HERMAN ASSELBERGHS & ROSI BRAIDOTTI - IN THE FUTURE PERFECT

“They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn’t understand. (Hitchcock?) As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, ‘This is where I come from…’—and falls back, exhausted. Then another wave of Time washes over him. The result of another injection perhaps. Now she is asleep in the sun. He knows that in this world to which he has just returned for a while, only to be sent back to her, she is dead.”
from Chris Marker, La Jetée

“Creative minds are thinkers of the future. The future expresses faith in our capacity to endure: it is a sustainable gesture of hope. Between the ’no longer’ and the ’not yet’, the present is always the future present: I will have made a positive difference to the world. I am rooted, but I flow.”
Rosi Braidotti

Rosi Braidotti will offer a reading of Asselberghs’s newest video piece as part of her vigorous defence of nomadic ethics against moral universalism and the charges of relativism and nihilism. In making a strong case for a non-unitary conception of the subject, she calls for a sustainable form of ethical accountability that takes ’Life’ as the subject, not the object, of enquiry.

Herman Asselberghs is a visual artist and publicist. He lectures at the film department of Hogeschool Sint-Lukas in Brussels, where he is also a staff member of the Transmedia postgraduate programme. His video works a.m./p.m. (2004), Proof of Life (2005) and Capsular (2006) were shown at, among other places, Witte de With, Rotterdam; Netwerk, Aalst; Muhka, Antwerp; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Transmediale Berlin.

Rosi Braidotti is a philosopher. She is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Utrecht University. She is author of numerous publications, including most recently, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002) and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006).

Language: EN

+ PARALLEL SCREENING in the BLACK BOX:

Herman Asselberghs (+ Spasm, Fairuz, Boris Debackere & Ko.)
Futur Antérieur (a.k.a. Disciples of the Heinous Path - Part 1: The Pain of Everyone)
single screen projection, color, stereo, 15’, 2007

an Auguste Orts film
thanks to: Pieter-Paul Mortier, Artefact, Transmedia, O.P.K., Nele Verreyken, Beursschouwburg

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