Promised Lands (2015) is a film essay that delineates the contrast between Empirialist Romanticist ideas projected on colonised lands, and testimonies voiced by people living in these parts (remembering violence, yet also mocking the colonial gaze). While the images show the sun set over a deeply forested place, a montage of texts on the voice over juxtaposes excerpts from a settler-utopia envisioned by 19th century Austro-Hungarian economist Theodor Hertzka to be realised in East Africa with reflections by the artist on such imaginary land-grabs, and dialogues with her uncle Patrick Wanambwa while hiking on site.

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (1976-2023) was an artist, a researcher and convenor of the Africa Cluster of the Another Roadmap School.

The work Culpture Capture: Crimes Against Reality, opens with a synthetic landscape and a public monument crumbling into digital pieces. To the sonic presence of a musical score and shutter clicks, the film goes on mixing 3D- and archival imagery of public monuments and museal objects, gradually taken over by a fleshy substance, at one point interrupted by the statement ‘To erect a statue is to take revenge on Reality (and reality in turn exacts its due)’.

New Red Order is a public secret society with a rotating and expanding cast, facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys.

The Fall of a Hero shows a fictitious interrogation room that gradually gets overlaid with images and videos, as the interrogated talks about the Islamic State’s construction of mythologies in its virtual presentation and propaganda. Focusing on their use of the Trajan font, known from epic videogames and Hollywood films, their strategies for glorification of the golden age and call to the masculine hero are exposed, also bringing in fascist and nazi propaganda materials of the 1920s and 30s.

Hasan Özgür Top is an artist educated at Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem and Marmara University, Institute of Fine Arts, Painting, Istanbul.

The program closes with Tonalli, where the collective brings in their own term shamanistic filmmaking and their constant seamless moving between digital and analogue material. Through a meditative, ritualistic experience, the film takes back the relation between the mythological and the land, their film being a possible antidote— ‘A Mesoamerican spell in action’.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology.

New Red Order, Culpture Capture: Crimes Against Reality, film still. Courtesy of the artists.