Declan Clarke and The Museum of a Proud History is a succinct attempt to look into one of the most intriguing challenges that Clarke proposes to us — the emotional and intellectual leaps that are revealed when we order things our own way. If History has been deconstructed and complexified and the role of hegemonic systems of thought has been called into question, the role of space — the exercise of the diagram — has been brought to confront that of time — the form of the line. In Clarke’s films, collections of objects, words, ideas and exhibitions, the diagrammatic possibility of ordering things has allowed mapping possible (alternative) accounts of human existence on Earth. Looking at the circulation and transmission of things, one finds the transitions and transformations that our lives went through.

Economic, political, ideological, poetic, affective and material circulation of things — narrative becomes both a taxonomy and a paradox, where its own limits are revealed, together with our own existential precarity. A radically minimalistic form opens up a maximal poetic potential — thought and feeling together in motion. — Cíntia Gil

Saturn and Beyond, Ireland, 2021, 60 minutes
Traces the discovery of the connection between lightning and electricity, and how this understanding developed into firstly electrical communication, and expanded to transcontinental communication and ultimately broadcasting. The film considers how the development of telecommunications and air travel led ultimately to the exploration of the solar system, and humankind’s desire to send signals to the further regions of the known universe. Most specifically it looks at our relationship with the planet Saturn, the furthest planet in the solar system visible to the human eye.

Group Portrait with Explosives, Ireland, 2014, 40 minutes
Connects the former country of Czechoslovakia with South Armagh in Northern Ireland. Though not areas that one would normally associate with one another, through the vagaries of industrial manufacturing and international trade, an imperceptible link has been made between the two.
Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic, is an industrial city that forged it’s manufacturing identity in the wake of the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The city is also renowned for its exceptional and numerous examples of structuralist and brutalist architecture that were produced between 1918 and 1989 with the profits made from industrial exports.
South Armagh became notorious for it’s violent resistance to the British presence in Northern Ireland throughout the modern ‘Troubles’.

Programmed by Artistic Differences with curatorial support from Constança Pinelo. 

ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES, is organized by UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art’s Christopher Allen, and Jenny Miller with Independent Programmer Cíntia Gil. It’s a monthly sequence of interlocking events— an online cineclub, along with physical screenings and public dialogues— that brings a diverse, international audience on a journey to many places and new contexts, welcoming many different films, voices, ideas and visions. Along the way, it makes room for brave questions and candid responses to challenging documentary art, and invites the voices of the audience to a more public stage after taking time to think together.

This drifting cinema club is an experiment in building an inclusive international community in partnership with some of the most exciting documentary events and spaces around the world. We screen singular films that open questions about the possibility of collective transformation, about forms and practices of togetherness, and speak to filmmakers and authors that bring those notions into the core of their own artistic interrogations.

Following the screening, the Cíntia Gil will propose a set of ideas for 40 mintue discussion. In Artistic Differences, the audience and the films are in conversation–we will play a game, in which strangers exchange ideas and share their reactions and questions with one another–to explore the films together.

13:00 Saturn & Beyond
14:00 Group Portrait With Explosives
15:00 Artistic Differences group discussion with Cíntia Gil