Public Lecture "Museum of Forgotten Returns"
In this talk, Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt explore the practice of collaboration, the complexities of archival research, and the work of fabulation through their feature-length experimental documentary, Museum of Forgotten Returns. The film centers on radical women, interracial alliances, and anticolonial pasts across 140 years of Canadian history told through the story of a single house in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The documentary, currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada, looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected and interconnected histories of Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, disability rights, and the racialization of a nation. Working through the concepts of ‘decolonial intimacies,’ and ‘trans as method,’ the film displaces the dominant colonial narrative of the house and reframes Canadian history as an anticolonial story of interconnected and politically-charged feminist and minoritized lives.
04. Mai 2023, 18:15 – 19:45 Uhr
F005, Unitobler
Julietta Singh
Julietta Singh is a decolonial scholar and nonfiction writer whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across the fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies, queer studies, the ecological humanities, experimental feminisms, and creative nonfictions. Her academic work has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Women & Performance, Social Text, Cultural Critique, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, among others. She is the recent recipient of the American Council for Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (held at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender), and delivers keynotes, lectures, and creative workshops internationally. Her first academic book, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), has emerged as a vital theoretical touchstone for global scholars and artists grappling with the politics of mastery that drive our professional, political, and personal pursuits. Her second book, No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), turns theory into creative praxis through an experimental meditation on the body as a plural and porous archive. In her newest work, The Breaks, Singh pens a long letter to her young daughter about race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. It has recently been hailed as a best nonfiction book of the year by entities such as the New York Public Library, Book Riot, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Singh is currently at work on The Nest, a feature-length documentary collaboration with Chase Joynt about radical maternities, interracial alliances, and anticolonial histories across 140 years of Canadian history told through the story of a single house. Taking a majestic home located in the center of Canada as its focus, the documentary looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected histories of Westward expansion, Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, domestic violence, and the racialization of a nation. The project is currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada, produced by Justine Pimlott.
Colloquium
With Prof. Dr. Julietta Singh & Prof. Dr. Chase Joynt
05. Mai 2023, 10:15 – 17:00 Uhr
F014, Unitobler
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Michaela Schäuble, Institut für Sozialanthropologie, Universität Bern
ECTS: 1.5 (Pflichtbereich ICS / Wahlpflichtbereich GS, SLS und SINTA / Modul I GSA)
Language: Englisch
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Film screening "Framing Agnes", followed by Q & A with the Filmmaker Chase Joynt
05. Mai 2023, 18:00 Uhr
Kino Rex, Schwanengasse 9, 3011 Bern
ECTS: 0.5 (Pflichtbereich ICS / Wahlpflichtbereich GS, SLS und SINTA / Modul I GSA)
Chase Joynt
Chase Joynt: After seeing my work in public, people often ask: "Are you a film person invested in gender theory or a gender studies person who also makes films?" The boundaries, investments and tensions revealed by these questions are emblematic of my interdisciplinary artistic practice and scholarly pursuits. My research sits at the intersection of cinema and media studies, gender and feminist studies, documentary film production, trans studies, and queer theory.
My current film, Framing Agnes, is complementary to a book, Conceptualizing Agnes: Exemplary Cases and the Disciplines of Gender, co-authored with University of Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt and under contract with Duke University Press. Working with newly discovered archival materials, the multi-format project urgently engages historical and contemporary debates about the production of expert knowledge, by implicating both social scientists and non-fiction media makers in the construction of exemplary cases and related legacies of research about gender non-conforming people. Framing Agnes premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and is currently being developed into a feature film with support from Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch program. With Aisling Chin-Yee, I co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about transmasculine jazz musician Billy Tipton. No Ordinary Man was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress and world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020. Further information about my artistic practice and samples of my work can be found on my website: www.chasejoynt.com
Registration colloquium and/or film screening:
Until 5. April 2023 via mike.toggweiler@unibe.ch as well as on KSL: https://www.ksl.unibe.ch/ (Login with UniBe-Account, search with title)
