Mar 22nd 2019

Onion City: The Tension Here

@ Chicago Filmmakers

5720 N Ridge Ave, Chicago, IL 60660

Opening Friday, March 22nd, from 7PM - 8:15PM

On view through Sunday, March 24th

Bodies connect, ships send distress signals, words and images are interpreted and misinterpreted and reinterpreted again, a boiling point is reached. This program asks: how do we feel tension as an individual, as a group, and as a country?

Featuring work by the following artists: Akosua Adoma Owusu, Sabine Gruffat, Greta Snider, Courtney Stephens, Eshovo Momoh, Kera MacKenzie, and Andrew Mausert-Mooney.

Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us
Akosua Adoma Owusu
“The starting point for this colourful film is a letter from human rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to the American embassy in Brazil. The fact that in 1927 it was impossible for African Americans to travel to Brazil reminds us of the inequality still faced by that country’s black inhabitants.” — International Film Festival Rotterdam

Take it Down
Sabine Gruffat
A last stand for the silent guardians of the old order, Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares across the South. At long last, a grand inversion! Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives. The South is renewed.

A Small Place
Greta Snider
A short film in honor of people surviving solitary confinement. The film points to the whorls of memory, expression, and human connection that are specifically targeted by this practice. The film includes transcribed testimonies from survivors, as gathered by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd in their book “Hell Is A Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement.”

Mixed Signals
A patient, undergoing a distressing medical exam, transmutes herself into a seagoing vessel, and signals her distress using antiquated maritime phrases.
Courtney Stephens

knee jerk | x it strata
Eshovo Momoh
Under Eshovo’s direction, ‘knee jerk | x it strata’ was performed by DC based artist, Mason Olonade Trappio in response to Momoh’s audio work “Listening or of Empathy and Echo”, a 45 min studio recording.

Stones for Thunder
Kera Mackenzie & Andrew Mausert-Mooney
3, 2, 1 . . . a TV director counts down, paltry images become actors, and bodies find sync.

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