Openness, Impurity, Intensity

Based on key concepts that cross the choreographic work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas, the program Openess, Impurity, Intensity. Perspectives around the work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas consists of a film program that includes works by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Renais, Ghislain Cloquet, João Sodré and Nuno Miranda, and a symposium that unfolds in two moments of inquiry: (I) Image, Vertigo, Intensity and (II) Openness, Dislocation, Opacity. In the first moment of the symposium, co-curated by Ymago/project Imagens Migrantes and with the support of DGARTES, we invite thinkers who focus on the “contradictory” world of images, whose montages, conscious and unconscious, produce a certain over-determined artistic object, with intensities, reminiscences and a multiple openness of meanings. Focussing on the emotion and overdetermination in the work of Romeo Castellucci, João Francisco Figueira presents a methodological and empathetic analysis that adds to the understanding of the visual experience of the work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas. Based on his latest book, Des corps. Anatomies, Défenses, Fantasmes (2019), Victor Stoichita examines the fluctuating, nonstop development of body images, focussing on the face, a place par excellence of expressiveness and displacement in the choreographer’s work. In the second moment, the notion of “openness” works as the motto to expand a decolonial reflexion with and through the work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas. Based on the film Les Maîtres fous (1955), by Jean Rouch, Ana Cristina Furtado explores the ambivalences of this cine-documentary and other post-colonial films that are relevant to Marlene’s choreographic work. Finally, Nadia Yala Kisukidi takes notions such as implosion and opacity to criticise modernity’s hegemonic, binary and racializing paradigms.