Join the Hunter Moving Image Alliance for a two-hour-long special event—a talk and collaborative interactive performance through a "zoomed" screen with the experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
For most of her adult life, film artist Lynne Sachs has collected and saved the small business cards that people have given her in all the various places she has traveled – from professional conferences to doctors’ appointments, from film festivals to hardware stores, from art galleries to human rights centers. In these places, Sachs met and engaged with hundreds of people over a period of four decades, and now she is wondering how these people’s lives might have affected hers or, in turn, how she might have touched the trajectory of their own journey. During our first hour together, Sachs will expand upon her personal approach to making experimental documentaries and her essayistic method of asking questions of herself and others. She will interweave clips from her previous works (including (including The Washing Society, Film About a Father Who, and Girl is Presence)) and her work-in-process, all of which take a hybrid approach to research and production. She will also touch on the writing of thinkers who have recently been of great importance to her own art-making practice, including theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt, scholar and activist Silvia Federici, and poet Ann Waldman. In this way, she will examine her own current work, be it inchoate, porous and, like everything that is worth doing, deeply challenging.
In the second half of her presentation, Lynne will ask the audience to make their own new piece. Each of us will engage with issues of performance, forensics, and materiality. Because our meeting will be conducted in a remote context, we will have access to items we find at home in our domestic universe or outside in the place from which we happen to be “zooming” in. At the end of our gathering, we will come together to discuss our own attempts to push as close to failure as we can imagine, and the revelations we discover on the way.