Nat Raha in the video film Insurgent Flows, 2023.
Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist Futures
Experimental-documentary video film: 90min
Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler
State, democracy, violence and the politics of death form a unity that is reflected as such in this project. If socialism/communism failed despite everything, this point of failure is now transformed into a whole structure that almost automatically mirrors the logic of Western colonialism and capitalism in the former Eastern Europe, which requires a more accurate and complex analysis of racism. Although the former Eastern Europe is inferior to the “former” West in the global process of racialization, colonialism and racism, which produced the historical stratification of orientalising practices and ideas, regressive, exclusionary and violent effects both during the socialist period and in the period after, operate in the former Eastern Europe to ensure the racial configuration and reproduction of Europe as white, Christian, and “European”. Against this background, we combine documentary material and thought with immensely powerful positions of those who think about racism, discrimination and colonialism to elaborate decolonial, feminist, Marxist, trans* and sexual forms of insurgent currents.
Conversations with: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Basha Changuerra (CNAACAT), Bogdan Popa, Aigul Hakimova, Danijela Almesberger (LORI), Nat Raha, Piro Rexhepi and Ramón Grosfoguel
Authors: Marina Gržinić in Tjaša Kancler
Editing: Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler
Music: EsRAP
Animation: Siniša Ilić, camera: Luka Papić
Audio post-production: Julij Zornik, 001
Film supported by Obalne Galerije Piran, Conviviality as Potentiality (2021-25), Vienna, (FWF: AR 679)
Positions:
Marina Gržinić is a doctor of philosophy and works as researcher advisor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana. She also works as a freelance media theorist, art critic and curator. She is Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria). Marina Gržinić has published hundreds of articles and essays and several books. She is involved in video from 1982, working collaboratively with Aina Šmid from 1982 in the last years with other artists as well. Website: www.grzinic-smid.si
Tjaša Kancler, PhD, is an activist, artist, researcher and professor (Serra Húnter lecturer) of Media Arts and Gender Studies at the Department of Visual Arts and Design – Section for Art and Visual Culture, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona. They are a co-founder of t.i.c.t.a.c. – Taller de Intervenciones Críticas Transfeministas Antirracistas Combativas (www.intervencionesdecoloniales.org ) and a co-editor of the journal Desde el margen (www.desde-elmargen.net). Their research and artistic work focuses on global capitalism, (post)socialism, diasporic artistic practices, trans* imaginaries and decolonial feminisms.
Jovita Pristovšek received her PhD in philosophy from the Postgraduate School of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and an assistant professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, Ljubljana. Pristovšek is the author of Strukturni rasizem, teorija in oblast (Structural Racism, Theory, and Power; Sophia, 2019) and co-editor of several publications. Her research focuses on race and racialization within contemporary regimes of aesthetic, public, and political.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and the director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Forthcoming books include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket); Abolition Geography (Verso); a collection of Stuart Hall’s writing on race and difference (co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Duke UP).
Basha Changuerra is an anti-racist and afro-feminist activist. She is one of the promoters of the Afro-feminist social organization AfroFem Koop and member of the CNAACAT (Black, African and Afro-descendant Community of Catalonia). She is also member of the CUP anti-racist commission and Member of the Catalan Parliament. She has written articles for media such as Afroféminas, El Diario, or El Periódico and participated in interviews for Verne, Naciodigital or Cataluña Radio, among others.
Ramón Grosfoguel is a full Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkley. He is internationally recognized for his work on decolonization of knowledge and power as well as for his work in international migration and political-economy of the world-system. He has been a research associate of the Maison des Science de l’Homme in Paris for many years. Grosfoguel is the author of numerous articles and books, among others, Colonial Subjects. Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (University of California Press), Unsetling postcoloniality: coloniality, transmodernity and border thinking (Duke University Press), and co-editor of the journal Tabula Rasa.
Aigul Hakimova is an activist and community organizer. Hakimova is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia and since 2002 has been involved in numerous self-organized movements in the field of migration and autonomous spaces. Her main field of engagement in late years includes the questions of political organization, resistance and commons.
Danijela Almesberger co-ordinator at the Lesbian Organization Rijeka “LORI.” Lori was founded on 19th October 2000. The goal of the organization is the informing and rising of awareness of the public for the acceptance of LGBTIQ+ persons, eradicate prejudices and homo/bi/transphobia, remove discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression as well as accomplish true equality in front of the law.
http://www.lori.hr/
Bogdan Popa is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, Transylvania University of Brașov. His research work focuses on histories of sexuality, gender, and affects. He is the author of the book Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh UP). His forthcoming book, De-centering Queer Theory: Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War (under contract with Manchester University Press) offers not only a historical angle to understand the emergence of queer theory’s vocabulary, but also an alternative epistemology.
Nat Raha is a poet, and queer/trans* activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research addresses sexuality and gender, critical theory and Marxism, contemporary poetry and poetics, through creative and critical methods. She is a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism’ project at the University of St Andrews. In 2018, she completed her PhD thesis ‘Queer Capital: Marxism in queer theory and post-1950 poetics’ at the University of Sussex. Her current research also focuses on radical transfeminism, race in UK poetry and poetics, and queer and trans print cultures. She is the author of three collections and numerous pamphlets of poetry – her third book, ‘of sirens, body & faultlines’, was published by Boiler House Press in November 2018.
Piro Rexhepi holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde. His research focuses on decoloniality, sexuality, and Islam. His recent work on racism and borders along the Balkan Refugee Route has been published in a range of mediums in and out of academia including the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critical Muslims, and the Guardian among others.
DIRECTORS CUT 30 minutes released in 2024 Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist Futures
Experimental-documentary video, dir. cut, Marina Gržinić, Tjaša Kancler, Jovita Pristovšek (English subtitles) 30 min, 2023. Released in 2024.
Speakers in the film: Basha Changuerra (CNAACAT), Nat Raha, Piro Rexhepi, Ramón Grosfoguel Ruth Wilson Gilmore with additional research through conversations with Bogdan Popa, Aigul Hakimova, Danijela Almesberger (LORI). The video as experimental documentary, presented in a director's cut format, moves from the history of Black Marxism, trans* and LGBTQI+ history to analysis of racism, Black Lives Matter! In the work, we lead a discussion in an artistic format of animation, rap music (rap duo EsRap, Austria), Zoom recordings, to provide the analysis of the logic of Western colonialism and capitalism, which requires a more accurate and complex analysis of racism. In doing so, we do not bypass a defunct space of former Eastern Europe, which came to the fore in a new Cold War situation with the war in Ukraine. Though the former Eastern Europe is inferior to the “former” West in the global process of racialization, colonialism and racism, exclusionary processes operate in the former Eastern Europe, during the socialist period and in the post-socialist period, to maintain the racial configuration and reproduction of Europe as white, Christian, and “European.” Against this backdrop, we combine documentary material and thought with immensely powerful positions of those reflecting on racism, discrimination and colonialism to highlight decolonial, feminist, Marxist, trans* and sexual forms of insurrectionary movements. State, democracy, violence and the politics of death form a unity that is reflected as such in this project.
Options: (SLOVENIAN SUBTITLES) Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist Futures, released in 2024; full version 90 minutes.
Experimental-documentary video, dir. Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler (Slovenian subtitles) 90 min, 2023. Released in 2024.
