Queer World-Mending

68th Flaherty Film Seminar

Programmed by Jon Davies & Steve Reinke
June 17–23 2023

Queer World-Mending was like living in a wound; vulnerabilities strewn across time forms, divisions and disagreements laid bare, more questions raised than answered. Yet, on this scorched earth, it was transformational to be reminded of our shared humanity, connectedness, imperfections, and ability to transcend the limits of language in search of a queerer future—
an amalgam of joy, pain, complexity, everchanging nuance, and a deep desire for the experiment of life. – PARTICIPANT

Digital Catalogue now available:

The Flaherty is pleased to share the 2023 Queer World-Mending digital catalogue featuring the complete 68th Flaherty Film Seminar program with film notes and artist biographies, and new texts by the programmers Jon Davies and Steve Reinke as well as Fan Wu, Simone Barros and Imani Dennison & Celeste Orozco.

 

Programmers’ statement

“Better a mended sock than a torn one – not so with subjectivity.”
— Hegel
 

The world – wounded, wasting, wheezing – needs mending. But our feral subjectivities, our libidos, need to remain torn, agape, asunder. So how can we mend the wounded world if we are open wounds ourselves? Sexuality is a force that cuts through histories and identities, and offers an embodied approach to thinking. Perhaps queer desire, through its very non-productive fucked-upness can mend the world better than more stable, normative approaches.

It is hard to have any hope these days, now that so many of the flaming creatures are literally flaming creatures. As the world burns, one can barely determine which fires to put out, which to ignore, and which to fuel and fan. This program will join the living and the dead because the only way into the future is through the ashes of the past. Queer World-Mending will be a playground of desire, a laboratory for developing and performing new subjectivities. And if we can’t build a new house, we can at least change the wallpaper. Long live the new flesh!

– Jon Davies, Steve Reinke

 
 
 

68th Seminar Art by Edie Fake

Programmers

Jon Davies

Jon Davies is a Montreal-born curator and writer. He holds a PhD in Art History from Stanford University, where he wrote the dissertation The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995. He was a member of the Pleasure Dome programming collective for several years before working as an Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (2008–12) in Toronto – where he curated an exhibition of artists who grew up in the shadow of the first decade of the AIDS crisis called Coming After – and then as Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries (2012–15). He has curated artists’ film and video programs for venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Aurora Festival, Gallery TPW, Images Festival, Inside Out Film Festival, and Vtape.

Jon’s book about Paul Morrissey’s film Trash was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and his anthology More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia University Press in 2021. His writing on film, video and contemporary art has been published in many anthologies, catalogues, journals, and periodicals such as C Magazine, Canadian Art, Criticism, Fillip, Frieze, GLQ, and No More Potlucks. His articles include “Sissy Boys on YouTube: Notes Towards a Cultural History of Online Queer Childhood” for C Magazine (2014) and “Sell Your Parents: Marketing the Handwriting of Julia Warhola and Phung Vo” for Master Drawings (2020). He also co-edited issues #5 and #6 of Little Joe magazine – “about queers and cinema, mostly” – with Sam Ashby (London).

Steve Reinke

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his monologue-based video essays. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), mumok (Vienna), MACBA (Barcelona), National Gallery (Ottawa) and the Julia Stoschek Collection. He has shown work at film festivals including Sundance, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, BFI London and the New York Film Festival. He has been in many exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial 2014. He is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin).

The Toronto International Film Festival named his The Hundred Videos (1989—1996) one of the 150 essential works In Canadian cinematic history. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. Two collections of his writings have been published, The Shimmering Beast, (2011) and Everybody Loves Nothing (2004). He has co-edited several anthologies, most recently Blast Counter Blast (with Anthony Elms) and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman).

He also works as a curator and critic, most notably assembling a box set of George Kuchar's video work for the Video Data Bank. His research interests include rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, artists' writing, queer Nietzsche, animation, the voice and psychoanalysis. Born in 1963 in the Ottawa Valley, he now lives in Chicago and teaches in the department of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern.

Hybrid Seminar

The Seminar was founded in the 1950s when Frances Flaherty began the annual tradition of inviting friends, mentors, collaborators, and students into her home to watch and discuss films. For nearly 70 years, these gatherings have been bound by geography. For past three years, riding the cusp of new technologies, we’ve developed a hybrid experience that reflects and extends the Seminar experience to cinephiles in over 50 countries.

Bengaluru Pod at Oorkathe

Pods

The Flaherty partnered with arts organizations in global locations to host local experiences of the 68th Seminar. The Pods support our mission to decentralize the Seminar experience and increase accessibility. In 2023, we launched this model in five locations, with the hope to expand to multiple locations, continents, languages, and time zones in 2024 and beyond.

The Flaherty’s custom online platform

Online

The Flaherty aims to be accessible to people around the world and to inspire de-centralized conversations around the programming. We offered a series of online events in late July and early August in which all members of our community —including folks who attended the in-person seminar at Skidmore, global Pod participants and online participants — had the chance to gather, thread their experiences together, and engage with the programmers and select artists. 

Programs

Revisit the full program on the 2023 Seminar Programs page.

Artists

Read about the Artists on the 2023 Seminar Artists page.

Fellows

Each year, the Flaherty offers fellowships to enable emerging and mid-career filmmakers, media professionals, and community members to attend the Flaherty Film Seminar. The Fellowship program is an expanded experience of the seminar, led by Fellows Coordinators and designed to further understandings of cinema through participation in an array of unique activities.

The Flaherty welcomed an in-person cohort of 31 fellows and 20 online fellows to the Seminar in 2023. Get to know them on our 2023 Fellows page.

The Team

Staff

Samara Grace Chadwick, Executive Director
Anisa Hosseinnezhad, Fellowships & Outreach
Anne de Mare, Grants & Special Projects
Devi Penny, Pod Communications Coordinator
Eynar Pineda, Producer
Helen Peña, Communications
Juan Pedro Agurcia, Producer
Jules Rosskam, Online Fellows Coordinator
Rami George, Fellows Coordinator
Sarie Horowitz, Program Director
Yasmin Desouki, Archivist
Zile Liepins, Communications & Design

Fellows Coordinators

Anisa Hosseinnezhad, In-Person Coordinator
Jules Rosskam, Online Coordinator
Rami George, In-Person Coordinator

Board

Pablo de Ocampo, President
jeanelle augustin, Vice-President
Ted Kennedy, Treasurer
Jason Livingston, Secretary
Anna Saulwick, Dessane Lopez Cassell, Juana Suárez, Kevin Jerome Everson, Nicholas Elliott, Ruth Somalo, Sara Archambault, Steve Holmgren, Tracy Rector

Pod Managers

Devon Narine-Singh, New York City
Aisha Jamal, Toronto
Nuno Lisboa, Lisbon
Anuj Malhotra, Bengaluru
Daniela Alatorre, Mexico City


Photo Album