“They conduct their lives with a wry resilience. They have a front row seat to the apocalyptic – birds falling out the sky – but they go on, with a cruel optimism towards the everyday within the age of extreme climate change. To translate that into formal strategies is the work of documentary.”
That’s how Shaunak Sen, producer of All That Breathes, described the protagonists of his film – siblings Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzed, who rescue and treat injured birds in India. Sen was speaking via Zoom during question time, following the film’s screening to open a workshop on ‘Technics & the Urban’, held 28-30 September at UWC’s Centre for Humanities Research. “You see multiple things happening,” he added. “Cinema has a particular purchase on this – you experience simultaneity, which writing cannot do in a single shot.”
Sen’s film and post-screening discussion, led by Meghna Singh and Premesh Lalu, set the tone for three days of dialogue and site visits for the second annual workshop of the UK-SA (NRF) Chair in Culture & Technics, held by Lalu. (Download the full programme, below.) The Chair is a bilateral programme between the British Academy and South Africa’s National Research Foundation and traces how the exercise of power relates to the co-evolution of the human and technology. Our experience of time, for instance, which in All That Breathes is conveyed as compression and decompression. Sen elaborates on the film’s plot: “They [the brothers] have treated 20,000 black kites in the past 20 years. Like any good question, they don’t really have an answer for what they do.”
Following Sen’s screening, five key speakers were invited to lead immersive discussion along various curated prompts in morning dialogue sessions various themed along the workshop’s broader theme of Technics & the Urban. These were: meditations on utopia (Vladimir Safatle); theory from a ruined city (Alia Rayyan) ; the hospitable city (Joy Mboya); séance & the city (Elena Vogman); the invisible city (Khotso Lamola Petousis); the studio as urban laboratory (Ellen Holleman); and forging material and meaning (Conrad Hicks). Afternoons were spent on site visits to contextualise the programming: Day 1 to exhibitions at the District Six Homecoming Centre, and the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation; Day 2 visiting CHR artist-in-residence Ellen Holleman’s studio and nearby Bijou Studios in Observatory; and Day 3 on a guided walk in Athlone and Oude Molen precinct.