Symposium is a part of SPECTRAL, a project developed in Portugal by Cooperativa Laia that puts the Laboratório da Torre space in dialogue with other European analogue film labs run by artists. In this context, researchers and programme-makers Teresa Castro and May Adadol Ingawanij have been invited to present their research on the concept of animism and its relationships (and possible divergences) with the practices of experimental cinema and expanded cinematic art. Both talks will be accompanied by a programme of films curated by each of the guests.


21 May Wed 17:00 Bar High Life

Free entrance

“Animist cinema as the art of attention”

Presentation by Teresa Castro

From a historical point of view, the expression ‘animist cinema’ evokes a series of debates on the latent or manifest forces of cinematographic images that took place in the 1920s-1950s. But what can animist cinema mean today? Despite the unavoidable contributions of contemporary anthropology to a renewed understanding of animism, animist cinema is considered here in relation to the ecological crisis we are going through and based on the proposals of Australian philosopher and eco-feminist activist Val Plumwood. In her writings, Plumwood advocates a philosophical animism that values matter and recognises in it forms of intentionality and creativity. In this context, some practices characteristic of experimental cinema are particularly interesting, suggesting the idea of animist cinema as a sensibility. In other words, as an ethic of attention and care.

“Animistic Apparatus”

Presentation by May Adadol Ingawanij

My talk draws on my experience of developing an experimental curatorial research project with wideranging collaborators. Animistic Apparatus (2018 - ) devises a curatorial method to explore ecologies of relations intertwining cinematic and cosmological practices with multiple agential beings in worlds of asymmetric powers and potency. The project’s unfolding partly entailed re-situating film theory’s foundational question: what is cinema? It relearns moving image curation by drawing inspiration from an animistic cinematic and cosmological genealogy of film culture in Thailand: the practice of outdoor film projection as ritualistic efforts in spirit ecologies of people in precarious circumstances to make time, future prospect, and relations with opaque powers.

21 May Wed 19:15 Room 2

Free entrance upon ticket pickup on the same day. Limited to two tickets per person.

Pwdre ser the rot of stars, Charlotte Pryce
16 mm, color, sound, 2019, 6’35 min.

The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance. Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, PWDRE SER joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images. ”Pwdre ser" is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400s.

Li: the Patterns of Nature, John N. Campbell

16 mm, color, sound, 2007, 9’07 min.

LI is a Chinese word that refers to the underlying intelligence and order of nature as reflected in its organic forms. This film explores in poetic, non-narrative terms, the myriad patterns of nature that are spontaneously generated in the physical world and blurs the distinction between living and inanimate phenomena.

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass), Elke Marhöfer
16mm, color, sound, 2017, 23 min.

The two concepts of extinction and becoming are difficult to think of together, both are more than just metaphors and neither of them offers an easy way out. Extinction emphasizes the extraordinary level of disturbance and precarity that we have imposed on our and other species. Becoming signifies taking up the struggle of a collective survival together with the nonhuman. We might begin by perceiving the world not as "our" — our climate, our survival, our films and our images.

There is gold everywhere, Rita Morais

16 mm, color, sound, 2023, 12’30 min.

With There is gold everywhere, one enters the subterranean reminiscences of a Roman gold mine to find, in a movement from the inside out, the multiplicity of subjectivities that re-inhabit the territory of the old mine.

21 May Wed 21:15 Room 2

Free entrance upon ticket pickup on the same day. Limited to two tickets per person.

{if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves, Migrant Ecologies Projects

2021, 28min.
This film is one part of a long-term engagement with Tanglin Halt, one of Singapore’s oldest social housing estates, which runs alongside a former railway track. The railway was owned by the Malaysian state until 2011, meaning that a ten-meter-wide zone of indeterminate-governance ran through the heart of Singapore for fifty years, playing host to a fecundity of more-than-human activities, ranging from the informal to the feral. Ornithologists have observed 105 species of birds in this patch. However, the land along the tracks is being repurposed as green corridor park through a new biotech and media hub…Our repeated returns to this contested site aim to trace remaining fragments of calls, echoes, shadows memories and transformative encounters that still animate this zone, like shadows through leaves.

The Migrant Ecologies Project is conceptualized by Lucy Davis, together with: Sound Designer, Zai Tang; Cinematographer & Editor, Kee Ya Ting. Editor, Daniel Hui & Design Studio Crop Singapore.

Birth of the Seanéma, Sasithorn Ariyavicha,

2004, 70min.
Sasithorn edited this black and white silent film from many hours of footage she shot on DV looking intensely at Bangkok streets, aerial views, the shoreline, lapping waves, gestures, figures and faces. An invented alphabet inscription accompanies the film’s slow gliding rhythm. The arrangement of letters and the layering of images tells a fable of the sea as the milieu of all the memories of all the world’s beings.