Catarina Rodrigues

In the film Reel/Unreel (2011) Belgium-born Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs, in collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwnadi, approaches the complex relationship between seeing and knowing through a displaced allusion to cinema. In it, whilst the camera documents a child's game, which consists of pushing a reel of film across the city of Kabul, in Afghanistan, leaving behind long trails of film, the spectator's attention turns to the referential specificity of the place. However, contextual information remains withdrawn from us. This presentation will focus on the implications of this film's strategies which problematize the process of presentation and distancing of historical reality as a continual process of doing and undoing, a feature common to other Alÿs’ projects.  This way of conceiving film will be situated in a wider reflection on the implications of the strategies of withdrawal in the arts, and put in dialogue with French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy understanding of withdrawal. It will be argued that through withdrawal, the tensions underlying the choice of what to represent and make visible when facing troubling events is related to the capacity of images and film to be both poetic and political.

Catarina Rodrigues is currently working on a PhD project entitled “Strategies of Withdrawal in Contemporary Art”. Before attending a doctoral programme in London at the University of Westminster, she lived in Lisbon where she was granted a BA degree in Literature and Modern Languages and completed a Master in Women’s studies, with a thesis on the localization and displacement of the subject in Chantal Akerman’s cinema. Her love for cinema made her work and study for more than a decade in several areas related cinema including production, assistant direction and making documentaries. One documentary Mulheres do Batuque (Women of the Batuque) won a prize in 1997 at Lisbon International Encounters of Documentary Cinema. She participated in the 2014 International Conference on Philosophy and Film in Lisbon with a paper on the cinema of British artist Zarina Bhimji.