Art & … An Anthropology of The Otherwise

Screening and conversation with Ana Vaz and Elizabeth Povinelli

April 21, 2016 at 7pm

Join Triangle artist-in-residence Ana Vaz for an intimate discussion with renowned anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli. Both will share films they have made, weaving a rich dialogue about affectivity, ecological crisis and fiction through images, sounds and words.

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films and expanded works speculate upon the relationships between self and other, myth and history through a cosmology of signs, references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the frictions and fictions imprinted upon natural and built environments and its multiple inhabitants. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy Studio National, Ana was also a member of SPEAP (School of Political Arts), a project conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings include the New York Film Festival – Projections, TIFF Wavelenghts, CPH:DOX, Videobrasil and Lux Salon. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work. Vaz is in residence at Triangle from March–May 2016.  

Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the co-director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of numerous books and essays and a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture. Povinelli’s work focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This task is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory and grounded in the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms.