FEELER GAUGE FESTIVAL
BLOCK 1 FEEL!
PROGRAMMERS' NOTES: In these five films, we intensely feel. Each filmmaker, as the sole or central subject of her or his film, embodies and exorcises the emotional silt of solitary and collective suffering that accumulates upon daily suppression. Collectively, they reveal armors we wear or armatures we become to achieve reliable and rewarded legibility in the world's, and our own, eyes.
In concretizing slivered gaps, feeler gauge blades render both the empty or hollow and the invisible as substantive. Rosa alludes to this dual inversion in peeling off layers of clothing and washing herself in a laundry machine – her body becomes mere armature for meaning-full sheaths (at once protective and masking or erasing), while her embodied agitations remain muffled and unheard. Kensaku also finds his body stifled in a cube or architecture of race- and gender-based prejudices; when his agitation crescendos to exasperation, he, too, submerges himself in water (this time quite literally).
Haaris opts to embrace the box of race-based expectations, as well as that of the screen, in his satirical online performances of racialized trauma for profit. Freddy further objectifies his own pain, literally gauging his feelings of stress with EEG brain wave recording technology.
Hanul, finally, quiets us to a close with a sincere and courageous invitation into her personal grief.
Total run time: 58:51 mins
Image: Freddy Ruiz, Pain as Object of Perceptual Experience (film still)
Instructions: Collect the clothes you have owned for the longest time. Put on as many layers as you can and still breathe. Remove each layer, one by one. After you have removed all layers, get inside of a washing machine. When you are as far inside as possible, make washing sounds with your body as long as necessary to get clean. When you are clean, transfer yourself to a dryer. When you are as far inside as possible, make drying sounds with your body as long as necessary to get dry. When you are dry, release your fleshly laundered body from the dryer. Fold or hang yourself, and put yourself away until you are ready to be worn again.
(The instructional score for RINSE/SPIN/DRY began with a reflection on the impacts of individual and collective trauma on the body and nervous system.)
This video is a 16-minute-long work-in-progress showing of a performance project, Good Bye, by Los Angeles-based choreographer and performer, Kensaku Shinohara. Good Bye is a response to challenging socio-political questions he has formed over the last 11 years as a Japanese person living in NYC. Some of these are: Why don't people talk about racial discrimination when it is right in front of them? Why there is not a Asian Rights section at Strand Books when there is a Black Rights section? I see some heterosexual men say in public that they respect women, but when they are in private they use exploitive pornography, isn't this a contradiction of values? Good Bye is scheduled to premiere at JACK, New York in 2022.
A man pushed to extremes due to the global pandemic and 2020 political climate responds by pushing the extremes of social media content creation and his Muslim American identity. A searing observation of the internet's role in our rapidly radicalizing social norms and the confluence of exhibitionism and self harm for profit.
Is pain a physical object (condition) confined in different body locations? Or is pain a mental phenomenon, and is it only private to our subjectivity?
Accompanied by intensity, duration, and magnitude, which is only assigned to physical objects, pain generally attached itself to a particular area in the body; however, pain often is understood as a subjective experience. In other words, pain is experience per se; it only happens inside our minds. Furthermore, regardless of pain’s intensity and duration, pain is frequently associated with a positive outlook. For instance, while exercising, we usually experience agony as a triumph, yet if we wake up the next morning with such agony, then we will rush to the hospital. This experience seems open to different interpretations.
In this project, I recorded my brain waves as I performed different physical exercises; then, I transformed the collected raw data into sound and later utilized it as the soundtrack for the video/ performance. With this USB flash drive, I am attempting to transfer my subjective experience to you as an object of perception in the form of data, sounds, and pictures while I wonder if one day we might objectively feel what others feel.
[Password: genesis]
Genesis is part of Southness, a multimedia project on evolving Southern identity. I originally wanted to describe the earth's creation using Southern landscapes. Last October, my grandma passed away. As an immigrant you anticipate getting that news one day. This home movie, made in quarantine and shot on an iPhone, acknowledges her life and passing.