Mario Garcia Torres Deimantas Narkevicius / The Speculative Archive in A Thousand Years of NonLinear History

Mario Garcia Torres – Tea (64 min, 2012) 
Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres has always been concerned to investigate the mechanisms of production of artistic thought and to explore the obscure points, unofficial or unhistoricized, of the more intangible heritage (bound up with facts, rumors and live testimonials not listed in the official accounts) of conceptual art, its gestures, figures and practices. Tea is an essay film documenting an artistic gesture surrounding Italian artist Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. What does it mean to return to a place while visiting it for the first time? How a guest can become a host due to a years-late arrival? How far, really, is Afghanistan from Mexico? These questions, as they pertain to the relationship between Boetti and Mario Garcia Torres, are considered in the film. 

Deimantas Narkevicius - The Dud Effect (2008,  15 min)
The 2008 film The Dud Effect by Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius (b. 1964) is a “reenactment” of something that has never happened but was planned and prepared to the smallest detail: the launch of a nuclear rocket from the Soviet Union. The artist shot the frightfully precise scene at the original location according to the memories of an ex-Soviet soldier who used to serve at a now-closed nuc-lear rocket base in Lithuania and still knows by heart the protocol of launching such a rocket. That Cold War might have ended but does not this only mean that the “enemy” changed name?

The Speculative Archive - Julia Meltzer and David Thorne - It's not my memory of it (25 min, 2003)
"It's not my memory of it" mobilizes specific historical records as memories which flash up in a moment of danger, in order to raise questions about notions of disappearance and the tenuousness of historical fact in the current climate of terror. A dynamic of knowing and not knowing-central to practices of secrecy, memory, and documentation. » Our work focuses on the production of documents, their collection, circulation and reception, and their socio-political effects. Through a consideration of the documentary processes operative across bureaucratic, political, mnemonic, secret, and public spaces, our work poses a range of questions about knowledge and power. While we recognize a certain value in instrumentalizing information in order to foreground power dynamics and their constitutive conditions, we are working to develop formal and conceptual strategies that challenge and expand our notions of "information," "history," and "evidence".

Curated by Aliocha Imhoff et Kantuta Quirós.
A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History - Nov 6 - Dec 18, 2013 - Event produced by the curatorial platform A people is missing in partnership with the Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art, FILM department, the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the School of Fine Arts in Nantes, the Cinématographe, Nantes, and with the support of the institutions, the Région Ile-de-France, the Polish Institute of Paris, the Mexican Institute of Paris, Casa de Mexico Foundation.

Read more