Cooperativa Laia symposium, 21 May 2025
Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto
“The symposium is a part of SPECTRAL, a project developed in Portugal by Cooperativa Laia that puts the Laboratório da Torre space in dialogue with other European analogue film labs run by artists. In this context, researchers and programme-makers Teresa Castro and May Adadol Ingawanij have been invited to present their research on the concept of animism and its relationships (and possible divergences) with the practices of experimental cinema and expanded cinematic art. Both talks will be accompanied by a programme of films curated by each of the guests.”
May Adadol Ingawanij gave a talk on the curatorial project Animistic Apparatus and presented the curated screening programme A Patch Echoes, A City Glides.
{if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves, Migrant Ecologies Projects
2021, 28min.
This film is one part of a long-term engagement with Tanglin Halt, one of Singapore’s oldest social housing estates, which runs alongside a former railway track. The railway was owned by the Malaysian state until 2011, meaning that a ten-meter-wide zone of indeterminate-governance ran through the heart of Singapore for fifty years, playing host to a fecundity of more-than-human activities, ranging from the informal to the feral. Ornithologists have observed 105 species of birds in this patch. However, the land along the tracks is being repurposed as green corridor park through a new biotech and media hub…Our repeated returns to this contested site aim to trace remaining fragments of calls, echoes, shadows memories and transformative encounters that still animate this zone, like shadows through leaves.
The Migrant Ecologies Project is conceptualized by Lucy Davis, together with: Sound Designer, Zai Tang; Cinematographer & Editor, Kee Ya Ting. Editor, Daniel Hui & Design Studio Crop Singapore.
Birth of the Seanéma, Sasithorn Ariyavicha,
2004, 70min.
Sasithorn edited this black and white silent film from many hours of footage she shot on DV looking intensely at Bangkok streets, aerial views, the shoreline, lapping waves, gestures, figures and faces. An invented alphabet inscription accompanies the film’s slow gliding rhythm. The arrangement of letters and the layering of images tells a fable of the sea as the milieu of all the memories of all the world’s beings.