Federico Windhausen: A Chorographic Cinema

This program of recent work from Latin America offers a series of speculative corografías (a term that combines chōros with graphē – the writing, drawing, or representing of a land, region, or delimited space). In these visualizations of urban and rural landscapes, the mapping of an alternative geography is shaped by active modes of questioning and probing. Even at their most personal and idiosyncratic, these shorts often draw our attention to zones marked by their collective significance, sites where particular surfaces, objects, and materials index shared histories and meanings.

Tropes of settlement and occupation, as well as traversal and passage, recur throughout the program, as every territory made visible is also transformed by near-continual movement and displacement within the frame. In addition, these films delve into parallels and points of intersection between human and non-human, organic and synthetic, animate and inanimate matter. Some evoke cosmovisions, others suggest conjectural chronicles, and each attempt to bring a new spatial imaginary into the realm of the moving image.

Complicating the audiovisual access that moving image media provides to the phenomenal world, a capacity which these films utilize extensively, is the array of techniques and processes that each filmmaker develops in order to foreground forms of mediation. The depictive ambiguity on display here - enhanced by dynamic, frequently unpredictable montage structures - can be allied with the more generalized refusal of transparency to which these filmmakers commit themselves. Put another way, these works pose hermeneutic challenges and solicit spectatorial responses of exceptional openness and receptivity. In this context, the viewer's experience of perceiving and making sense of the enigmatic image (or the ambiguously-motivated chain of images) can function as an analogue to the process of continually rethinking received social and cultural norms. This is a selection of work whose investment in larger struggles - over contested notions and values, related to revisionist histories, identity formations, cultural recognition, and so on - is not necessarily made explicit in its manifest content, but rather in its modes of engaging its spectators.

Federico Windhausen