FEELER GAUGE FESTIVAL
BLOCK 6 FLY
PROGRAMMERS' NOTES: Spirits soar in these five films, in celebration, conviction, meditation and/or hope.
Isaiah celebrates memories and possibilities in a jubilant earworm about flying saucers and visionary Black explorers, and Rachel also celebrates art, championing it as a powerful advocacy tool while generously educating us about the need for vastly greater opportunities in higher education for people with Down syndrome.
In a more subdued meditation on sustainability of land use in Bakersfield, California, Fabian's soaring yet yoked balloon evokes myriad tensions between the possible and impossible.
Razan's lush film echoes Fabian's meditation, this time in Kuwait; juxtaposing bridal rituals promoting personal health and fortune with desolate landscapes, and modifying a ritual to include the planting of seeds, she conjures the rejuvenation of land through gestures of (self) care.
Finally, Jennie closes out the festival with a kinetic sculpture that sets feeler gauge blades aloft.
Total run time: 21:53 mins
Image: Rachel Handlin, 15 Grains of Sand (film still)
Double Trouble Mop Head is a short animated video poem written by Elias Ferguson (aka H.E.Z.Y.) reminiscing his childhood days shared with his older brother, Isaiah.
The filmmaker explores her experience as one of only a dozen people with Down syndrome in the world to have earned a college degree, and how art can help rectify that.
bIg rEd bAll is an excerpt of a work in progress. This short in whole or in part serves to act as a catalyst for dialogue on land use practice and sustainability. When there are more homes than farms, what will horses do? I, myself, do not like the taste of sheetrock.
Seeds After Black Gold is a short film created in Kuwait, illustrating several rituals traditionally practiced by Shia women preparing for an Islamic marriage. The rituals are then lifted from the context of a wedding and displaced into spaces unbound by time or resolution.
A feeler gauge's poetry lies both in its name and the ability of its fingers to slip into spaces that are generally overlooked or seemingly flush, like the sliver of a gap between a table and its legs or a window and its frame. The tool embodies these liminal, subtle, unseen, and unarticulated spaces (or feelings) and provides notation for them.
Roland Barthes' "twinklings" of the Neutral – flashes and figures outside of binary or oppositional paradigms – are liminal cracks, fissures or portals as well. Here, in a nod to these playful twinklings or figures, fingers of a feeler gauge are freed to fly. (Cyanotypes of the feeler gauge variously fanned or folded also gesture toward these twinklings, while the audio comprises the figures’ whispered names slowed down to expand the slices of space they occupy.)
If feeler gauge fingers can break free from their case, and as subjects rather than objects feel expansion and joy, how might we retool or reimagine our own embodiments, configurations and expressions of "solutions" or "liberation?"