Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi / Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi work with archival material, taken from both known and unknown film archives. Since the 1970s, they have, in performance, films and installations, examined the colonialism, fascism, war, population movements and diasporic patterns that informed much of the 20th century. The main material in Pays Barbare (2013) comes from the years 1926 to 1937 and shows the Italian imperialist rampages in Libya and Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) and their connection to fascism under Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Through a dissection and thorough processing of the images, historical layers are revealed and shifts in relation to the colonial gaze are intensified. The film shows the barbaric injustices during this phase of Italian fascism as well as raises compelling questions in the present.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) was an American writer and artist of Korean origin. She is best known for her 1982 masterpiece, the genre defying book project Dictée, and her film works. In May 1980, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha traveled from New York to Seoul with her younger brother, James, to begin filming White Dust from Mongolia. It is her most ambitious film work but was still unfinished at the time of her death in 1982. The project description tells of a female protagonist with a fictional or speculative past, afflicted with amnesia and verbal memory loss. Due to political unrest, the work could not be completed on site, and what we have left is just over half an hour of footage of marketplaces, parks, railroad tracks, and other urban environments; images that, in their desolation and poetic density, allude to and activate questions of place and loss of place, diaspora and historical violence, “physical and psychological” displacement, questions that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha repeatedly addressed.