Keynote talk at the Film-Philosophy Conference 2025, University of Malta
23-25 June 2025
Abstract
My talk draws on my experience of developing an experimental curatorial research project with wide-ranging collaborators. Animistic Apparatus (2018 – ) devises curatorial methods to explore ecologies of relations intertwining cinematic and cosmological practices with multiple agential beings in worlds of asymmetric powers and potency. The project’s unfolding partly entailed re-situating film theory’s foundational question: what is cinema? It relearns moving image curation by drawing inspiration from an animistic cinematic and cosmological genealogy of film culture in Thailand: the practice of outdoor film projection as ritualistic efforts in spirit ecologies of people in precarious circumstances to make time, future prospect, and relations with opaque powers.
From my initial film historical research into itinerant film projection around Thailand since the Cold War period, I learnt to think with the practice of making animistic film offerings. This is a ritualistic mode of film projection through which existentially vulnerable human agents address and maintain relations with opaque and potent spirits of place. This experience of research led me to initiate a series of curatorial experimentations to find creative, relational and embodied ways to theorise the poetic tendency of Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ cinema from the place and the ecology of animistic film projection. Reflecting on the insights gained from this experimentation, my talk ends by proposing a definition of Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ cinema as animistic poetics. Drawing on the practices of artist-researchers such as Lucy Davis, Riar Rizaldi and Ho Tzu Nyen, I highlight elements of this poetic cinematic form concerning durational and relational rhythms, agency of humans in existential vulnerability, and communicational addressing as gestational practice of the powerless.