Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility we learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself.
We ask, could tenderness dissolve total violence? Could tears displace total extraction?
Towards this we reimagine the human and its subject-formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, away from the mind and eyes and noble senses, away from total extraction and its articulations as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade and mining.
Instead we turn to skin, resonance, and tenderness as the raw material of our reimagined earthy sensibility. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and to attend to is to care for, to serve. Serving, we know is the opposite of slavery just as violence dissolves with care.
as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker and writer. His films and installations have been shown internationally, including in Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, Sharjah Biennial and in museums such as Centre Pompidou, Madre Museum, MAAT and Jamee Art Centre. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, Umbau and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts. He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological. He has mixtapes essays on Dublab, Radio Alhara and NTS. He is also a co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is a practicing artist and philosopher. She is the Director and a professor at the Institute of Social Justice-GRSJ at University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture and Design (Melbourne, Australia). In spring 2023 she is also occupying the International Chair of Contemporary Philosophy of the Department of Philosophy of the Paris 8 University.
Denise is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is a member of several boards including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs and the journals Postmodern Culture, Social Identities and Dark Matter.
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). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery, The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Arnhem Museum (Netherland) and more. Their films have been screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Images Festival Toronto, Doclisboa, Pravo Lujdski and more. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Belkin Museum Collection. In 2023, they are showing the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Barcelona) and they will premiere their new film Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Ghosts in October at the Kunsthalle Wien.
In 2021, “Serpent Rain” and “4 Waters-Deep Implicancy” were presented at Shedhalle within Denise Ferrerira da Silva’s “Elemental Study Room”, her contribution to Protozone2: Continuity/Transpassing -. making histories together in more-than-human words.
