Economies of Love. Part 3: Sensing Body

Economies of Love. Part 3: Sensing Body

Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi, In a Nearby Field (still), 2023.
 

Economies of Love

Economies of Love. Part 3: Sensing Body

Admission:
General $10
Student $7

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Date
May 29, 2025, 7pm
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172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

Economies of Love continues with its third installment, “Sensing Body,” presenting the New York premiere of Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi’s In a Nearby Field (2023, 18 minutes), alongside Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993, 76 minutes), on Thursday, May 29 at 7pm at e-flux Screening Room.

This screening considers how film gives form to embodied experience—through image or its absence, through rhythm, sound, and the sense of duration. In Blue, made as he was losing his sight to AIDS-related illness, Jarman dispenses with the image altogether, composing a monochrome field of International Klein Blue over which voice and sound trace the contours of his body in decline. The film’s visual austerity intensifies sensory perception, transforming the screen into a space for imagining the limits of one’s bodily connection to others. In a Nearby Field, by contrast, is filmed from within daily life: created with their young daughter, Ebel and Lertxundi integrate domestic actions—learning, naming, holding—into the act of filmmaking that itself appears as part of the broader web of life. Whether in voicing what’s impermanent, or in imaging saturated entanglements, both films present a distinct way of giving form to the sense of body: one suspended at the threshold of disappearance, the other filled with the presence of becoming. 

Economies of Love is a series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures. You can view more information along with the archive of the previous screenings here

Films

Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi, In a Nearby Field (2023, 18 minutes)
A man, a woman and their young daughter live together in an apartment in the Basque Country. Domestic chores and everyday gestures are superimposed onto lush, green landscapes. The filmmakers and their stand-ins reinterpret fragments of a diary. Music fills the house while children’s drawings come to life. Combining quiet observation and moments of fantasy, In a Nearby Field is a film about support, heredity, and the invisible little labors which sustain us.

“This film unfolded from our interest in what the American artist Merle Laderman Ukeles identified as “Maintenance Art”—an art contrary to notions of individuality, destruction, and the avant-garde, which might instead reflect the daily maintenance of our species, invisible and endless tasks, equilibrium, and what Ukeles called “The Life Instinct.” As artists, partners and parents of a child, we wanted to see what would happen if we fully integrated the mak-ing of a film with our daily life, using everyday routines, objects and gestures as material for the film. In a Nearby Field is the result of that experiment.”
- Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi

Derek Jarman, Blue (1993, 76 minutes)
A bold contribution to New Queer Cinema, Derek Jarman’s final film is a devastating rumination on color, the void, and AIDS. Formally, the film is starkly experimental—an unchanging shot of the color blue paired with a musical soundtrack and voice-over spoken by Jarman and collaborators Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, and John Quentin. The narration merges diaristic reflections on Jarman’s disease and impending death with poetic meditations on the meanings associated with the color blue. A monochromatic film, Blue was initially inspired by the work of Yves Klein but morphed after Jarman’s diagnosis with AIDS in 1986, instead becoming about sightlessness, with the screen’s color mimicking the hue that his vision took on as it faded. Blue is a visceral cinematic experience like no other and remains a fiercely vital piece of cinema to this day. 

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.

Category
Film
Subject
Experimental Film, Video Art, Love, Care, The Body, Death, Everyday Life
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Economies of Love

Ren Ebel is an artist and writer from California. His fiction and art criticism have appeared in a variety of international publications including Frieze, Artforum, e-flux, Mousse, and X-TRA. He lives in Paris.

Laida Lertxundi is an artist living and working in Paris. Combining conceptual rigor with sensual pleasure in a process she calls Landscape Plus, her films establish parallels between landscape and the body as centers of pleasure and experience.

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was an English artist, film maker, stage designer, diarist, author and gardener. He was educated at the King’s College London and at the Slade School of Art. In 1967 Jarman exhibited his paintings in Young Contemporaries, Tate Gallery, London; Lisson Gallery, London and Fifth Biennale des Jeunes Artistes, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. Jarman worked as a set designer on Jazz Calendar, The Royal Ballet, London (1968); Don Giovanni, ENO, London Coliseum (1968) Ken Russell’s feature film The Devils (1971) and Savage Messiah (1972); The Rake’s Progress, Maggio Musicale, Firenze (1982) among others. In the early 70s Jarman began an extensive series of film works made Super 8mm followed by his first full-length feature film Sebastiane in 1975. He then went on to make a further ten feature films including Jubilee (1978); Angelic Conversation (1985); Caravaggio (1986); The Garden (1990) and Edward II (1991). His final film Blue was first shown at the Biennale Arte, Venice in 1993. Jarman also wrote several books, including the autobiographical Dancing Ledge (1984) and two volumes of memoirs, Modern Nature (1992) and At Your Own Risk (1992). Derek Jarman’s Garden, which documents the creation of his extraordinary garden at Dungeness, was published in 1995.

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