Sound / Image / Media Encounters (SIME)

A roundtable at South London Gallery with Elan Gamaker and Michelle Williams Gamaker which explored how film genre continues to expand its potential as carrier of political message, field of activism and site of thematic play (2024).

This one-day symposium research sharing event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts was inspired by three broad themes: collectives, communities & inclusion/possible, probable & preferable/ecologies, spaces & geographies.

This symposium at the ICA, curated by Astrid Korporaal, explored the creative and ethical use of moving image, film and photography as a medium for engaging with contested institutional collections, archives and histories. Specifically, institutions connected to the incarceration, exploitation and separation of bodies and objects from specific social, geographical, and cultural contexts.

The ‘Sensitive Film' series, realised in association with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London, exploring the collaborative potential embedded in image-making from the perspective of editing, design and cinematography. Invited contributors to this series have included Claire Atherton (Chantal Akerman's editor), David Raedeker (Joanna Hogg's cinematographer on ‘The Souvenir', parts I and II) and Chu-Li Shewring (sound designer), speaking on their methods and perspectives.

• Screening and discussion of 'Constant’ by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, a journey through the social and political histories of measurement.
• Nana Varveropoulou's photographic practice and research that focuses on issues relating to human rights and social justice, often through the process of collaboration.
• Holly Antrum's collaborative doctoral research Writing a lens: how might the formal structures of the film archive be subverted through fictioning within artist moving image? facilitates the becoming of a narrator and a matrilineal counterpart.
• Oraib Toukan and her long-standing research on “Cruel Images” and the question of how to treat them as both object and subject through artistic practice.
• Xavier Ribas' photographic work that investigates contested sites and histories, and geographies of abandonment with a presentation of his two AHRC funder projects.
• Xavier Sole's Mora, Technocatharsis is an experiential simulation that encapsulates the frustration, excitement, and anxiety associated with keeping abreast of cutting-edge technology.
• Dr Owen Brierley, Digital Empathies exploring multiple forms of synthetic experiences, ranging from bioinformatics simulations to reinforcement learning.
• Bettina Malcomess presents her practice which crosses a diverse set of media and forms, ranging from long duration performance to the staging of shorter interventions, and installation projects to the book as site of practice. She produces performances under the name Anne Historical.
• Julie Pfleiderer discusses her film Das Retirée or the last house of my father (43 minutes, 2022) and its relationship to her ongoing research into the intersection of film and architecture.
• Nicola Field presented her doctoral autoethnographic research within a framework of historical materialist analysis.  
• Q&A with Dr Silvia Casini facilitated by KSA PhD researcher Mandy Eugeniou. Themes related to the body, care, medical visualisations, emerging technology, affective images, situated practices, craft, choreography and her art-science collaborations in an age of biopolitics.
• Vinicius Marquet ran a workshop on interactive, hypertextual narratives using Twine.