“Swamp”

Shambhavi Kaul
“Swamp”
[Response: Rachel Price]
Tuesday, November 29, 2022 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

The swamp has long been imagined as a site of horror in popular cinema, partially premised on the idea that such land exists beyond the reach of capitalist society: think of the much-adapted 1971 comic, The Swamp Thing, whose protagonist is a vegetal, subhuman who hides and survives, away from humans, in a swamp. As my own films have been concerned with “protagonism” within popular cinematic logic, I am now turning to the ways in which the question of protagonism, actors and agency, are at the heart of how to think of our earth’s future beyond the reigning extractionist logic. In this talk, I discuss these concepts in relation to my current, in-progress film that builds on my earlier work.

Shambhavi Kaul is a filmmaker, visual artist, and Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, the program in Cinematic Arts and the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. Her entire body of work is engaged with a core question of the limits and possibilities afforded to protagonists in cinematic storytelling. Her films and installations have been presented worldwide at the Toronto, New York, London and Rotterdam film festivals, the Berlinale, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. She has also been invited to present her work at museums including the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York among other venues.

Rachel Price works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture. Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University, she is author of several publications on media, slavery, poetics, environmental humanities, and visual art, including The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968 (Northwestern University Press, 2014), and Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (Verso Books, 2015)

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