Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Matilde Meireles

Welcome to Doc’s Kingdom!

MATILDE MEIRELES is a sound artist and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects. Her work has a multi-sensorial, durational and multi-perspective critical approach to site, where Matilde investigates the potential of listening across spectrums and scales as ways to attune to various ecosystems and articulate plural experiences of the world. Some examples include the inner architectures of reeds and complex water ecologies, resonances in everyday objects, local neighbourhoods and the architecture of radio signals. Her upcoming new album on the Crónica label, entitled Loop. And Again. (2024), delves into the dynamics of magnetic fields, intricate wiring arrangements, and their interconnectedness with the shifts in the surrounding landscape. Her work is also presented regularly in the form of performances, installations, community-based projects and publications. She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, Queen’s University Belfast.
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Doc’s Kingdom – Ways of Listening
International Seminar on Documentary Film
19-23 Nov 2024 | Odemira, Portugal
Registrations and more information here:

Doc’s Kingdom 2024: Odemira, 19-23 Nov.

Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Trevor Mathison & Gary Stewart

Welcome to Doc’s Kingdom!

TREVOR MATHISON is an artist, composer, sound designer, and recordist. His sonic practice – centered on creating fractured, haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music – has featured in over 30 award-winning films and installations. Trevor was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), where his sonic designs defined and situated the Collective’s audiovisual works. He has continued to work with some of his former collaborators from BAFC creating sound design for numerous documentaries and installations. With Anna Piva and Edward George, he formed the projects “Flow Motion” and “Hallucinator”, whose mutant techno dub featured on the leading record label Chain Reaction. In recent years Trevor has produce a series of artworks and album releases as part of the ongoing and iterative project “From Signal to Decay”.

GARY STEWART is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sound, moving image and computational creativity. His work examines social and political issues of identity, culture, and technology, through media art, experimental music, and research. Through the application of innovative technologies and practices, he is part of a global network of collaborators who are advocates for equality, climate justice and better health through the arts especially those from marginalised communities. Under the moniker of Bantu, Gary sets out to explore and bring fresh new perspectives and in particular to “Black Noise”.

As DUBMORPHOLOGY, Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart create installations and performances that incorporate elements of dub and musique concrète which functions as a binding agent for disparate visual material that is bound together by what might be dubbed “post-soul noise”.
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Doc’s Kingdom – Ways of Listening
International Seminar on Documentary Film
19-23 Nov 2024 | Odemira, Portugal
Registrations and more information here:

Doc’s Kingdom 2024: Odemira, 19-23 Nov.

Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Trinh T. Minh-ha

We’re thrilled to announce the first name from the guest artists and filmmakers who will be joining us in Odemira in 2024!

TRINH T. MINH-HA is a writer, theorist, composer and filmmaker whose practice is mainly positioned within the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies. Born in Hanoi, she emigrated to the US during the Vietnam War, where she studied music composition, ethnomusicology and French literature. While teaching in Dakar, Senegal, she created her first film, Reassemblage (1982), which documents the lives of women in rural Senegal in a manner that she famously described as “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” the subjects she portrays. She has consistently challenged the traditional documentary format and has been deconstructing normative ways of looking at and listening to different cultures, whilst being dedicated to questioning totalising systems of knowledge and categories of identity. She considers each work to exist as a “boundary event,” eluding labels such as documentary, fiction or experimental film, instead positioning her work between these designations. Alongside audiovisual works, she has published numerous essays and books on cinema, cultural politics, feminism and the arts. She is Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Doc’s Kingdom – Ways of Listening
International Seminar on Documentary Film
19-23 Nov 2024 | Odemira, Portugal
Registrations and more information here:

Doc’s Kingdom 2024: Odemira, 19-23 Nov.

Thinking with Dub Cinema Study Days // Documentation

In the context of Courtisane Festival 2024 (Gent, 27 – 31 March 2024), with the support of KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts.

How to think dub cinema? How to think dub in, or as, or with, cinema? How, and in what ways, to think cinema by way of dub? How, and in which ways, does dub, understood not as a genre but, instead, as a sonic process that undoes the body of song, unmake the temporal structures of film?

In which ways does film invite thought that registers some of the ways in which dub, understood not only as sonic process but as cinesonic process, dramatises the unbelonging of black film to, or for, the institutions of the aesthetic, the ancestral, the archival, the auteurist, the authentic, the avant-garde, the bodily, the communitarian, the formal, the gendered, the generic, the historical, the militant, the narrative, the nation, the oral, the poetic, the political, the popular, the racial, the resistant, the struggle, the sexual or the traditional called upon by thought to organise the coherence of cinema?

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as two days of study, a film programme and a dub session devoted to questioning these questions. An invitation to study that dedicates itself to a practice of listening to cinema enabled by watching Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective, 1986).

Across study sessions led by Kodwo Eshun, Louis Henderson and Lynnée Denise, Thinking with Dub Cinema departs from an invitation to thought that attends to Handsworth Songs. Each session invites attendees to attune practices of watching, reading and listening towards developing a dub methodology for the imagination of auditory blackness, black audition, collective audition and filmic collectivity announced by Handsworth Songs.

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as a convening around an idea of dub cinema proposed, initially, by Greg Tate in 1988 and, subsequently, by Okwui Enwezor in 2007. In ‘Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Here Comes Sankofa’ published in The Village Voice on 30th August 1988, Tate wrote that:

“Black Audio Film’s Handsworth Songs is dub cinema — dub, for the uninitiated, being that form of reggae where the lead vocal track is removed, and the foreground space filled with regenerated and decaying sounds bent on invoking a mythic African past and future. Ostensibly a documentary, its free-floating and spectral treatment of historical footage testifies to the mystique of the black British citizen while critiquing the commercialization of the black image. Handsworth Songs is a compressed chorus of black British voices, whose foregrounding puts white media and the police in the position of being Other.”

In ‘Coalition Building: Black Audio Film Collective and Transnational Post-colonialism’ published in The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective edited by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in 2007, Enwezor argued that:

“Though ostensibly addressing the issues of policing, Handsworth Songs reflects more profoundly the agency of the oppressed; it narrates their stories, not purely from the point of view of the event from which it derives its name, but equally through an archaeology of the visual archive of minoritarian dwelling in Britain. As is often the case in Black Audio Film Collective’s work, the ghosts of those stories inform the notion of a historically inflected dub cinema whose spatial, temporal and psychic dynamics relays the scattered trajectories of immigrant communities.”

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as an invitation to hear the ‘free-floating and spectral treatment of historical footage’ proposed by Tate and the ‘notion of a historically inflected dub cinema’ advanced by Enwezor as suggestions or, better still, as suggestures, to use Ian Penman’s term, for imagining a cine-poesis of the echo and a cine-practice of the version.

To hear Handsworth Songs as dub cinema is to elaborate upon the ways in which Handsworth Songs practices its versioning of cinema and its cinema of the version. To hear Handsworth Songs in and as a cine-mix is to attend to the ways in which Handsworth Songs versions film. To hear dub cinema in Handsworth Songs is to listen for the latent dimensions of the retroactive and the proleptic that become available for thought in the sounds and the images deployed by Handsworth Songs.

To hear Handsworth Songs from the place of the queer epistemology of Isaac Julien’s Territories, the television ballad of Philip Donnellan’s The Colony, the negrophobic Pathé newsreel of Our Jamaican Problem and the funerary poetics of Sir Collins & The Versatiles is to orient thought towards the ways in which Handsworth Songs summons archives for the sake and the stake of struggles that threaten the futures of the memories of black lives and deaths.

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as an invitation to elucidate the ways in which Handsworth Songs announces a cinema of unbelonging and unsettlement. An invitation to expound, expand and explicate some of the ways in which cinema dramatises its dub acoustemologies, its dub adjacencies, its dub affinities, its dub cosmologies, its dub economies, its dub epistemologies, its dub morphologies, its dub ontologies, its dub poiesis, its dub psyches.

Curated by Kodwo Eshun and Louis Henderson
In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent)
With the support of the Committee for Contemporary Art, KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts, Film Department campus Brussels
In collaboration with Auguste Orts and argos

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STUDY DAYS

Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, theorist and artist. In 2002, he co-founded The Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar. They work by looking in the key of listening across media, observing a research-based methodology that studies events, archives, movements, compositions, materials, performance, vocality, and space-time in moving and non-moving image, sound, music and text. He is author of works such as Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (Afterall, 2012) and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet Books, 1998), and co-editor (with Anjalika Sagar) of The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (Liverpool University Press, 2007). He is a lecturer in Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, works as a curator and writes regularly for magazines and journals.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Henderson‘s films and installations are shown regularly in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and are distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. His writing has been published in both print and online in books and journals. At present, Henderson is a doctoral candidate at the École Nationale Supérieure d‘Arts de Paris-Cergy. His research looks into the riverscapes of the East of England and Guyana through “spiral retellings” of the works of Wilson Harris and Nigel Henderson.

A global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, Lynnée Denise is an Amsterdam-based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. Shaped by her parent’s record collection and the 1980s, Denise’s work traces and foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora. She coined the term DJ Scholarship in 2013, which explores how knowledge is gathered, inter- preted, and produced through a conceptual and theoretical framework, shifting the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist and cultural worker. A doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, Denise’s research contends with how iterations of sound system culture construct a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora. She just published her debut book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (the University of Texas Press), a narrative journey of reclamation that intricately details and humanizes the full life, musical contributions, and cultural impact of Willie Mae Thornton.

Doc’s Kingdom 2024

Doc’s Kingdom – International Seminar on Documentary Film will be back in Odemira from 19 to 23 November 2024, with a programme of screenings, debates, installations, and sound performances. Under the title “Ways of Listening”, this year’s programme, curated by Stoffel Debuysere, aims to develop critical perspectives on documentary from the point of view of sound. In order to imagine and discuss the political and ethical possibilities and implications of the sonic, Doc’s Kingdom will be deployed as a space for viewing and re-viewing cinema in the key of listening.

All information about the registration, fees, accommodation, and more details are available on the website.