CHANNELING

GOOD NEWS: AVB, in conjunction with aGLIFF is presenting a screening!
CHANNELING: An Invocation of Spectral Bodies and Queer Spirits:

CHANNELING is an entryway into the spirit realm and the queer body politic: a program of experimental moving image work that summons the ghosts of the past and the specters of the future. If we imagine the technologies of film and video as occult mediums rather than technological ones, then perhaps we can make a kind of spiritual contact with the emotional and physical realities that are often invisible (ghostly) in everyday life. In this sense, both the camera and the ghost stories it captures can serve as powerful instruments in the act of queer worldmaking.

The artists in this program use their bodies and stories as conduits that channel the political and historical dramas that haunt the queer experience: the AIDS pandemic (Renwick, DiStefano), the body in transition (Montague), the idealized nuclear family (Pena, Robinson), and the cultural conventions that shape desire and desirability (EMR, Moulton).

CHANNELING is more than communing with the dead: it is a method of accessing the living. The stories we share together in the flickering light are not disembodied records of the past, but rather, bewitching presences that speak to us here, in this very darkened room. In using moving images to propose the phantom as a fundamentally queer body—a liminal manifestation, floating between two worlds—we open the possibility of entering into a spiritual dialogue from which queerness is often excluded. Like the process of filmmaking itself, CHANNELING is a reinterpretation of light and shadow; a new form of alchemy that can guide us through sorrow, pronounce our desires when we lack the language to do so, and conjure utopias that re-vision - and therefore reshape - the political present. The future is bright. Come into the light, Carol Anne!



Join us this coming Satuday, January 24, at 8:30 PM at The Hideout (617 Congress Ave).
Tickets are $5, and there will be a meet and greet with the curators, Ethan A White and Latham Zearfoss before the screening and a Q&A after the screening.
Get more info here and here.



ALSO, there will be a dance party afterward at The Cockpit (113 San Jacinto)!
Ethan and Latham will be DJ'ing some awesome dance (they have already promised some Sylvester, so I'm pleased as punch).