March 16, 2018
Workshop (10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.), followed by discussion and screening
The KABANE77 collective is currently developing the project 77 Fragments, which will constitute a sum of archives relating to the group鈥檚 actions and reflections since its creation in 2012. The practice of documentation allows for existence through new manners of saying and doing, and without having to ask for authorisation. In our view, it notably allows us to better understand the possibilities and limits of self-representation through different forms of media (print, social media, video, cinema, audio narratives, etc.)
Born out of the need to tell the story of our ties to a specific territory (the warehouse situated at 77 Bernard East, in Mile-End), and to constitute our legitimacy within the 鈥減ublic sphere,鈥� this workshop proposes to think, through concrete gestures, about pragmatic ways to present a moving and porous entity beyond functional categories, which will instead be substituted by fictional ones.
This workshop invites willing participants to reflect and contribute to the creation of some of these fragments of invented stories. The exchanges will be animated by the collective conception and production of the next edition of the Cahiers des impossibles, a newsletter printed on Risograph that we have been publishing on a monthly basis for almost a year, and which is distributed freely.
This activity seeks to meet with the Media@McGill community in order to reflect upon notions of self-representation, commons, archives, speculative gestures and territory in the areas of communication, image production, mediation, and political theory.
The day鈥檚 activities will take place at the Cultural Studies House on McGill campus (3475 Peel Street) as part of KABANE77鈥檚 residence with .
The workshop will be followed by a discussion and screening of Robert Kramer's film Ice (1969).
Ice - A film by Robert Kramer, 1969, 130 minutes
Cultural Studies screening room, 3475 Peel Street, Room 101
A pioneering work that blurred the boundaries between fictional and documentary styles, Ice was hailed by filmmaker and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas as 鈥渢he most original and most significant American narrative film鈥� of the late sixties. An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife which threatens its security and stages urban guerrilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and serve to restrain the melodrama inherent in the 鈥渢hriller鈥� genre. Shot in the gray landscape of New York City in a gritty cinema-verit茅 style, the film has been compared to Jean-Luc Godard鈥檚 Alphaville.
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At the crossroads of the Mile-End鈥檚 lines of desire, KABANE77 proposes to open an abandoned city building at 77 Bernard East, and to turn it into a laboratory of experimental social and artistic practices. Anchored in cinematic practices, and inscribed in the organic corridor initiated by the Champ des Possibles, it will be a space of human ecology that houses a hub of knowledge production and sharing that is open to the community.
KABANE77 is in residence at Media@McGill for the 2017-18 academic year.