HD video/16 and 8mm film, color, 16:9, stereo sound, BE, 2023, 80’30”
Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose by Eva Giolo,
Barefoot Birthdays on Unbreakable Glass by Rebecca Jane Arthur
When Things Fall Apart by Katja Mater
Un Âne by Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat
The possibility of being sea by Maaike Neuville
Produced by Kunstencentrum Nona
In the context of the 10th Contour Biennial of Moving Image
Curated by Auguste Orts
Un Âne (2023)
In Akerman’s latest film, No Home Movie (2015), we see footage of the Palestinian/Israeli Al Naqab/Negev desert. However, Akerman chooses not to name the location. Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann went to that same desert, and made alternative images: asphalt roads cutting through the arid landscape, tourists on camels, a musician leaning against a car, a donkey from the village of Al-buqay’a.
Much to their frustration, they can no longer engage in direct conversation with the filmmaker, so they conceive Un Âne as an imaginary, intergenerational dialogue. The artist duo shares with Akerman a family history of dislocation and displacement Unlike her close relatives, their families ended up in Israel. They themselves live in Brussels. Within their European, Jewish identity, they try to do away with Zionism and colonisation. In the choice of the letter form and the struggle with their family history and with notions like identity and belonging, Efrat and Foighel Brutmann links their work to that of Akerman. Their film adds a form of grief to the filmmaker’s desert images, a place- and language-based grief with a political aspect. That experience blows through Un Âne like a wind.
Text by Natalie Gielen