Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner: Trilogy

Followed by Q&A with the filmmakers

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner have been working collaboratively since 2018. Experimenting with image-making techniques and nonlinear narration, their work is driven by a series of open-ended questions about how the world has been organized historically and, crucially, how it could be otherwise. They understand moving image as a world-building tool: a way of questioning, critiquing and reconfiguring the structures of power and knowledge that influence how we perceive and therefore inhabit the world.

Their trilogy of films A Demonstration (2020), Constant (2022), and My Want of You Partakes of Me (2024), looks to histories within western science for perspectives on how models of the modern body have been constructed over time and how these continue to shape the political parameters of subjectivity. This is the first time that their trilogy of films will be shown together in full. 

Programme:

A Demonstration
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, 2020, 25 min

A Demonstration is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. A Demonstration picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.

Constant
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, 2022, 40 min

Constant is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. Constant asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.

My Want of You Partakes of Me
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, 2024, 54 min

My Want of You Partakes of Me interrogates digestion as the fundamental condition for being in the world, a process of physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and political dimensions. Multiple storylines trace the poetics of incorporation as a matter of metamorphosis and decay, the philosophy of matter and imperial conquest, industrialisation and annihilation, poetry and parenting, love and citation.

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www.sashalitvintseva.com
www.benywagner.com