Elemental Cinema brings together collaborative film works by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. The artists are developing a series of films that are guided by the four elements – water, earth, fire, air – to reimagine knowledge and existence “otherwise.” As experiments in the way of thinking of the world, the works consider the potential of a world without time, measurement or notions of value, where humans are just one part of our global understanding of existence. Through their films, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman question how structures of power in western knowledge perpetuate categorizations of difference that create rifts between humans, the more-than-human, the earth and the cosmos.

These sources include texts by Denise Ferreira da Silva, artist interviews, reviews and supplemental material about works in the exhibition, as well as writings on the elements and archives.

Writing by Denise Ferreira da Silva

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Heat,” Canadian Art, October 29, 2018.
Ferreira da Silva considers how heat not only displaces notions of human-centred time and progression, but reorients towards material transformation as a way of thinking through the world. In particular, she outlines how heat is both a measurement of kinetic energy brought about from extraction, and a guide for how the colonial, racial and capital are deeply implicated with each other.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” in 32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo: Incertza Viva, eds. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 57-65.
Rather than viewing the world as ordered and made of many distinct parts, Ferreira da Silva instead proposes thinking of the world as Plenum, or an infinite composition of entities that are each expressions of all other entities. This entanglement opens avenues for reconsidering sociality and difference without assuming separability, determinacy and sequentiality.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 81-97.
Exposing the ways Western modes of reflection, recognition and subjecthood are entwined with the expropriation of slave labour and native lands, Ferreira da Silva expands on the redress entailed through decolonization and a necessary unthinking of the world as part of this process. Instead, working through considerations of the world as Plenum, she proposes a Black Feminist Poethics that transverses time and space, virtuality and reality, all against conceptions of the subject in Western thought.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Fractal Thinking,” Accessions no. 2 (2016).
Touching on interpretations of colonial and racial violence by thinkers including Marx, Badiou and Žižek, Ferreira da Silva proposes a kind of thinking – poethical or compositional thinking – that reframes the relationship between colonial and racial subjugation and global capital. She goes on highlight the ways poethical thought, through attention to symmetries and the fractal, can disrupt repetitive patterns of violence emerging from the foundation of global capital.

Writing on works in the exhibition

Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, “Serpent Rain,” introduced by Margarida Mendes, Vdrome (2016).
In this conversation, the artists discuss the way they came to collaborate on Serpent Rain, and some of the key questions that guide their collaborative process – in particular how to make a film without time. Touching on intersections between landscape, the sinking of a Norwegian slave ship, and peri-acoustics, they consider the ways experimentation and the act of questioning resonate throughout their three collaborative films.

Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy, correspondence between the artists introduced by Steffanie Ling, Gallery TPW (2019).
This series of correspondences between Ferreira da Silva and Neuman details the working process behind the making of 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy, and highlights the ways some of the film footage developed through considerations of the elements, histories and ongoing realities of the ocean and island geographies involved.

Johnny Rodger, “Sugar and Soot and All Things Moot: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman @ CCA,” The Drouth, July 5, 2021.
In this review, Rodger discusses the resonance of Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum with the ongoing urgency and crisis of climate change, and how the work proposes thinking on climate change differently through new materialisms, intimacies and Blackness.

Other sources

“Plattform: Serpent Rain: Talk and Film Screening,” Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, 2021.
In this film screening and discussion, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman discuss the making of Serpent Rain, which was initially a commission for the Bergen Assembly. Approaching the work as an experiment, the artists discuss intersections between the elements, slave labour and attempts to make a film without time.

Sasha Englemann and Derek McCormack. “Elemental Worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies,” Progress in Human Geography 45, no. 6 (2021): 1419-39.
Engelmann and McCormack outline ways the elements have garnered a renewed interest across disciplines, and how the elements – in their resistance towards reduction – traverse ways of knowing and being. Considering what is at stake in thinking with the elements, the authors explore the limits and possibilities of elemental thought.

Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever” (1995) and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” (1986), in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether, (London and Campbridge, MA: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006).
This edited anthology highlights interests in, and resonances between, the archive and contemporary visual art practice. The highlighted portions include a text by Derrida that examines the archival impulse in relation to Freud’s death drive, while Sekula’s writing considers the relationship between the archive, authority and photography.

The archives presented at the Belkin are related to 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy and Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum and expand the films through texts, audio, video interviews and other media. These sources delve further into subjecthood, identity politics and representation in cultural practice to form additional facets of interface for myriad ways of thinking of and acting in the world. When presented at CCA Glasgow, the artists compiled a corresponding online archive for Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum that can be accessed here.

Image (above): Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (still), 2020.