Admission:
General $10
Student $7
May 13, 2025, 7pm
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
Join us on Tuesday, May 13 at 7pm at e-flux Screening Room for “The Sun is Burning the Unspoken,” a screening of Mutable Cycles II (2024) by Joyce Joumaa alongside Seven Types of Dust (2023) and Sprouts of a Dragon’s Teeth (2023) by Danae Io. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artists, with Joumaa attending in person and Io joining remotely from Athens, moderated by Ariana Kalliga.
This event stages a dialogue between two artists who use film and video to approach infrastructure and landscape as subject to interruption and inscription by larger historical forces. Presenting films shot in Lebanon and Greece respectively, the screening does not attempt to map one context onto another. Rather, it aims to reveal the connecting threads that run through both artists’ engagements with the contemporary realities of land, agriculture, and infrastructure.
In Mutable Cycles II, Joumaa traces the mediated visibility of political struggle in Lebanon through a screen assemblage that becomes an audiovisual translation of the past. The video pairs digital shots of solar panels in Lebanon with footage from the nationwide protests of 2019 to question how images and their transmission participate in the fragmentation and framing of historical experience. Meanwhile, Io’s films focus on Thebes—a city layered with myth and characteristics of industrial decline—to explore how land registers the sedimentation of violence and bureaucracy. If Joumaa reflects on the signal as a form of interference in the production of history, Io thinks of the earth as a repository of state inscription and its repeated violence.
This screening is co-presented with CCS Bard in conjunction with the group exhibition Mutable Cycles, curated by Ariana Kalliga at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Films
Joyce Joumaa, Mutable Cycles II (2024, 11 minutes)
The film explores the influx of solar power in Lebanon following the country’s economic collapse in 2019. Tracing the scientific trajectory of the earth around the sun, the narration is a reflection on the notion of cyclicality within crises that emerged within the contemporary political history of the country.
Danae Io, Seven Types of Dust (2024, 12 minutes)
Seen through the shimmering heat haze, a group of US archaeologists are studying the plains of de-industrialized Thebes, the city of Antigone and Oedipus. The camera records the varied landscapes of the area focusing on agriculture, infrastructure, and ancient ruins while a field worker is leaving the crops after a day’s labor. The landscape scenes are overlaid with an on-screen poem on Thebes’ polluted soil and its histories of impurity and displacement.
Danae Io, Sprouts of a Dragon’s Teeth (2023, 9 minutes)
Between agricultural landscapes, industrial ruins, and an overgrown ancient theatre, insects and farm animals meander in the plains of Thebes in Greece. A group of field workers are getting ready for their lunch break. The film examines the relationship between people and land through the form of a poem on autochthony, othering, and myth.
For more information, contact program [ at ] e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program[ at ]e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.