A dialogue, a conversation, is never just between two, let alone just between two people; it is between blocks of sensation, it is between images. Images that unfold through various materialities. Audiovisualities, textualities, corporealities... A dialogue, a conversation is a whole act of disposing oneself as an intersection for thought, to cross and let oneself be crossed by an idea, by a common cause... In this case, how to make life go on or in other words how to make the image be what is always to come. An idea that, on the side of the immanence of life, is called metamorphosis, but that on the side of the human is called gestures of re- existence before scenarios of extinction and extermination. An idea that here Sebastian Wiedemann and Jenny Fonseca Tovar explore and inhabit in the middle of an affirmative blackening of the thought in between-images.

Re-joining With Life Under the Sign of Obaluaye:

Some Notes on "Obatala Film" as a Cinematic Mode

of Experience in Times of Coronavirus.

by Sebastian Wiedemann

Today, more than ever, we must think of a cinema of immanence, a cinema that is not restricted to one form or place. A cinema whose process of individuation goes through the most diverse metamorphisms. A cinema that escapes from confinement and claims to be a pure affirmative potency of contagion. After all, cinema is the potency of thought of intervals, of creating continuities in discontinuities, of creating closeness between distant and disparate images that create worlds in heterogeneities. In saying this, there is no doubt that the effects of the current pandemic resonate with us. The coronavirus making itself present, the coronavirus as a pregnant image that imposes itself, and that inevitably evokes the need for a new montage theory of the world as a cinematic occasion, in which we are all involved. Cinema has never been out of us. And, of course, we may now miss going to a movie theater, but, luckily, cinema has no fixed address and it cannot be quarantined. When we understand it as a vital mode of experience in which we are inevitably submerged, more than a human manifestation, cinema is a cosmogenetic condition. Being in the world means to be in the immanence of a cosmic cinematograph. The coronavirus is not the enclosure or detention of a world, but the presence of a mutagenic agent that forces us to change the montage logics of a world, so it can continue to be claimed as multiple. Coming up with new modes of making life go on, of making cinema happen.

The cinema-form may even crumble in front of the violence of the virus, but not its forces. Will I be able to shoot a film like "Obatala Film" again, in Nigeria, in distant lands, with other bodies? I don't know. But what is certain is that just like the forces of the cosmos, the forces of cinema cannot be taken away. They escape and move forward as existential modulations in so many cinematic modes of experience. They, the forces, insist on life. And it is in this sense that I want to return to "Obatala Film", not as a nostalgic gesture of remembering the achievement: making films as the tangible encounter between bodies. There is no time for melancholy when there is a call to continue affirming life! It's not about going back, but about making that film continue by other means. "Obatala Film" was a gesture of getting together, of intensifying the encounter with the Orishas, with the Yoruba deities, and of composing oneself with a spiritual and immaterial plane of thought. A gesture of making visible the invisible, of giving flow to the ashe, the vital forces of Oshun —orisha of fertility and motherhood and Obatala —orisha of creation and creativity. And now, all of a sudden, we are facing this pregnant image, the coronavirus, which is equally invisible as the orishas, but which becomes visible as a death effect in the bodies. An image that sometimes eclipses, sometimes changes the trajectory of a certain stagnant existential montage that is claimed to be habit and not transmutation and renewal of life by other means. And let us not forget that death is not the end of life, but a continuation of it by other means. Thus, returning to "Obatala Film" as an affirmation of memories of future in times of coronavirus, is to look again and affirm its potency under the sign of Obaluaye —the orisha of epidemics, pandemics, lord of the land that takes and gives life, that makes one sick, but that also heals. Conditions that say much less about a moral and much more about the transformational processes of the world, and that keep it open and in constant formation, and where the forces of Oshun and Obatala continue to act.

Many might believe the world stops. However, in conjunction with the coronavirus and Obaluaye, it continues to affirm itself, only this time making it clear that the human-form has never been and will never be the center of creation or the center of the metamorphisms of life. Humans, as well as the virus, are nothing more than vehicles for the modes of experience, always cinematic, to go on. The experience, like the plane in which life affirms itself and unfolds as it comes from the cosmos, does not belong to someone, but in any case, the bodies belong to it. This writing, in fact, belongs to it and in turn, it is a mode of appearing of the cosmic cinematograph that in the will to reclaim "Obatala Film", what aspires is to perform the enacting of a counter-spell gesture where a montage logic of worlds and of the film itself as a manifestation of the world, are reinvented. In other words, to make continue "Obatala Film" along these lines as a rewriting and a re-editing, this time implying the presence of a pregnant image that must become our ally, as well as the forces of Obaluaye, under which Oshun and Obatala are modulated. A new cinematic and cosmic ecology is instituted, one in which the proximity and distance between images can change, and in which intervals can be other, making unthinkable and event-images emerge. A critical and precarious montage, also vulnerable and fragile and that, particularly, conjures up any desire to make the pregnant image a trauma-image that cloisters us in the repetition of the same and that, on the contrary, transmutes it and transvalues it into repetition that opens space and time for the difference. A kind of montage-at-a-distance in the style of Artavazd Peleshian. A montage of distancing, which promotes new spatialities and temporalities, as well as interstices to existence.

The potency of the hiatus, of abysmating in the intervals, where the discontinuities open new beginnings of worlds because of their wideness. In this variation of "Obatala Film" on paper, in the unfolding of these lines and not on Super 8mm film, the rhythm still remains first, as the primordial vibration that emerges from the intervals and sustains the point of view of creation, the pure differentiating potency latent even in the void of silence, that which opens in the presence of Obaluaye. The vertigo of the waters of Oshun, as well as of entering in relation with the luminous potency of Obatala —creator of light— and which overflows the bodies, would be different. Obatala as a rain of sparks of light, and Oshun as a wateriness and a fertile current of life, in the presence and under the sign of Obaluaye entering into a process of slowdown, of slowness, of deceleration in which another perception of details is opened, in which the trance with the world as a possibility of spiritual connection ceases to happen, because it goes too fast and, on the contrary, is opened because it goes too slowly, which is no more than the infinite speed where life and death become indiscernible. Obaluaye opening a cinema, even if as speculation on these lines, which escapes the human perception of what is alive or not, because it is so alive that it is beyond the thresholds that we can measure with our poor perception. Let us not forget that behind every cut there is a continuity, there is life as infinite variation, there is an existential continuum beyond the life-death poles.

To continue writing and editing "Obatala Film" from Obaluaye's hand is to welcome the fact that the pregnant image can present itself as a un-editing force or if you want as a montage of impermanence. This is the counter-spell! A joyful state of catastrophe where the cosmic cinematograph makes the cuts, explicit occasions of crumbling creation. Vertigo, disfiguring, erasing, and blurring of images, for they are always beginning, starting. Re-starts, left behind ephemeral lives while others begin. Obaluaye making the beginning of the images last between the thresholds of getting sick and healing them. That is the affirmation of the pharmacological condition of the images. They like this Pharmakon that heals or kills. A whole question of dosage. The measure of the virus that asks for the writing to become delirious as potency of thought of a whole living world, of an animist pluriverse as a multidimensional montage that resists the eclipse of a pregnant image. The film of a mystical afro-futurism as a speculative fabulation that distances itself from all dualism. We are, because we are this writing, because this writing is the emergence of this other film as futurity in the present that palpitates in us.

So I close my eyes and start writing this infinite film that is projected on the screen that is my brain. This film in which I am, we are written by images, in which there is no longer a brain that can be called mine, but which is an impersonal world-brain as pure experience of the cosmos in constant opening and birth. Obaluaye drags me, takes me, makes me fall purely. He tells me: embrace death if what you want is to embrace life. Come with me, affirm my sign, be the renewal of the earth. I could believe I'm dying, falling into the void. This free fall in which worlds are blossoming and others are falling apart. Little sighs of the world and the fall... beloved fall is made even more vertiginous, a clandestine celebration of the fugacity of a breath that is extinguished and opens... and opens life again. Oshun is thrown upon me, upon the world, embraces it. All bodies, all infinitely fertile, always infinitely fertile. Now they remember in their innards and in the blood of the sacred feminine forces that give birth to them, that they are rain. Rain of light, flying sparks of Obatala. Sparks which are the bodies themselves involving each other like luminous rivers in all directions. The fall advances, images in trance, in vertigo of lesser adherence and greater abstraction. Precipitation! More than human eyes affirming the cinematic creation of the cosmos. On one side an infinite and immeasurable interval between the images of two worlds. The eternal night where Obaluaye sleeps and the infinite day that detaches itself from its dreams. On the other side, a whirlwind that does not let the fall finish. This, an impossible film, only perhaps inferable in these lines as an ascending spiral between heaven and earth, for the Yoruba people, between Orun and Aiye, as an unthinkable rejoining with life.

An "Obatala Film" that continues to affirm itself here beyond the film-form, for precisely insisting on its force of film-occasion. Proliferating as variation and divergence, as difference. It cannot be reproduced, as if it were projecting the same film over and over again in a movie theater, but it continues to be deeply productive, because in movement, even on paper and by other means, always is on the becoming. It is an experience! And every experience, when it is alive, claims to be another and cinematic beyond the support that shelters its vivacity and cosmicity. It was never about watching or returning to watch the film, as if one were saying that one is a subject contemplating an aesthetic object. No more dualisms, please! The call has always been how to continue making body and embodying with "Obatala Film", how to continue co-existing with it, knowing that no matter how much we have different processes of individuation we are conglomerates of images, we are occasions for thought where cinematic modes of experience, which are our own luminous and sonorous bodies, affirm themselves and are becoming. A re-joining with life, a re-joining of the human, and more than human images, which as a constant co-production keeps the cosmogenetic process active. That is, we are images among images, but the image is always to come, as is life after life when it passes through death.

Pregnant image, coronavirus, but we prefer to say Obaluaye and follow its sign as the possibility of an affirmative vulnerability, in which the movement is claimed to be multiplicity of genetic potencies of the world that deny themselves to be a totality. The virus does not totalize, the human will, too human, yes. The virus opens variation and as an ally that it is, it manifests itself here in writing as a contagion that keeps "Obatala Film" in process and transformation. From Obaluaye's hand, "Obatala Film" is not only a film-offering-occasion, but, above all, a film-sacrifice-offering-occasion. It is not enough with the disposition of life for facing the life that unfolds from it. It is also necessary that life detaches itself from it as death, so that it can throw itself more intensely into the very life that always escapes from dying. Passages where vital and spiritual forces are intensified, where ashe is intensified. And, perhaps, this is the challenge and destiny of every expressive gesture, of filmmaking, of writing, of between writing and filmmaking being a practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. It means to be a medium and channel to intensify the vital force of the cosmos, to be a productive and proliferating occasion for it, as this writing and speculative cinematic experience have been proposed in the act, and that it has found as allies to the two faces of the vertigo we live in today: the virus and Obaluaye.

Re-joining with life, knowing that it is film, it is writing, it is an experience that goes from one body to another, from one surface to another, from one image to another. And that is why we affirm here a cinema that comes and goes, that happens by other means, that is born, that is nourished, but that, above all, goes through a dying-birth that renews the re-joining with life, and that now and for the moment express itself as writing, as one more manifestation of the dying-birth complex, as one more manifestation of Obaluaye's gaze, where what is expressed is the metamorphosis of life itself that circulates and constantly prepares itself to take other forms. Just as life does not belong or cannot be property and simply passes through bodies, "Obatala Film" does not belong to a digital archive, to a Super 8mm film, to a projection. It passes and now it is here, not as a living dead or as a ghost, but as full potency of life, as that occasion for the always foreign thought that for not denying its condition claims welcome, care and hospitality with the life that pulses in the passage.

I am not afraid of not making a film like " Obatala Film" again. I am not afraid of what now begins to distance itself (because of the presence of the pandemic, of Obaluaye). It is only up to me to continue being what I am inevitably called to be and to become: a practitioner of cinematic modes of experience, as is happening along these lines. Lines, words, cinematic sparks that between intervals ask themselves what starts to be close. In the middle, the possible may emerge... The question is not to be afraid of dying or of the end of a world. The question is how and with whom we want to die and start a new world. In the middle, we must compose and incorporate the virus and Obaluaye, in an agreement to make world and cinema with them, to cinematically worlding and earthing with them. Counter-spell, as diplomacy, as cosmopolitics of image and radical ethics of the encounters that babalawos and Ifa teach us. "Obatala Film" as an exercise of futurity with Ifa, of babalawo-becoming, father and guardian of the secret and so much of the image that is always to come, that refuses to be totally cognizable and thinkable, but that moves the thought and makes the world pure process.

It is only up to me, then, to insist that the cinematic gesture that was, is and will be "Obatala Film" awakens in those who see and read it a desire to let something die, even a tiny thing, so that another co-creation of the world may follow, so that life may continue to be affirmed as the endless passage of existential traces through the most diverse surfaces and materialities. So that I can only release "Obatala Film" and let it follow with you. Open one more interval, where the words are silent and the images advance, where it is up to you to speculate one more un-editing or montage of impermanence between images and in the midst of the catastrophe of re-joining with life.  

Sebastian Wiedemann is a filmmaker-researcher and philosopher, or as he likes to say a practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. His works investigate liminal intersections animated through experimental cinema and philosophy, aware of a possibility for thought-cinema as living poetic ecology, as a possible surface for the affirmation of a Cosmopolitics of Image. His works have screened in venues around the world and have received retrospective shows in Brazil, Colombia, Spain, and Ireland. In 2015 his film “Los (De)pendientes” was included in the Artforum’s list of the best films of the year and won the Special Prize of the Jury at Fronteira Film Festival (Brazil). In 2017 his film “Abismo” was included in the research project and film series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, conceived by Los Angeles Filmforum as part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. In 2019 his film “Obatala Film” won the Prize of the Jury at SuperOff Film Festival (Brazil) and Curta 8 – Film Festival (Brazil). He is also editor and curator of the online platform Hambre | espacio de cine experimental which focuses on critical experiments seeking dialogue with new tendencies in Latin American avant-garde cinema and where he has edited the books “La Radicalidad de la Imagen. Des-bordando latitudes latinoamericanas. Sobre algunos modos del cine experimental.” (2016) and “Pensamientos migrantes: Lo que las imágenes nos fuerzan a pensar. Intersecciones cinematográficas” (to be released, 2020). More recently he published the book “Deep Blue: Future Memories of a Livings Cinematic In-Between” (2019).

Jenny Fonseca Tovar Colombian. 39 years old. Documentalist. Visual and body artist. Inhabits the intersections between the moving image and the moving body. At the same time, she inhabits the intersections between Colombia and Brazil. Graduated as a film director from the National University of Colombia, with parallel training in contemporary and afro dance. She completed a Masters in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and is currently a candidate for a Ph.D. in Visual Arts from the University of São Paulo. Her doctoral research ponders how, from artistic collaborative practices, we can subvert the necropolitics that kill, butcher, burn, massacre, and disappear certain bodies.