Moving closer to the ground, getting to the bottom of things, looking and hearing with precision, perceiving what’s happening close by, oft-unnoticed: these are the ideas that inform the 17th edition of Forum Expanded and the selection of films, installations and performances that will be presented as part of the Berlinale at the Arsenal cinema, silent green Kulturquartier, the Embassy of Canada, SAVVY Contemporary as well as at the Zeiss-Großplanetarium for the very first time.
Rosalind Morris's The Zama Zama Project is a multi-channel installation of narrative fragments, with accompanying images and poems, devoted to the predicament of undocumented and informal migrant miners in the depths of South Africa's abandoned gold mines.
Naeem Mohaiemen's Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) [64’, 2020] was conceived in response to a prompt given by Raqs Media Collective to think about modes of care, and the afterlife of caregivers. In an empty hospital in Kolkata, a man faces protocols of blood, a subtly discriminatory office, and a vacant operating theater. His mind is on a loop of the last months of his wife’s life, when a quiet argument developed. When is the end of pharma-medical care, whose life is it anyway? They were an estranged couple, thrown back into intimacy by an unknown illness. Even in a dreamworld of his making, the paranoia of infection is twinned with a hesitant intimacy.
