Women Cinemakers meets
Pauline Batista & Madeleine Stack Live and work between London, Berlin, Rio, Brisbane, California, and Barcelona
It’s about an excavation. Of the mind, of the self. Who is colonized and who flies freely? Fly in, fly out. We’re seeking a pattern. Pattern recognition. Data mining and mining for ore, a shared language of opacity and incoherence. Travelling at great speed above the surface of the earth or penetrating the borders that block free movement. Is there a point to vision when what affects our lives most is what occurs invisibly? Waves, data, infrared, corruption, offshore banking, infection, the outsider becoming other. Who enters and who is stopped at the border? Capital flows freely while bodies stagnate, are dammed. Technology reaches obsolescence at increasing velocity, and acceleration fails to take into account the material consequences of a dream of constant progress: permanent environmental damage, an expansion of the colonial project by way of corporations, an enclosure of the commons, and an expectation of total work. Between Big Data and Big Pharma, what falls between the cracks? Here are some threads at the intersection of technology and intimacy. Specifically, where have these projects for a future failed, and what possibility is there for dreams of progress to be redeemed? Perhaps via a third way, outside of the traditional binary of progress at all costs vs a return to the land. The imagery we mine is that of defunct and obsolete technology that once heralded progress. At the end of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value comes from what was once thought of as ineffable: our personalities, habits, preferences, memories. If algorithms take the traditional role of the artist in translating and making sense of the world around us, who decides what information is filtered, which memories are stored and how the circulation of bodies and ideas flows?
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Pauline and Madeleine and welcome to : to start this interview we would like to invite our readers to visit and
in order to get a wide idea
about your artistic productions. In the meanwhile, we would ask you a couple of question about your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence your evolution as filmmakers?
Personally I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a film maker, although I do use the medium. I often think that artists’ video and moving image production is more interesting and experimental than traditional cinema in terms of techniques used, themes addressed, and viewing apparatus. But it comes with its own setbacks - if a film is shown on loop in a gallery, the viewer is free to enter and exit at any point in the narrative, and I think that makes one more aware of how the work could function as a fragment, rather than a film seen in a cinema that would most likely be seen without interruption. With the art context, you can also break away from linear rules of narrative. We studied together and so have been in conversation for many years and seen our practices develop and mature, so it