Matters of Being is a filmscreening series where artists and independent filmmakers screen and discuss their works with each other and the audience.

15:00 Welcome by Nele Brökelmann
15:05 May your eyes never look away, may your genitals always be lubricated (pixels, porn, power and the panda desire economy) (2022), Ange Neveu
15:25 Residual Light / Beneath the Floating Land (2022), Bao Dachen
15:45 Wunderkammer 10.0 (2021), Soyun Park, co-directed with Yelim Ki and Inwoo Jung
16:15 See You Later Space Island (2022), Alice dos Reis

short break

16:45 Conversation with Bao Dachen, Ange Neveu, Soyun Park and Alice dos Reis

Matters of Being is a filmscreening series at iii curated by Nele Brökelmann. The series presents experimental films by artists and independent filmmakers, and documentary films about artists, thinkers and scientists. Matters of Being allows our minds to wander and stumble upon new associations in the illuminating darkness of the cinema setting.

This Matters of Being edition investigates (human) desires and the imprint they make on the ambiguous zones we humans move through and inhabit. Ange Neveu’s performance-lecture May Your Eyes Never Look Away, May Your Genitals Always Be Lubricated (2022) zooms in on the image-driven obsession of the pornographic production machinery that wants to animate pandas to propagate. Bao’s Dachen Residual Light / Beneath the Floating Land (2022) takes us on a journey in which we gaze upon the daily landscape of a Chinese riverbank. This is guided by a narration adapted from historical diary entries from the 19th-century British merchant-adventurer Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Little. Soyun Park’s Wunderkammer 10.0 (2021), co-directed with Yelim Ki and Inwoo Jung, is dealing with the problems inherent to technology driven societies: when the artificial intelligence Wunderkammer runs into the limitations of data accessibility it starts to dig into a long-expired travel blog it found on the Internet. Alice dos Reis’ See You Later Space Island (2022) pulls us back into our current times, speculating on the (false) hope that space exploration can bring and reflecting on how we, as humans, connect with one another and our environment.

After the screening of the individual works, Nele Brökelmann will moderate a conversation between the artists and the audience. Bao Dachen, Ange Neveu and Soyun Park will be present during the event, Alice dos Reis will be joining the conversation remotely.

Ange Neveu 

Ange Neveu is an artistic researcher and writer based in Rotterdam. They are interested in the intersection of sex, eco-surveillance and technologies of (re)production, particularly in non-human and queer bodies. They often present their findings through video installations, performance-lectures and publications. 

May Your Eyes Never Look Away, May Your Genitals Always Be Lubricated (2022) delves into the controlled existence of captive pandas. Exclusively using found footage, it traces the lengths humans go to propagate them, manage their desires and render them irresistible to our eyes. Surfing through pornographic productions, YouTube comments and research papers, these images reveal regimes of sexual governance but also the resistance strategies and variability of desires of the vulnerable species. 

Bao Dachen

Bao Dachen is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Rotterdam and Chongqing. Through films, installations, and performances, Bao’s practice combines archive, ethnography and speculative fiction in examining the ever-shifting structural relationships between geopolitics and ecology, self and other. He is also a co-founder of the self-organized Chongqing Work Institute (CWI), a research-based collective operating since 2018. 

Residual Light / Beneath the Floating Land (2022)
The film is based on the daily landscape along the Chaotianmen Dock and riverbank in Chongqing, a city in Southwest China. The sight follows the lens as it wanders between the riverside and the navigation, and travels through different spaces and gatherings. It is narrated by a dialect voice-over, excerpted and adapted from the diary of a 19th- century British merchant-adventurer Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Little on their voyage through the Three Gorges into West China. Contemplating the relationship between the residues of history and modernities, the film traces an ambiguous zone that accommodates the complexity between history and reality through these fragmented landscapes and memories. 

Soyun Park – co-directed with Yelim Ki and Inwoo Jung

Soyun Park is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and educator from South Korea, living in The Hague. By making use of new media and technology, her work investigates the border between the digital world and reality which is getting thinner every day. She also leads a community-based studio RGBdog. Wunderkammer 10.0 is co-directed together with Yelim Ki and Inwoo Jung.

Wunderkammer 10.0 (2021)
In a virtual city of the future, the operating system ‘Wunderkammer 10.0’, created to provide a more stable and fast autonomous driving service, crawls map data and learns by itself. Faced with the limitation of data accessibility within a specific timeline, Wunderkammer finds a long-expired travel blog on the Internet.
<Wunderkammer 10.0> is a science-fiction film that depicts the inequality caused by map data access, glorified economic growth, and conflicting political ideologies. The film captures the fragility inherent in the contemporary technological society and environment, and projects it into fragmentary events occurring in the possible world of the near future. 

Alice dos Reis

In their work, Alice is often preoccupied with the material systems and demands involved in enabling technologies of transference and transcendence. They are lured by film as a primary narrative and poetic medium, but their work also takes shape through text, sculpture, photography, and as of late, embroidery and tapestry. 

See You Later Space Island (2022)

In the middle of the Atlantic, Helena rekindles an old friendship with Ceu, an astrophysicist who recently relocated to the Azorean island of Santa Maria to study exoplanets. Caught between the island’s geological inheritance and the vastness of the cosmos, the two friends reconcile with the various space exploration infrastructures that are stationed on the island. A work of science- fiction inspired by the various space resources currently existing in Santa Maria, ‘See You Later Space Island’ is a loose tale of friendship and endurance in the age of multi-planetary engendering. 

Nele Brökelmann

Nele Brökelmann is an artist, writer and researcher. Deeply intrigued by the human need for structures of meaning, the perpetual search for and fabrication of meaning are recurring themes in her practice. This research finds another playful outlet in Nele’s collaboration with June Yu: waterybeings. Nele also writes for the contemporary art magazine Metropolis M, and is working together with the writer’s platform and artist in residence Witte Rook (Breda, NL) on a research project into artistic processes: Proces is een Octopus. 

Wunderkammer 10.0 by Soyun Park is funded by Creative Industries Fund NL

Matters of Being is presented by iii with financial support from Creative Industries Fund NL and The Municipality of The Hague.