by a dreamer during the covid-19 pandemic. 

Compendium [7:09, silent, 16mm, 2023] 
Full of lush shapes and vivid hues, this film loop was handcrafted using the techniques of phytography and optical printing. Raw visuals drawn from the artist’s garden over a period of two years bathe everything and everyone and confront us with silence. Vibrant leaf-prints, fingerprints, scratches and tape marks on celluloid work with the various phytographic offspring to evoke human entanglements with nature. With every touch of the hand or lamplight, these botanical image-traces are simultaneously illuminated and deteriorated. (text by Lesley Loksi Chan from the curatorial notes from Research garden: a compendium of lost moments: https://www.franciduran.art/research-garden) 

Surprise NEW work-in-progress on 16mm!! (2:00)

Total length of the program: 75 minutes

Biography:
Francisca Duran is a Chilean-Canadian experimental media artist who creates films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works about history, memory and violence. Duran has exhibited internationally at film festivals and venues including Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Film Festival at Rotterdam, HotDocs, Arkipel, Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Film Forum, John Hansard Gallery and Gallery 44. Duran holds an M.F.A. from York University and a B.A.H. from Queen’s University. Her practice has been supported by research, travel, and production grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
My artwork looks at history, memory and violence through the aperture of the archive: assembled and accidental. I create films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works. Born in Santiago, Chile in 1967, I came to Canada as a refugee following the 1973 military coup that ousted elected president Salvador Allende. This event – the experience of exile and its reckoning – is integral to my artistic practice.
I am interested in traces and lost, irretrievable things. I take images and audio apart, and reassemble them to reveal the the tactile qualities of media that are often thought of as ephemeral. Using a variety of digital and analogue media, processes and methodologies — photographs, film and digital video, hand drawing and digital illustration, analogue and digital found footage, downloaded images, texts and type, animation — I seek to make visible, to give a graphical representation and physicality to what is usually perceived as invisible and intangible, for instance, light, sound and memory. I strive to locate and follow circuitous paths produced by the intersections of the body, language and translation, popular culture, new technologies, old technologies, lost and abandoned technologies, humans and other-than-humans, archival films and recordings, personal stories, news stories, historical documents, politics, and works of art.
I am interested in the acts of looking and documenting and in the results, both pleasurable and painful. These formal and material experimentations act as metaphor for memory.

MONO NO AWARE SCREENING SERIES:
The CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA series will present the work of artists, film-makers and curators who are traveling or presenting special interactive programs in-person. Our hope is to engage the community by showing work with a focus on post-screening discussion. This series is made possible by support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).