COMBAT BREATHING: INSURGENT POIESIS

A curated film program that treats moving images as tools for political struggle and poetic invention. Six contemporary artists—Tony Cokes, Filipa César, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Shiva Addanki, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Camila Galaz—present works rooted in anti-imperialist thought, from the PAIGC's anti-colonial fight in Guinea-Bissau to Palestinian resistance, Maoist insurgency in India, Mexico's neoliberal violence, and Chile's 2019 uprising. The program opens with the recognition that all art is ideologically conditioned, and these films model how form and content become inseparable in the service of collective liberation.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Palestinian artists based in Berlin, contribute an audiovisual poem that loops Israeli military surveillance footage of a 14-year-old killed while picking edible plants near Hebron, layering poetic verses and scenes of Palestinian resistance. Filipa César, a Portuguese filmmaker, reconstructs the memory of PAIGC's liberated zones through archival documents and testimony from Swedish witnesses to the 1970s anti-colonial struggle. Camila Galaz, a Chilean filmmaker, returns to a 1986 French documentary on MAPU Lautaro—a left-wing armed group that resisted Pinochet—binding her father's political history to the 2019 uprising through newly filmed material and choreographic scores.

The screening runs approximately 95 minutes and is followed by a conversation with the artists and curator Adam HajYahia. Tickets are required; purchase online.