Casting Our Kino-Eyes Over the Collective Horizon

The Post Collective is an autonomous platform of co-creation, co-learning, and cultural activism, located between Ghent and Brussels in Belgium. It is created by Mahammed Alimu, Marcus Bergner, Hooman Jalidi, Sawsan Maher, Mirra Markhaëva, and Elli Vassalou: artists with different means and access to artistic production due to their legal status (refugees, asylum seekers, sans-papiers, documented citizens). Generative modes of kinship, solidarity, dialogue, and storytelling form the basis of their speculative and experiential approaches to art and design. Since 2020, in collaboration with Robin Vanbesien, The Post Film Collective elaborates on the work and experiences of The Post Collective in the realm of cinema.

Soon after, we started to produce various ciné-pieces, always with a horizontal collectivist approach: seven directors, seven scenarists, seven camera operators, and seven performers. In these last months, Mahammed Alimu and Hooman Jalidi couldn’t commit to the collective any longer. The rest of us found ourselves geographically apart, and we had to find other ways of co-creation while in long-distance kinship. It reminded us how, in the very first place, cinema is a work of imagination (without a need for a lens or a screen). And it inspired us to see our correspondence with ourselves as a process of filmmaking: a series of thoughts, calls, and responses that slowly and visually structure our collective imagination. Our methodology for this piece was simultaneously sending emails to each other, using each letter as a possible beginning. We posed questions such as: How do you stay a collective while being physically apart? What makes a collective? And how does the notion of trust play into all of this?

After reading, we replied to one another, creating an archive that spirals an abundance of relations, feelings, and desires.

From the very beginning of our creation process, we understood that we had to start defining our own conditions and working methods. Each of us is completely autonomous in what we create for each other. Our process is a mature dialogue based on trust in each other's expertise, judgment, and creativity. From this perspective, I share with you all this practical survival recipe for forming a collective in war/crisis/uncertain times:

1. First of all, I'm taking for granted that I already have my friends. This recipe will not teach you how to bring people together or how to start a collective.

2. So this recipe is for those who are already in a collective and want to keep it alive.

Trust is central to this recipe. I will give a brief description of each of the ingredients here.

Trust

T = Treat your peers as you like to be treated; train yourself to see the beauty and uniqueness of your collectiveness.

R = Readiness to share your story and care for your friends’ stories, with an active sense of responsibility towards all the wounds you will come across. Reduce egotism, “negativity,” and fear.

U = Use your resources, connections, survival techniques, and creativity to provide and maintain your togetherness.

S = Security from one’s traumas and keeping triggers far away, provided by the care of the collective.    

T = Time together: each meeting is a miracle, and you need to consciously appreciate that miracle.

I trust those who care to check in with the pain they have.

Dear POFCO,

Over the last few years, we have done lots of things together, but we have not as yet, as I see it, made a truly collective film. This is where we are all equally the director, performer, and editor, and share all the other aspects of making the film. The closest we have come to this was when six of us decided to set out into the streets of Aalst with one Super-8 film camera and one roll of film to make a film together. We had an hour, which meant editing in-camera and dividing the three minutes of the film reel six ways as we filmed. Like a strange twelve-legged and twelve-armed insect, we meandered along the street in close proximity to each other, handing the camera back and forth, so each could film in relation to what we saw and how we imagined constructing the film on the spot. Dividing the time equally was the most difficult aspect to figure out, as we had to measure time while filming. We were joined together through the one kino-eye in the same moment and the same place. As an experiment, it was valuable in terms of indicating ways to approach collective filmmaking and something that we could build upon. It was as if we were making improvised music together. There was palpable solidarity in terms of recognizing and drawing from instants of individual and collective spontaneity, as well as curiosity, that became cinematic elements well beyond anything we had previously discussed or thought about in terms of what a film might be.

After all that we have experienced together, we know each other quite well and have built a good sense of trust. But there are things I think we should investigate much further. For instance, we should continue to rethink the whole idea of film production, so that it becomes a more inclusive and open-ended artistic/social event—both for the film viewer and filmmaker, which is linked to the big question of how might film become a force for societal change. We also might continue investigating the role that “the inner voice” has in film (as opposed to voiceover) with all its qualities of cacophony and poetry in terms of building polyphonic film moments. Also, I feel strongly about recognizing and celebrating the implicit as well as explicit role that anarchy holds within the making of our film and within the collective generally (Germaine Dulac and Jean Vigo are early cinematic precursors in this). This means radically breaking from all the usual hierarchies and constraints that accompany or shape most film productions.

Presently I am a long way away from each of you. Every day I stand in the ocean up to my chin and observe in a concentrated, and cinematic way, the surface of the water with all its different gelatinous and dancelike patterns. Soon I will be back in Belgium and look forward to us combining our imaginations and aspirations by casting our kino-eyes over the collective horizon.

In solidarity,

Marcus

Dear oh dear PoFCos,

The sun is shining today over the Flemish landscape and my internal plant is harvesting as much sunlight as it can get to grow stronger. Our film ReRooting is an experiment that is also a collective endeavour.

After our experience in filmmaking in Aalst and Ghent, we wanted to experiment with the idea of what it would mean to film together outside of a city and a structured artistic residency. What different imaginary and memories would rise to the surface, by situating ourselves in a rural space? What new form of imagery would be brought by finding our joy in nature, which is different than staying in a white cube structure and having a production-oriented day plan?

We brought with us the tool of rerooting, borrowed by another collective in kinship: Conciencia Afro.11In the seminar “(Un)SCREWING CARE,” The Post Collective was given the tool of ReRooting by the Spanish collective Conciencia Afro. “(Un)SCREWING CARE” was part of Catalizadoras [Catalysts] initiated by Te( n ) cuidado, a collective action research group, which promoted collaboration between six organizations and cultural collectives based in Spain and Belgium with the objective of sharing tools for care both as principle and as method of resilience and resistance in the current cultural and socio-political context. https://tencuidado.org/en/actividades/unscrewing-care-seminar This tool, or rather, this intention, is an invitation on building community, based on the relationship with our ancestors, with the "self," the earth, and with other beings surrounding us.

We plant ourselves in this new land, we grow films between us, and we build networks of trust, of resources, of safety. The films we share and create together are our own private universe of myths and kinship.

The collective is here to witness, empower, and support each person's situation. With our cine-gaze, our liminal financial resources, with our love and sisterhood.

Sometimes I wonder if this is contributing to creating a more inclusive world for all, or is it just a self-made extraction? We fight every day to be together, to not leave anyone behind, but so often we fail... so often we fall into despair.

But film, the “best” edited versions of our joyous, meaningful, collective worldmaking, brings back this mythical memory of being, growing, playing, loving, and rooting together.

💓 I love you all so very much 💓

Elli

My answer. (Not a direct answer, but an answer)

Our films are a deep emotional need. The making of our films unfolds in the creation of a social space where having fun, experiencing joy, paying attention, caring for each other is really important. The making of a film cannot be separated from these circumstances and conditions, and the message of the work is therefore inseparable from its making. In practice, this means that the films show and explore their own process of making.

Our films begin with a claim to the right to make a film, a claim to worldmaking. In cinema, the notion of worldmaking is sometimes used to refer to the way in which the medium can create an immersive, fictional universe. Here, in our practice, we understand worldmaking as the transformation of the world through a transformation of our representational practices. The making of our films helps us to rethink the ways, modes, grounds and soils with which we do things. It is a speculative activity. It's a rehearsal. We are rehearsing the capacity to hold space for each other. To use Trinh T. Minh-ha's words, we "speak nearby" to each other, leaving possible gaps between us, leaving the space of representation open, for us, and for the spectator (just as it is performed in this email thread). During the making of a film, we rehearse different forms/methods that rethink our relationships to time and space, as well as the bodies that inhabit these spaces. What we film is not this or that, but what surrounds it, what it does, how it speaks to what we don't know, and how it rethinks/reframes what we think we know.

“Casting our kino-eyes over the collective horizon,” you used this phrase in your first letter Marcus. It created an image in my head: all of us being in the sea with you, our Aussie brother. Our kino-eyes and bodies are present for each other, caring, and loving—in solidarity.

But where do they look?

Do they look at the same horizon? Some of them look at the seashore, worrying about border controls, some of them are diving deep, looking for ways to keep us safe(r), and some of them are just struggling to float.

Is it where we look that makes us a collective or is it the fact that our eyes are witnessing + confiding each other’s gaze, composing and transforming it, celebrating it into a transindividual manifestation of, as Sawsan said, the miracle of being together?

Waiting for the miracle to happen again soon,

Elli

Dear All,

The casting of kino-eyes towards the collective horizon might be seen in terms of what Gadamer calls the fusion of horizons.22Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). With each of us from such different backgrounds, it is not possible to remove ourselves from our background, as we look for ways to understand each other in dialogue and via our different perspectives, stories, and inner visions. And then there is a fusion of "horizons" that first takes place between speaker and listeners and maybe between filmmaker and viewer. But braiding, instead of a fusion of horizons; this cinematically could be our way forward.

Braiding: assembling and disassembling stories that go in circles, that leak and fuse in unexpected ways, spiralling out of control into chaotic and poetic entanglements.

Hugs and solidarity,

Marcus