Refamiliarization: Day 2
Thursday, September 30
530–7pm
Processional Event
Embodying Our Collective Change, Edgar Fabián Frías
In this processional event, Fabián Frías will guide a group of participants through a collective ritual of self-transformation that reflects on how we perform ourselves in the institutional environment of the campus.
7-8pm
Screening
Brazil: Verse and Reverse by Dulphe Pinheiro-Machado, O, LUNA! by VLM, and Caroline by Tim Feeney
The exhibition’s second screening of short films presents the conflict between material infrastructures and the surreal, imagined worlds they enable: Dulphe Pinheiro-Machado’s "Brazil: Verse and Reverse" offers a poetic view into the intersection of politics and the domestic sphere; "O, LUNA!" by VLM follows a Luna Moth through a homemade, miniature film studio in a surreal investigation into materiality and metamorphosis; Tim Feeney’s "Caroline" is an ambient meditation on the limits of visual and sonic recording technologies in capturing natural phenomena.
About Refamiliarization
A century ago, Viktor Shklovsky introduced the concept of “defamiliarization” to describe art’s revolutionary potential. Facing a world beset by habituation, automatism, and alienation, he proclaims that art “exists so that one may recover the sensation of life.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has effected a thoroughgoing sense of defamiliarization — even the most quotidian habits have become strange. It has awakened a reflexivity in our relations to the objects of everyday life, making us more aware of the clothes we wear when leaving the house. Simultaneously, though, the domestic sphere has become the site for further habituation to technologies that imperceptibly extract value from our every utterance and gesture. While some seemingly intractable institutional norms may have been temporarily interrupted, others have been fortified. A sustained moment of emergency, the pandemic obliges us to assess what must be recast and resisted and what, if anything, may be recovered with care.
Refamiliarization brings together works of art — from performances and installations, to videos and sculptures — that speculate on and give form to new versions of what could be “familiar.”
You can read more about the series at the Refamiliarizaton home page here. You can also check out the Refamiliarization website here.