Ana Mendieta, Creek, 1974

Valie Export, Syntagma, 1983

Emilija Škarnulytė, Sunken Cities, 2021

Ana Maria Millan, Monica Restrepo, Cali Choreography Dancing Show, 2008

Steffani Jemison, Succession, 2019

This session focuses on how bodies interact with, commune with, change, and disrupt natural and built environments, and demonstrates how the medium of cinema can aptly render these interactions and propositions. With works ranging from fifty years ago to present day, the program explores how movement and physical gesture activate ideas, politics, assertions. In Ana Mendieta’s Creek (1974), the artist lays still submerged in running water, letting it flow over her and asserting her body as inseparable from the body of water, and rocks and trees around. Progressing from Maya Deren’s work on movement and placement captured on camera, Valie Export’s Syntagma (1984) experiments with repetition, forward and backward moment, the relations between skin and surface and the feminine body against and within the built environment. In Emilija Škarnulytė’s, Sunken Cities (2021), the artist–inhabiting a form at once human, mermaid, or cyborg–is shown in an expanse of water, shot from above, a tiny figure alone swimming over what appear to be ruins of civilizations past. In Ana Maria Millan and Monica Restrepo’s, Cali Choreography Dancing Show (2008), the artists created a group called “The Feminine Dance League,” to choreograph dances in culturally and historically specific places in  the Colombian city Cali, as a was to assert femininity in typically patriarchal public space. Finally, Steffani Jemison’s, In Succession (2019) reenacts real stories of Black excellence and interdependence via split-screen, fragmented, and close-up depictions of four young men of color building acrobatic formations together.