Saturday, December 7, 2024 at 7:30pm
An Evening with COUSIN
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
To mark the release of our newest publication, Temporal Territories: An Anthology on Indigenous Experimental Cinema, COUSIN Collective has organized an evening of films and talks at Light Industry around the artists and ideas animating the collection. We begin with a reading by Lou Cornum, which will travel from Edison’s Kinetoscope to the poetry of Diane Burns, then continue with a pair of videos by Raven Chacon, including Report (2001), “a musical composition scored for an ensemble playing various caliber firearms,” in which the “sonic potential of revolvers, handguns, rifles, and shotguns are utilized in a tuned cacophony of percussive blasts interspersed with voids of timed silence.”
The event will conclude with Shelley Niro’s singular featurette Honey Moccasin (1998), a work of special consequence to many of the book’s contributors, followed by a discussion between Niro and COUSIN member Adam Piron. “Honey Moccasin defies any notion of traditional categorization,” Piron explains. “It takes no authoritative stance on delivering any kind of thesis on Indigeneity, but rather it seamlessly weaves its way through a multitude of approaches to present a surreal spectrum of subjective meaning. For over twenty years, it remains a high-water mark of experimental Indigenous cinema and continues to inspire artists looking to push their own formal and thematic boundaries.”
Fluid and funny, Honey Moccasin’s pastiche moves across a number of genres—cable access, performance art, the whodunit—and its open-ended design rhymes, in significant ways, with the editorial outlook that shaped Temporal Territories. “The purpose of this collection is not to define what this movement is or is not, but rather to illustrate some of what drew us to these works and these artists, whom we admire for their creativity, their risk, and their hope,” COUSIN writes in their introduction. “We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections, as it shows some of the different ways that different Peoples are thinking about and making work as Indigenous artists and scholars. There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone.”
Copies of Temporal Territories will be for sale at the event.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.