Karrabing Film Collective & Elizabeth Povinelli, The Family

Film screening and conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Sunday 20 March 2022, 5 – 7 pm
Theater

In the frame of the exhibition ESPRESSIONI CON FRAZIONI which will open on 24 April 2022, on Sunday 20 March at 5 pm in the Theater, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea presents a conversation with anthropologist, scholar, and member of Karrabing Film Collective Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Buffalo, USA, 1962) and the Museum’s Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

On that occasion will take place the Italian premiere of the film by Karrabing Film Collective The Family, 2021 (29’23”). The film questions the current ecological crisis, indigenous destruction, and cultural erasure produced in Northern Australia. Alternating between contemporary time in which Karrabing members struggle to maintain their physical, ethical and ceremonial connections to their remote lands and a future populated by ancestral beings living in the aftermath of toxic capitalism and white zombies, The Family mixes comedy, tragedy and realism to reflect on the practices of the present and their impact on worlds to come. 

Biographies

Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Buffalo, USA, 1962), critical theorist and filmmaker is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded across five books, numerous essays, and a thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her books include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), which was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011), and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002) which was a Art Forum Best Book of the Year. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta 14, the Contour Biennale, and MoMA PS1.

Karrabing Film Collective is a group who uses filmmaking to explore the conditions of inequality for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia and retain connections to land and their ancestors. Karrabing, which in the Emmiyengal language means ‘low tide’, refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatise and satirise the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with state entities, intervening on aspects such as environmental devastation and economic exploitation.

This collateral activity is part of the ESPRESSIONI exhibition supported by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT

The activities of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea are primarily supported by Regione Piemonte

The activities of the CRRI are primarily supported by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo