Magazine

“For me the volcano has always represented a central metaphor for the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. At the foot of the sleeping monster the mafia runs its empire. Meanwhile, all official attention is focused on the volcano, where nature is dramatized as a media spectacle—a powerful structure beyond comprehension.”

“I try to create an anarchic organization of cinematic space in my films and larger exhibitions. Anarchic organization attempts to build a foundation for thinking and acting by destabilizing the old hierarchies of film’s components. It gives viewers more freedom about where to look, what to read first, how to bring all of these narratives together, and, indeed, how to edit the space.”

DOUBLE WHISTLER — By Andrew Maerkle
“In recent years I’ve been struck by the affinities between astronomy and cinema. On one level, both engage with concepts of light, time, and distance. Indeed, it could be argued that both astronomy and cinema are essentially composed of only these elements. On yet another level, both can be understood as sharing, in different ways, fundamental aspects of uncertainty and speculation.”

“In Thailand, the word IMF entered popular usage during the Asian financial crisis and became a synonym for ‘cheap.’ I think the foreign origin of the word, or what Vicente Rafael calls the ‘promise of the foreign,’ is what opens the word itself to becoming a carrier for new meanings.”

“In Japan, there was the benshi narrator. In Thailand, there were the versionists who would travel in troupes in the provinces, where they would present films accompanied by a live aural performance that served to supplement the projected image in various ways, from narration to dubbing, commentary or even critique. You can read this practice as an extreme localization of the foreign or generic.”

IMAGE CRISIS — By Andrew Maerkle
“I think it would be too ambitious to say that the lectures in themselves offer an escape from capitalism, because that’s obviously not what’s happening. The starting point can be just a single question that I’m trying to answer. For Asia the Unmiraculous, this is the question of the relationship between race and capitalism.”