Poetics of Relation
a Moving Image Workshop

December 17, 6–9pm
December 19, 6–9pm
December 21, 6–9pm

January 7, 6–9pm
January 9, 6–9pm
January 14, 6–9pm

Public Program:
Thursday January 16, 6–9pm

Ana Vaz, Apiyemiyekî?, 2020

“Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.” 
—Édouard Glissant, from Poetics of Relation

Aupuni Space, in collaboration with TRADES A.i.R., is pleased to present Poetics of Relation, a Moving Image Workshop led by Aily Tanaka Nash. 

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) was a Martinican post-colonial thinker who worked at the intersection of poetry, philosophy, and prose. Glissant’s archipelagic theory will be read in relation to the Pacific, and specifically to diasporic and indigenous experiences and ways of being in Hawaiʻi. We will also think through how the structures of creolization in the Caribbean might relate to that of Hawaiʻi’s diverse cultural influences and histories.

Starting with Glissant’s concept of opacity as a political and aesthetic method, this workshop will look to forms of resistance, refusal, and disruption as wellsprings from which to articulate potentials for an ‘otherwise’. We will enage with contemporary experimental narrative and documentary film, avant-garde cinema, and video art that articulate these methods. Provoking us to question where our attentions lie, and what forms of legitimacy we adhere to, these practices offer us myriad ways to look, listen, make, and be. We will encounter various modes of sharing that prioritize multi-narratives, entanglement, repetitions, translations, marginalia, spirals, abstraction, alterity, queerness, diaspora, and non-western expressions of time and space. How can we read the shadowy opacities and ambiguities in art as generative offerings and invitations for collaboration? How are the murky spaces of the unconscious, memory, and dreams expressed as alternatives to legitimized forms of knowledge?

Participants are asked to relate to the materials with their own practice by sharing films, work-in-progress, treatments, other aspects of their work, as well as bring in texts and epistemologies that are formative for their approach to making and being in the world. The participants’ contributions will inform the way we build the conversation together over the sessions.

The workshop will consist of gatherings to watch films, discuss readings, watch each other’s work, and engage in activities around the stated themes. We will meet three times in mid December, break for the holidays, and meet again for a few sessions in early January. There will be a culminating public event in which we will share aspects of the workshop and our own work with the community.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Aily Tanaka Nash is a curator and educator based in New York. She is a programmer at the New York Film Festival, serving on the selection committee for the Currents section, and is head of short films. She co-curated the Projections section of the festival from 2014–2019. From 2015-2022, she was a program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s short film section. She served as a Biennial advisor and co-curator of the film program for the 2017 Whitney Biennial and was head of programming for the 2018 Images Festival in Toronto. She curated the Basilica Screenings series at Basilica Hudson from 2012-2016. She has curated programs and exhibitions for MoMA PS1 (New York), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Anthology Film Archives (New York), SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture (San Sebastian), Doc’s Kingdom (Portugal), FACT (Liverpool), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (Tokyo), Ghost:2561 (Bangkok) and others. In 2015, she was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2018, she had a MOBIUS Curatorial Fellowship at the Finnish Cultural Institute New York. She has taught at Bard College, Bard Microcollege, and Bard Prison Initiative. She is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.