T H E  U N S E E N  F E S T I V A L  2018

Invisible Islands

Join us on Wednesday, September 5, 7:30pm for night 5 of the Unseen Festival. We will screen work by André Almeida Rodrigues,Marcos Serafim, Jefferson Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon,Cristián Tapies and Robert Oyarzún Susñar, and Anuar Elias. Preceding the screening will be a reading, curated by Julia Madsen, featuring Evelyn Hampton and Bailey Mestayer Pittenger.

Alfaião – André Almeida Rodrigues – Portugal – 2016 – 13 min

In the countryside painted in white by the frost, the birds sing while entrapping the hunter who warms himself in the early sunlight. In the fireplace, the wood crackles in the fire and warms the elderly who are making siesta in company of their cat. We are in the village, where there it is always too hot despite the cold weather and the rain once in a while. This village is Alfaião.

André Almeida Rodrigues is a Portuguese director who was born in 1988 in Leça do Balio, Municipality of Matosinhos. In 2016, he finished a Master’s degree in Sound and Image in the School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa. As a student in the first year of the Master’s, he directed and produced “The Barber Guitarist”, a short documentary that was winner Latino Award for Best Portuguese Short Film, nominated for Sophia Student Award, a prize from the Portuguese Film Academy, and with 28 screenings in 19 countries.

Gede Vizyon – Marcos Serafim, Jefferson Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon – Brazil/Haiti – 2018 – 15 min

A walk through the Port-au-Prince Grand Cemetery guided by one of its inhabitants: the goat. Shot with Go-Pro cameras during the 5th Ghetto Biennale in 2017, this video experiment is the result of a collaboration between Brazilian and Haitian artists. The images captured by the animal in its derive suggest a psychogeography of the cemetery, a site loaded with meaning: a place of Vodou practice, a historical landmark, and an index of the destruction caused by the 2010 earthquake. The images are combined with audio documentation of Vodou songs and improvised poetry, both in Haitian Creole. Informed by Haitian culture, Gede Vizyon problematizes the ethnographic gaze and human-animal relationships while exploring the material and immaterial complexities of the cemetery.

Jefferson Kielwagen (Brazil). Kielwagen is an artist and a researcher. His artistic practice is best described as intervention or social art. Some of the major venues in which he exhibited artwork are the Ghetto Biennale of Port-au-Prince, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in NYC, and the Coletiva de Artistas of the Joinville Art Museum, in Brazil. He teaches Sculpture and History of Art at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. His current research looks at the challenges and strategies in creating a global narrative for art history.

Marcos Serafim (Brazil). Serafim is a filmmaker whose practice focuses on video art, video installation and experimental documentary. Some of his major works are “O Artista tá nas Ruas”, a series of documentaries on street art in south Brazil; “Pretexto Performance”, a series of performance art documentation; and “Itapocu”, a documentary about an African-Brazilian popular festivity. Some of the major venues in which he exhibited are the Berlin Independent Film Festival in Germany, the Osmar Niemeyer Museum (MON) in Brazil, the Queens Museum in NY and the Ghetto Bienalle in Haiti.

Steevens Simeon (Haiti). Simeon is a visual artist who works with photography, video and fine arts. Part of the Port-au-Prince Atis Rezistans community, he participated in all editions of the Ghetto Biennale and collaborated with several visiting artists. He took part on the Young Energies Summer Camp in Berlin, in 2012, and worked with the Africamerica Foundation and the Haitian Ministry of Culture, teaching video production to university students in 2013.

Fragmento de Canto del Macho Anciano – Cristián Tapies and Roberto Oyarzún Susñar – Chile – 2017 – 10 min

An experimental video inspired on homonymous poem of Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha. Canto postulates the synchrony between the vitality of the individual memory of a speaker in its various versions, and the time of the praxis of a poetic project held amid a political-economic context which modifies the production of words and speeches.

The poet was a Chilean writer who was born in Licantén in 1894 and died in 1968. His real name was Carlos Díaz Loyola. His texts have a strong anti-clerical load, which meant severe criticism attacks. The influence of German thinkers, the Romantic movement and anarchism can be seen in it. De Rokha he read and admired Walt Whitman and felt a deep enthusiasm for the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Rokha received the national prize for literature in 1965.

Cristián Tapies. Born in Santiago de Chile, 1975. Works in Documentary Films and Experimental Film and Video Art.

Roberto Oyarzún Susñar, around 41 years old. Born in Punta Arenas, Chile, 1974. Musician (around…50 albums), Social Science teacher (around…1878 students), Actor (around…6 movies), Composer (around… 2078 tracks), Film director (around… 6 movies), Writer (around… 3 books). Father of four tiny ninjas brothers/sons & two little Venus dancers, sisters/daughters. Only one love.. Alondra Isabella is her name.

Quehuaya – Anuar Elias – Bolivia – 2017 – 23 min

A fisherman of Lake Titicaca, an island that only exists once a year, a Yatiri reads the future of the water in the coca leaves, a civilization that resists to disappear.

Anuar Elias. Born in Mexico (1983). Artist and director, self-taught. As an artist, he won the 2010 Young Art Award and participated in group exhibitions in Mexico, Brazil, USA, Colombia, Bolivia and Chile. His first short film Quehuaya won the award for Best Visual Experimentation Short Film at the XXVIII Amalia de Gallardo Municipal Video Contest in La Paz, Bolivia and Best Experimental Short Film at the Eduardo Abaroa Prize, La Paz, Bolivia. It is part of the official selection of several festivals in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Mexico and Romania.

Reading Curator and Readers

Julia Madsen is a multimedia poet and educator. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is a doctoral student in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver. She is the video editor at Reality Beach, and has shown video poetry and projection mapping installations at Outlet Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, No Nation Art Gallery in Chicago, IL, Counterpath Gallery in Denver, CO, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory conference in Orlando, FL. Her video work has appeared in VICE’s “The Creators Project,” and her poems and multimedia work have also appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, and others. Her first book, The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland, is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press in 2018.

Evelyn Hampton is the author of Famous Children & Famished Adults (FC2), Discomfort (Ellipsis Press) and The Aleatory Abyss (Publishing Genius), and the chapbooks We Were Eternal and Gigantic, Seven Touches of Music and MADAM. For more information please visit www.lispservice.com.

Bailey Mestayer Pittenger has lived mostly between Appalachia and the Deep South. She has an MA in English from Wake Forest University and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Her writing can be found in Glittermob, Gigantic Sequins, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Denver.