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Cinematic narratives of eating disorders run the risk of presenting their characters as largely passive — a risk compounded by the fear of ‘contagion’ that haunt the images of bodies affected by these disorders. Paradigmatic examples are not only the images produced by the fashion industry but also the controversial photos posted online by ‘pro-ana’ communities (often presenting anorexia as a lifestyle). The mimetic aspect indeed plays an ambiguous role in drawing the contours of both the definition and the proliferation of eating disorders. For instance, after having diagnosed ‘bulimia nervosa’ in 1979, the psychiatrist Gerald Russell worried that his description of the symptoms had contributed to the dramatic spread of the pathology itself. This is a question for all newly introduced medical categories: do the symptoms proliferate or the diagnosis? But what is, in this respect, the role of cinema in recirculating both highly visible and hidden aspects of eating disorders forming such a prominent part of today’s visual culture? Moara Passoni’s Ecstasy (2020, 80 min) tells the story of the development of the film’s protagonist Clara’s anorexia, from her childhood to her late teenage years, against the background of the political changes of 1990s Brazil. In order to find a language that speaks against visual stereotypes of eating disorders and their spectacularization, Moara shows the way Clara perceives and tries to control reality through her relationship with food. Instead of overexposing the anorectic body, or protecting it by leaving its frailty outside the frame, the Brazilian filmmaker puts the audience in front of the ecstatic spectacle Clara witnesses: her phantasies and desires, her idiosyncrasies and her fears. Thus, in Ecstasy, the overused and often obscure word ‘dysmorphia’ takes multiple forms. It does not only correspond to the discrepancy between the way one looks and the way one perceives oneself. Body dysmorphia here also takes the shape of two imaginary friends/enemies of Clara, a blue dot and an egg, revealing how magical thinking is part of eating disorders. And visually most poignant is Moara’s use of both close-ups and extreme close-ups that mirrors Clara’s morbid need to re-redit reality by cutting it into little pieces according to what she calls ‘the geometry of hunger’. Moara Passoni is a writer-director from Brazil. She graduated from the University of São Paulo in sociology, anthropology, and political sciences, studied dance and performance at Universidade de São Paulo (USP-SP), and philosophy & aesthetics at Université de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. After finishing a master’s in film and documentary at, she earned an MFA in screenwriting and directing from Columbia University. Êxtase (2020) is her first non-fiction film and premiered in the CPH:DOX main competition. The film was screened, among others, at MoMA ‘DocFortnight’ and at Visions du Réel in Nyon and was awarded several prizes, including the Prix D’Innovation Daniel Langlois at the Festival du Cinema Nouveau and the Jury Award for best newcomers at the São Paulo International Film Festival. Passoni co-wrote and associate produced The Edge of Democracy (2019) by Petra Costa. In addition to the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, the film was nominated for best narration/writing by The Critics’ Choice Awards and the International Documentary Association. The Spectacle of Dysmorphia: in Moara Passoni’s film Ecstasy, screening, ICI Berlin, 6 December 2021

What is the relationship between reenactment and repetition compulsion? By shedding light upon the different levels of reenactment at stake in "Yella" by Christian Petzold, I analyse the 'transitional spaces' where the German filmmaker places his wandering characters who have 'slipped out of history'. In "Yella" Petzold mixes up past, present, future, and oneiric re-elaboration to question the memory of the past of GDR, which in his view has never really been constituted as history. The characters that populate this movie move in a setting constructed at the crossroad between a protected environment where the reenacted events are sheltered by the time and the space of the plot and a place weathered by the unpredictable atmospheric agents of the present. How and to which extent can the clash between different temporalities produce a minimal variation?

Tracing the complex history of the term ‘reenactment’, back to R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history, on the one hand, and popular practices of war reenactments and living history museums, on the other, a survey of its current contribution in art and museum practices highlights the importance of historicity — a category the postmodern was supposed to have vacated — in a wide range of examples, from Rod Dickinson and Jeremey Deller to Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmuş, and Milo Rau. Performance reenactments, in particular, are premised on performance art having become historical, but also threaten to digest history in favour of a mere productivist mobilization for the needs of current attention economies. An alternative could be the attempt to counter historical with dramatic time in order to unlock unrealized possibilities and futures, as the term preenactment promises.

The Dialectics of Denkraum is the presentation of the book by Clio Nicastro, La dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg, published by Palermo University Press. The volume investigates the concept of Denkraum der Besonnenheit as “the name of the constellations of methods, concept, forms of expression, and personal challenges that distinguish Aby Warburg’s research programme”. Along with a Foreword by the author and an Afterword by Salvatore Todesco, the book is divided in four chapters: 1. The Shifting Boundaries of the Denkraum der Besonnenheit; 2. The Corporeal Roots of Sophrosyne; 3. The Hospitalization in Bellevue; 4. Table C: An Elliptical Space for Reflection.

Clio Nicastro, Introduction to the screening The Spectacle of Dysmorphia: in Moara Passoni’s film Ecstasy, ICI Berlin, 6 December 2021, video recording, mp4, 11:44

Ecstasy Trailer of the screening The Spectacle of Dysmorphia: in Moara Passoni’s film Ecstasy, ICI Berlin, 6 December 2021, video recording, mp4, 02:03

Interruptions and discontinuity are the very essence of Aby Warburg's conception of the temporality that affects art objects. Beneath the seemingly immobilized expressive gesture, the Hamburg scholar recognizes the vitality of the "Pathosformeln" that convey the intricacy of human multi-layered temporality, made of interruptions, resumptions, inversions, regressions, stops, accelerations, and survivals (Nachleben). In this sense, Warburg's idea of 'renewal', which he developed from his well-known investigation of the Italian Renaissance, does not quite overlap with the notion of rebirth: an expressive gesture can re-emerge and be renewed in a different time without dying and being born a second time with a different form.

Despite the increasing incidence of eating disorders, very few films have addressed these conditions in particular. What’s more, most of the US-American mainstream fiction films that deal with eating disorders tend to be built on anachronistic clichés, hardly depicting their broad array. Furthermore, the traditional narrative structure of beginning, middle, and (happy) end misrepresents the erratic temporality of eating disorder symptoms as well as the nonlinear phases of recovery and relapse., Re-: An Errant Glossary, Cultural Inquiry 15, 49-56, Clio Nicastro, ‘Recovery’, in /Re-: An Errant Glossary/, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 49–56 >

Saima Akhtar, an urban historian and co-creator of the series ‘In Front of the Factory’, will offer reflections on the advancement of new technologies and the future of work. The aim of the workshop is to foster a discussion among participants about work/labour as a primary site for capitalist accumulation and resistance, as well as the ways in which forms of image-making – particularly film – endorse or fail to support it. This workshop is the third and final installment of the series ‘In Front of the Factory,’ which has focused on questions of work and the ways in which work/labour have been framed in past and contemporary forms of image-making. The workshop presents the research and conversations that accumulated through the series, including topics such as cinematic representations of women’s labour; the presence or absence of domestic and reproductive labour in visual media; the spatial and temporal dimensions of unemployment; the use of cinema for industrial knowledge production and nation-making; and the gendered and racial dimensions of labour in film and photography. Programme 16:00 Introduction by Clio Nicastro 16:15-18:00 Workshop with Saima Akhtar 19:30 Keynote Silvia Federici: The Globalization of Women’s Work and New Forms of Violence Against Women Introduction by Rosa Barotsi As Workers Leave the Factory, What’s Left Behind?, workshop, ICI Berlin, 9 July 2018

Clio Nicastro, Introduction to the lecture Silvia Federici, ‘The Globalization of Women’s Work and New Forms of Violence Against Women’, part of the workshop As Workers Leave the Factory, What’s Left Behind?, ICI Berlin, 9 July 2018, video recording, mp4, 06:27

Much has been made of the influence of media and fashion on the proliferation of eating disorders (ED): The glamorization of skinny and ephebic bodies is blamed for the quasi-epidemic spread of anorexia among young women, and hence the core of ED is often understood to be profoundly mimetic. Yet this link between ED and issues of representation extends even to its most clinical definitions and their inherent difficulties. While ED do affect bodies and gestures, their symptomatology remains elusive. ED thus often appear as disorders constructed around socially conditioned invisibilities. The one-day symposium will examine the discursive and aesthetic challenges that arise with respect to both the definition and representation of eating disorders, taking into account cinematic, literary, and artistic depictions of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and other forms of food consumption deemed ‘disordered’, keeping in mind that these diagnoses always raise the question of what constitutes ‘normal’, ‘ordered eating’, socially accepted habits and ‘aberrant’ ones – such as diets and obsessive ‘healthy’ or ‘clean’ eating. Since ED can be structured by imitation and concealment rather than a clear manifestation of symptoms, they seem to resist the clinical gaze also in their temporal aspects. Foucault has described modern symptomatology as emerging in conjunction with ideas about a defining course or progression of identifiable diseases (a typical Krankheitsverlauf). Yet ED temporalities are difficult to classify in accordance with the medical language of chronic vs. acute, episodic, sporadic, but also compulsion, addiction, or relapse. As a result, for example, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic Manual, DSM-5, lowered the frequency threshold for ED symptoms required for a diagnosis. The symposium, thus, will focus on the errant temporalities bundled into ED and fraying quotidian rhythms. Social time is structured around ‘ordinary’ mealtimes and collectively prepared festive occasions, both of which collide with the obsessional temporality characteristic of ED. Disordered eating obeys different rhythms, a time radically stretched or violently compressed. In all this, but even after a supposed ‘recovery’ from an ED, disordered eating remains paradoxically linked to the most elementary, by definition ‘chronic’ condition of an organism dependent on food intake. Can narrative time articulate these temporal complexities; can it absorb the intensely repetitive structures of ED or the questionable notions of recovery and relapse? The still very much uneven gender distribution of ED attests to the perniciously patriarchal structures of social life, yet ED also exhibit the overdetermined nature of consumption in capitalist societies. For many decades, ED have been a focal point of feminist attention and activism. But can the resilience, endurance, and refusal encountered in ED become modes of political resistance? Dis-Ordered Eating: Temporality, Normativity, Representability, symposium, ICI Berlin, 27 April 2018

Since the 1990s, re-enactment has emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Current re-enactments question the ability of the present to unpack, embody, and disentangle the past. Thus, to re-enact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. To re-enact means not to restore but to challenge the past – to not merely repeat it, but to interpret and translate it – in the present and for the present – or for the future. History thereby enters a special temporal dimension, that of a possible and perpetual becoming, opening a space for invention and renewal. The symposium investigates the issue of re-enactment through a discussion at once conceptual and practical. How, and to what extent, does recent history engage in a creative dialogue with a more distant past supposedly reactualized through re-enactment? This process of creative repetition branches out into at least three directions: (1) the return/survival of the past understood as generating meaning and values for both present and potential future/s, in terms of what one could call a symbolic archaeology; (2) an epistemological-axiological challenge to the traditional dichotomy between true and false, original and copy; and (3) a performative bodily practice that physically re-stages events. Methodologically, the notion of re-enactment will be approached from three directions: the archive, the arts, and curatorial practice. Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, symposium, ICI Berlin, 16–17 November 2017

In the short yet compelling text ‘Einfühlung’ (2008), Harun Farocki questions the relation between distance and identification from the point of view of both the film actor and the spectator. Right at the start of the text, the German filmmaker emphasizes that the term Einfühlung has been ‘handed over to the enemy’. Who is this enemy? And what is the context within which the German filmmaker positions this complex and ambiguous concept? Is ’empathy’ – the term most commonly used to translate Einfühlung – even strictly equivalent to the German term? Over the past decades, many studies have been published on the topic of empathy across a range of disciplines. Yet the debate on this topic is not limited to academic contexts: to react empathically is almost considered a social duty, amplified by the possibilities enabled by new media which allow for immediate contact with stories and experiences of distant people practically simultaneously. The general trend is arguably that of focusing on a supposed fusional relation between subject and object, without taking into account the distance and conflict implicit in sensing the other. Focusing on Farocki’s manifold research relating to the topic of Einfühlung, the workshop seeks to explore these issues, as well as the cinematic techniques/devices used to tackle them. Harun Farocki and the Notion of ’Einfühlung’, workshop, ICI Berlin, 4 July 2016

Clio Nicastro, Introduction to the workshop Harun Farocki and the Notion of ’Einfühlung’, ICI Berlin, 4 July 2016, video recording, mp4, 08:26

“Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind.” Harun Farocki’s condemnation of cinema’s unwillingness to represent labour finds echoes in present-day political discussions about the struggles and persistent invisibility of labour in public space. Undocumented labour, the weakening of union organizing, and the decoupling of work from physical space in the era of the Internet, are phenomena that have irreversibly altered everyday life. At the same time, a new vocabulary capturing the expansions of labour – affective labour, care work, women’s work, immaterial and precarious labour – has made it possible to deepen our understanding of what ought to be considered as labour and where this labour happens. In the same vein, a growing number of filmmakers are showing a commitment to render the spaces where work takes place today visible again. Despite arguments to the contrary, film and the moving image have always been concerned with the processes of labour, including the work of cinema itself. If film theorists such as Jean Louis Comolli chastised cinema’s distancing approach to spaces of labour, it could be argued that they had in mind a limited notion of the workspace. In other words, whilst the space in front of the factory has enjoyed relatively little screen time in film’s history, spaces of labour hold an enduring relationship with the medium. This conference will tackle the historically shifting relationship between cinema and the representation of labour spaces and will reflect on the renewed attention to the workspace in today’s art cinema and documentary production., In Front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour, conference, ICI Berlin, 26–27 May 2016

Il lavoro si fonda sull’idea che il periodo del ricovero (1921-1924) di Aby Warburg nella clinica di Bellevue (Kreuzlingen), allora diretta da Ludwig Binswanger, debba essere considerato centrale per lo sviluppo teorico dello studioso amburghese. Piuttosto che liquidare come lungo momento di buio gli anni della malattia, si è ritenuto utile riflettere sulle connessioni tra l’esperienza e l’attitudine esistenziale di Warburg e gli sviluppi della sua ricerca. Prendendo in esame la celebre conferenza sul rituale del serpente (A lecture on Serpent Ritual) che lo storico dell’arte tedesco tenne nel 1923 a Kreuzlingen, con il consenso di Binswanger, per attestare la sua guarigione davanti a un pubblico di medici e pazienti, ci si imbatte infatti in un concetto che diviene centrale per attraversare la produzione frammentaria e asistematica warburghiana. Se infatti il tema del Denkraum der Besonnenheit, compare per la prima volta nel 1920 (Divinazione antica pagana in testi ed immagini dell’età di Lutero), soltanto nella conferenza sul serpente prenderà le sembianze di un processo dialettico - al contempo metodologico, scientifico e terapeutico - che tiene insieme e rielabora costantemente le polarità costitutive dell’essere umano. Il primo capitolo presenta l’autore all’interno della sua cornice storico-teorica, mettendo in evidenza le nefaste ricadute che ebbe lo scoppio della Prima Guerra Mondiale sulle certezze scientifiche e metodologiche di Warburg, sul suo rapporto privilegiato con l’Italia e l’arte rinascimentale e sulla sua passione per la migrazione storica, geografica e simbolica del sapere. In quello che si lascia definire come percorso di autoguarigione, Ludwig Binswanger ebbe senza dubbio un ruolo determinante, introducendo il suo paziente, da sempre ossessionato dalla distanza conoscitiva tra soggetto e oggetto, al metodo fenomenologico in occasione della conferenza del 1922 (Sulla fenomenologia; Über Phänomenologie) alla quale Warburg fu invitato ad assistere. Il secondo capitolo è una disamina accurata delle ricorrenze del Denkraum der Besonnenheit negli scritti dello studioso amburghese per seguire le mutazioni sostanziali che la locuzione subì dopo la permanenza a Kreuzlingen. Analizzando l’etimologia greca di Besonnenheit, sophrosyne, si coglie l’essenza della proposta warburghiana che, in linea con la prospettiva herderiana, riprende il significato della parola greca al momento della sua nascita, quando mostra un legame intrinseco tra corpo e intelletto che subito perderà fino a simboleggiare l’esatto opposto, la volontà umana di dominare le passioni con la forza della ragione. Il terzo capitolo è dedicato alla dimensione temporale della dialettica del Denkraum all’interno dell’ultima, incompiuta opera di Warburg, l’atlante Mnemosyne, che nasce proprio dall’esigenza di tematizzare un paradigma evolutivo delle forme simboliche (storiche/artistiche/antropologiche) alternativo a una concezione di progresso lineare e unidirezionale. Lo sviluppo spazio-temporale delle forme simboliche è caratterizzato da uno sviluppo discontinuo soggetto alla regressione, la dimensione in cui l’acquisizione di nuove funzioni vitali può avvenire soltanto tramite la scomparsa di elementi preesistenti. I pannelli introduttivi A (orientamento), B (microcosmo/macrocosmo) e C (progresso tecnico) risultano emblematici sia nel convogliare la costellazione concettuale presa in esame nel corso della trattazione, sia nell’illustrare il funzionamento del modello di “evoluzione regressiva”, una dialettica tesa tra il guadagno e la perdita che non ha esclusivamente matrici umanistiche ma si inserisce nel vivo confronto tra biologia e scienze dello spirito, grazie al quale Warburg si confronterà proficuamente con le teorie di Darwin ed Haeckel.

In 1895 Aby Warburg decides to complement his theoretical research with field anthropological observation, directly experiencing habits, rituals and customs of the Hopi natives. Warburg meticulously documents his journey with his Box Camera Kodak, one of the first devices ever produced by the firm. Within the theoretical framework of unitary knowledge, that is a space of integration between different methods and disciplines, his choice of expressive media offers the opportunity to explore and experiment its peculiar potential. His interest in technique is combined with a non-formalistic aesthetic stance, according to which art coincides with a specifically hum biological need. It is then a true device for space/time orientation, the pulsating hub of the symbolic polarity oscillating between Nachleben and Pathosformel.

Sullo sfondo di un mondo che viaggia verso l’anonimato e l’astrazione come distanza dalla realtà, la vita di Boonmee, l’agricoltore e apicoltore protagonista del film di Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2010), è al contrario permeata da un legame magico e ancestrale, e insieme semplice e concreto, tra esseri umani, animali e tutti gli elementi presenti in natura. Il tempo che scandisce gli ultimi giorni dell’apicoltore afflitto da una grave malattia è infatti quello circolare del rito, della gestualità e della reiterazione in grado di demolire e costruire gli spazi simbolici del reale. In a modern world of anonymity and distance from reality, the life of Boonmee, the protagonist of Apichatpong Weerasethakuls film (2010), is on the contrary based on a magic and ancestral bond between man, animals and nature. The circular time of the rite marks the last days of Bonmee, who is affected by an incurable desease. This time of gesture and reiteration is able to destroy and reenact the symbolic reality.

Agnès Varda ripercorre la sua vita raccontando l’intreccio inscindibile tra set cinematografico e vita quotidiana all’interno del quale l’incontro con persone, luoghi e oggetti scandisce il ritmo stesso dell’esperienza. Sfondo privilegiato sono le spiagge del sud della Francia, scenario reale della crescita della regista belga che al contempo incarna emblematicamente l’attitudine vardiana all’esplorazione e alla “spigolatura” come raccolta di quel materiale che la società dei consumi velocemente dismette. Agnès Varda retraces her life recounting the overlap between the film set and the everyday life. Meeting people, place and things beats the time of the authentic experience. For the Belgian director South France’s beaches are the landscapes of her growth and at the same time they emblematically embody Varda’s attitude to exploring and collecting what usually the consuming society puts away.

Si può ritenere questo testo una proposta concettuale che si sviluppa parallelamente alla carriera accademica dell'autrice perché costituisce la rielaborazione di un nucleo teorico che, per esigenze di ricerca dottorale, era stato messo in sordina in attesa di un recupero o una riscoperta. Il saggio, impostato secondo il tradizionale accostamento di temi filosofici alla produzione di celebri registi tanto caro alla produzione dei Cahiers du Cinéma, viene proposto come possibile primo passo di una riflessione a puntate sulle tematiche inerenti il cinema e la filosofia della percezione.

Nel 1895 Aby Warburg decide di affiancare allo ricerca teorica l’osservazione antropologica sul campo, facendo esperienza diretta di usi, riti e costumi degli indiani Hopi. Lo studioso amburghese documenta meticolosamente il suo viaggio portando con sé una Box Camera Kodak, uno dei primi apparecchi prodotti dalla casa. All’interno di una visione del sapere unitario, spazio di dialogo e integrazione tra metodi e discipline differenti, la scelta del mezzo espressivo diventa un modo per esplorarne e sperimentarne le potenzialità peculiari. L’interesse per la tecnica si sposa con una concezione estetica non formalistica, secondo la quale l’arte coincide con una necessità biologica specificatamente umana. Essa è un vero e proprio dispositivo di orientamento spazio/temporale, fulcro pulsante della polarità simbolica che oscilla tra Nachleben e Pathosformel. I caratteri dell’immagine divengono in questo senso strumento capace di dare forma ed espressione alla vitalità dell’uomo e al suo sviluppo storico.

‘The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture.’ Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement This symposium takes the planetary ecological crisis as an urgent occasion to reflect on the history and politics of taste. Talk of taste today is considered outmoded, if not suspect. But is this not itself suspect in the ongoing Great Acceleration, a period defined since the 1950s by excesses of consumption and corresponding disruptions to the earth? In the context of the contemporary ecological crisis, examination of the implicit relation between taste and consumption seems all the more pressing. To what extent has the Great Acceleration been propelled by taste? What might such a question contribute to understanding these twin crises of climate and culture? Attending to taste in the Great Acceleration involves analyzing the proliferation and the allure of certain aesthetic forms, materials, and attitudes – as well as the obfuscation of the associated production of waste. And it means revisiting historical debates since the 1950s in aesthetic theory and culture critique for their blindspots and evasions as much as for their insights. Might reflection on the politics of taste indicate an intersection of affective embodied experience with the ostensibly more abstract categories of cosmopolitan politics, the global economy, and planetary ecology? Is there an alternative sensus communis to the rampant consumerism that has driven the Great Acceleration and that can no longer be dismissed as mere bad taste? Bad Taste?: Culture and Consumption in the Great Acceleration, symposium, ICI Berlin, 17 June 2022

Tracing the complex history of the term ‘reenactment’, back to R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history, on the one hand, and popular practices of war reenactments and living history museums, on the other, a survey of its current contribution in art and museum practices highlights the importance of historicity — a category the postmodern was supposed to have vacated — in a wide range of examples, from Rod Dickinson and Jeremey Deller to Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmuş, and Milo Rau. Performance reenactments, in particular, are premised on performance art having become historical, but also threaten to digest history in favour of a mere productivist mobilization for the needs of current attention economies. An alternative could be the attempt to counter historical with dramatic time in order to unlock unrealized possibilities and futures, as the term preenactment promises.

Another Screen together with ICI Berlin presents two rarely exhibited films on hands and their place in relation to fate, work, pleasure, touch, and surveillance: Maria Lassnig’s Palmistry (1974) and Ayesha Hameed’s A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) (2015). These two short films are accompanied by a transcribed roundtable discussion, which includes a number of voices: Rachel Aumiller, Sam Dolbear, Nadine El-Enany, Amelia Groom, Clio Nicastro, Daniella Shreir, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, and M. Ty. Hands Tied is programmed as part of Sam Dolbear’s ICI project ‘Cosmic Reductions: Palms, Fate, Body, Character’, which has a newsletter available for subscription here. Further documentation on another-screen.com Hands Tied, screening, An Another Screen, 2–18 April 2021