For the last 120 years, cinema has held a dominant position as a creative and entertainment medium, a cultural institution, and an audiovisual language for understanding ourselves and our world. How will cinema's significance evolve in the years to come? How does cinema imagine its own survival, especially in response to the environmental and societal crises that pose threats to the survival of humanity and the planet?
The Future of Survival is a new initiative to explore at Locarno Film Festival the future of cinema. Made possible by the partnership between Locarno Film Festival and Università della Svizzera italiana – with the support of Swiss National Science Foundation, Swisscom, Mercator, Swissnex, and Harun Farocki Institute –, the project connects audiovisual innovation to social and environmental responsibility.
As part of its larger mission to discover and support new directions for cinema, the Festival offers an exciting environment to convene the world's prominent voices in film and media, serving as a platform to define the future of the field.
The initiative is held during the days of Locarno77 in parallel with The 2024 Cinema Audiovisual Futures Conference. Focused on the main theme of Cinematic Survival – elaborated through three modes of survival: Digital Survival, Social Survival, and Environmental Survival –, for three days from August 13 to 16 the Conference will host approximately 50 scholars, students, filmmakers, and artists, providing a place for the intersection of theory and practice.
The Conference is the result of the ongoing collaboration between the Festival and USI, with the support of SNSF and Swisscom.
While the Conference is for invited specialists only, the Future of Survival project features three public evening events (from August 13 to 15) in which leading artists, thinkers, and audiovisual innovators bring the insights of the Conference to a wide audience. These encounters – curated by Professor Kevin B. Lee – are free and open to all, as part of the 2024 BaseCamp program.
The Future of Survival
Public Encounter
Paul Trillo in conversation with Miriam de Rosa (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) and Richard Misek (University of Bergen)
Text-to-video generation signals a new era in audiovisual creation, allowing a greater number of people to realize and share their visions while challenging established norms of perceiving reality and humanity.
How does an artist work with such new technology? How does a viewer evaluate AI generated images? What considerations around economics and image rights surround such images?
Paul Trillo has established himself as a leading creator in the field of audiovisual generative AI, pushing the limits of the visual imagination, and offers his own hands-on experiences and insights. Miriam De Rosa is a leading researcher in experimental, new media, and post-cinema film and visual art. Richard Misek is a scholar, activist, and filmmaker whose most recent work is the award-winning A History of the World According to Getty Images.
Together they delve into the evolving landscape of film and storytelling shaped by advanced algorithms.
Sponsored by Swissnex
The Future of Survival
Public Encounter
Suneil Sanzgiri in conversation with Greg de Cuir Jr. (Kinopravda Institute) and Devika Girish (Film Comment Magazine and New York Film Festival).
How can cinema respond to colonial legacies of extraction and violence? How can artists and activists use digital technology in ways that bring attention to questions of structural violence and histories of anticolonial struggle?
This event will explore the themes of migration, deracination, and diaspora and the ways in which films, and especially the video essay, can travel across space and time, as social and visual journeys in the process of healing distances provoked by colonialism and violence.
Suneil Sanzgiri utilizes a dazzling array of technological and mediatic approaches to explore the effects of migration on peoples, nations and cultures. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Joining him in conversation are Greg de Cuir Jr., co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade, and Devika Girish, film critic and editor of Film Comment.
The Future of Survival
Public Encounter
Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths University) Nora M. Alter (Temple University) and Doreen Mende (Harun Farocki Institut and Geneva University of Art and Design)
How can cinematic practices allow us to see and hear wounds of environmental and social injustice in spaces around us? What kinds of knowledge can be produced through cinematic listening?
This talk focuses on unique practices of cinematic intelligence produced through essay cinema and environmental filmmaking, creating a planetary archive of “material witnesses” and novel forms of intelligence.
Susan Schuppli, a UK-based researcher and artist, will present her audiovisual investigations producing evidence to expose climate-related injustices. Nora M. Alter is the author of the newly published Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, which critically assesses one of the most celebrated visual artists of the last 50 years.
They engage in conversation with Doreen Mende of the Harun Farocki Institut, a research platform that connects the legacy of Harun Farocki to contemporary practices and politics of the audiovisual.
Sponsored by Harun Farocki Institut
