__________

Athens Design Forum presents a curation of films for Cinema Parentesi at BASE Milano, accompanying our 2023-24 theme ‘ANTHROPOS-TOPOS’, deciphering how humans and places coexist at the proxy of design.  Mohamed Khan’s El Batikha (1972, Egypt) is followed by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s documentary Chircales (1966-71, Colombia). Athens Design Forum’s cross-cultural programming transforms these films into archives of labor practices that examine how design informs labor rights advocacy. The selection emphasizes a diverse spectrum of labor sharing a temporal framework: from an Egyptian office worker in Cairo to a Colombian family of brickmakers, we bear witness to the role of spatial landscapes both as agents of demise and ones capable of intrinsic power.

Mohamed Khan traveled to London in 1956 to study architecture, ultimately extending his interests to film studies. As one of Khan’s earliest films, El Batikha follows the changing temperaments of Cairo’s penetrative urban infrastructure through the stimulus of a watermelon purchase from a local outdoor vendor. Cinematographer Said El-Shimi’s footage allows for a critical lens questioning the working-class identity’s relationship to space. The unnamed male protagonist, a government employee, is introduced within his office space, where an evocation of his surroundings is rendered and disputed.  Khan superimposes the wife’s audible economic laments into the office space the man inhabits – at once, evoking a fissure of the domestic and office spatialities. Upon his departure from the office, the urban landscape unfolds in symphonic unison: painted billboards advertising insurance for families transition into coffee shop promenades, and crowded buses meet the echo of the fruit sellers’ voices. The city dissolves into a prolonged elevator shot as the protagonist transitions into the domestic sphere. Gendered connotations are evaluated through a barometer of spatial tensions: the wife, now visible,  prepares the watermelon for serving while the man rests. The final scene depicts the kitchen table where the family gathers to eat, with the father at the head.

Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva are regarded as the pioneers of documentary cinema in Latin America. Their first joint film, Chircales, is set in Tunjuelito, Southern Bogotá, Colombia, and chronicles the Castañeda family’s journey as brick producers over a five-year period. Chircales exposes ‘the human reality that is denied,’ prompting the audience to re-examine the humanist parameters and implications of derelict supply chains for building materials.  The filmmakers reveal the political violence enforced upon the laborers and their consequent estrangement from the land they cultivate. Ultimately embodying the ailments of the mud they harvest, the Castañeda family’s forced displacement as temporal laborers diffuse and act as a reference for the ongoing threat laborers’ bodies experience. The religious undertones that are interwoven within the documentary foresee the virtues of humility – wherein protection by saints, and the iconography of Christ, call forth a constant beckoning and questioning of fate.

– Katerina Papanikolopoulos, Founder, Athens Design Forum.

The aforementioned programming marks the first time ‘Chircales’ and ‘El Batikha’ will be shown in Italy; With extended gratitude to Cinema Parentesi, BASE Milano, and Fundación CINE Documental.

________

Cinema Parentesi

Cinema itself includes an almost ritualistic act on the part of its viewers and spectators. It somehow encompasses the awareness and forethought of an experience: the rendezvous of a moment when "everything can happen, everything is possible and probable" (The Dream, August Strindberg, 1901). Cinema Parentesi was created with the intention of a tribute to a contemporary language, increasingly common within the discipline of design and architecture: moving images. The goal is to create a kind of ephemeral temple, dedicated to the field of video installations, that seeks to restore the audience to its original state of contemplation. Cinema Parentesi is a celebration of a moment, the moment in which one receives a stimulus through a screen. The spaces, infrastructures, objects, textures, materiality, and physicality of the material culture with which we are surrounded gets interrogated, recomposed and narrated by images, sounds and words.

Founded by Standard404 / Eretico / Beatrice Maione

@cinemaparentesi

For Inquiries:

Katerina Papanikolopoulos, Founder

info@athensdesignforum.com