Friday February 20th at 5:30PM
LOCATION: Carpenter Center, Harvard University.
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Tickets: Suggested donation $7
Balagan and Film Study Center at Harvard University Present
THE SPECULATIVE ARCHIVE (Julia Meltzer & David Thorne appearing in Person)
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne produce videos, photographs, and installations. From 1999 to 2003, their projects centered on secrecy, history, and memory. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed, and realized or relinquished, specifically in relation to faith and global politics.
Recent projects have been exhibited at the Walraff-Richartz Museum (Köln), Argos Center for Art and Media (Brussels), the Wexner Center (Columbus, Ohio), the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 California Biennial, Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), Apex Art (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery's (London) travelling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among many others.
Program: (subject to change)

We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass - 2007, 47 minutes
“We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass” is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005–06 in Damascus, Syria, each section of the piece—the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Qur'an school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew—offers a different perspective on what might come to pass in a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.
Winner of “Best New International Video” at the Images Festival in Toronto, 2007 and the “Dialogue Award” at the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrueck, Germany 2008.
Produced by Julia Meltzer, Directed by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Written by David Thorne
Edited by Catherine Hollander
Music and Sound Design by Chris Kubick
Camera by Raed Sandeed

It's not my memory of it: three recollected documents - 2003, 25 minutes
“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Referencing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the tape addresses the logic of the bureaucracy of secrecy in the current climate of heightened security.
A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. Images pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 are the source of a concluding reflection on the role of documents in the constitution of the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.
These records are punctuated by fragments of interviews with information management officials from various federal agencies, who distinguish between “real” and “protocol” secrets, explain what it means to “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of records on a given subject, and clarify the process of separating classified from unclassified information.
Winner of “Best Documentary,” International Short Film Festival, Rio de Janiero, Brazil
Biographies:
Julia Meltzer is an artist and director of Clockshop. Her work takes up subjects ranging from the bureacracy of secrecy to contemporary politics in the Middle East. She has taught at Hampshire College and UC Irvine. She received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a recipient of grants from Art Matters, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship Fund, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005–6.
David Thorne lives and works in Los Angeles. He is he recipient of a 2007 Art Matters grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. He completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. In spring 2006 David was a visiting artist at The Cooper Union in New York City. He recently collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for documenta 12. |