An Experiment in Leisure explores the link between free time and creativity, between leisure and the kind of imaginative contemplation it facilitates.

An Experiment in Leisure

Diamonds are forever imagined as an object of desire that circulates as condensed wealth. They can easily carve through a lens or blind our eyes, severing our fetishistic attachment to the glitter of commodities. A perfect cut, carving lines into our retina, separating screen and lens, stone and fluid.

Perfect Cut

The artists, following Chantal Akerman’s footsteps, decide to turn the camera where Akerman didn’t and pronounce the name of this particular desert in its Arabic name. By this simple gesture, Un Âne frames this location, including its geopolitical history and actuality, where there is evidence of colonial practices of segregation and deprivation of the Bedouin community being practiced.

A Donkey

Echoing the title of its precursor film, Un Âne—“a donkey” in French–, [anan] refers to the phonetic sound of the word “cloud” in Hebrew. The film moves through route 3199 in the Negev desert in southern Israel/colonised Palestine—a route followed and filmed by renowned filmmaker Chantal Akerman around her untimely death in 2015. A work invested in an attempt to mourn Akerman in a time of ravaging genocide that creates an inter-generational trauma. A reckoning with the blind spot of European Jewry towards the settler colonisation of Palestine by Zionism and the ongoing Nakba.

[anan]

The curators invited a group of artists to be inspired by the work of the well-known, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. They specifically presented them News from Home, the 1976 feature film with two equal main characters: the island of Manhattan, New York where the director resides and her mother in Brussels who, through a stream of letters, demands increasingly urgent news.