🎞️ “Disobedience Archive”, Palestinian resistance in 16mm + «R21 aka Restoring Solidarity»

Panel and screening. Marco Scotini presents the «Disobedience Archive» in dialogue with Fabiola Naldi. Followed by the film by Mohanad Yaqubi

«R21 aka Restoring Solidarity»

DIRECTED BY: Mohanad Yaqubi
YEAR: 2022
LENGTH: 71′

The Reel n. 21 (or R2) serves as an addition to and a reflection on a collection of twenty 16mm films, preserved in Tokyo by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine. The film unfolds as an undelivered solidarity letter, written by a Japanese activist that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found throughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself during the film. The act of restoring these films brings to light the motives, aspirations, and the disappearance of a generation and its struggles, not only in Japan, but around the world. The film is part of the Disobedience Archive, initiated by curator and theorist Marco Scotini in 2005, a constantly transforming video archive with no fixed location, dedicated to the relationship between artistic practice and political action.

The movie will be introduced by a presentation, in Italian

Curator and art critic Marco Scotini is in dialogue with art historian Fabiola Naldi, a scholar of video art and performance practices, around "Disobedience Archive," the project Scotini launched in Berlin in 2005 that has since gathered documentaries, video art works, and other visual materials dedicated to movements of dissent, activism, and civil disobedience. The archive spans forty years of social conflict, from the 1977 Italian riots to the global protests in Seattle, up to the revolutions in North Africa and more recent diasporic and gender movements. "Disobedience Archive" has no fixed form, reconfiguring itself around the space that hosts it. After the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Nottingham Contemporary, MIT in Boston, Castello di Rivoli, MAXXI, and the Venice Biennale, at the DIG Festival the archive enters a cinema hall for the first time. At the center of the dialogue is the ambivalent nature of the documentary and the possibility of using the archive not as a depository, but as a material with which to interrogate the present: a terrain where authenticity and fiction, ethics and aesthetics, art and politics intertwine, and where memory becomes a political stake for the times to come. Proof of this is "R21 aka Restoring Solidarity" by Mohanad Yaqubi, a documentary of movement cinema in which the preservation of images ceases to be a custodianship of the past and once again becomes an instrument of struggle and solidarity among battles.