WAKE AMERICA!
a two-year anniversary of
cinematic resistance
Jan. 22, 2019

Tuesday, January 22, 2019
8pm
Museum of Human Achievement (916 Springdale)
Austin, Texas

Admission: suggested donation $5-10
(all proceeds donated to Refugee Services of Texas)

Experimental Response Cinema presents WAKE AMERICA!, its third installment (F*CK TR*MP (2016) and TR*MP TH*S! (2017)) celebrating two years of resistance to the policies of United States president #45.

COMPLETE LINEUP

Countdown, Bogdan Perzynski, ongoing video projection (pre- and post-show).
online countdown to the end of presidency

Fake But True: I’m Angry, Bryan Boyce, 2
A lesson in anger management from an old friend.

Knee Jerk, Kerry Laitala, 6
Class participants: Sarah Aineb, Colleen Donovan, Daniella Parrado, Izabell Navarro Perez, Gautama Ramesh, Sequinette 
Knee Jerk is a moving image work made in the Advanced processing Workshop of the Personal Cinema class at the San Francisco Art Institute. Educational film material is hand-processed, manipulated and recontextualized by the voices of women at the newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice’s confirmation hearing.

there are no trains in trinidad, Devon Narine-Singh, 10
a personal portrait through a political landscape

B.A.M. aka By Any Means Inc., Ariel Jackson, 4
A collage documentation of a video installation titled “BAM aka By Any Means” a video featuring my alter-ego Lil Lil teaching my other alter-ego Confuserella how to get from point A to point B by any means necessary. Confuserella is caught in a cultural desire to make it to point B. After failed attempts she seeks guidance with Lil Lil. He shares his experience of not being able to pass over the eyeline and gaining advice from the elders who founded B.A.M. inc. a company whose mission is to provide guidance and reassurance to those traveling from point A to point B.

Take It Down, Sabine Gruffat, 13
A last stand for the silent guardians of the old  order. Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares across the South. At long last, a grand inversion! Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives. The South is renewed.

This film looks to North Carolina to describe the cultural fissure that runs through the South, a legacy of the Civil War. In the context of the divisive Trump presidency and the increasing visibility of white supremacist activism, these Confederate memorials have become sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.

Historians agree that a majority of Confederate statues were erected as propaganda tools legitimizing racism in the era of Jim Crow laws. For example, “Silent Sam”, a statue depicted in the film, was erected on the quad of the University of North Carolina campus. In an act of civil disobedience in Fall 2018, students and protestors tore down the statue in a statement against white supremacist oppression.

Reality Fragment 160921, Qigemu (Jasmine Lin & April Lin), 14
Our own histories are always under curation, and as such, our perspectives become the central point in the building of personal realities. How do these multiple lived worlds, each their own amalgamation of memories, sensations, thoughts, coexist with de facto presentations of distance, history, and totality? How is this coexistence mediated if one is an actor in the online realm? The Internet functions as yet another parallel universe, but likewise an explicit symbol of the traversing between the subjective and the objective — a symbol in the questioning of solitary truths.

“Ega” (Money), Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani, 2
“Ega” is about the power of money on humans.
Money plays a central role in our daily lives, it has the power to change human life. People work hard to earn money and want more and more money.
By money, we can do whatever we want, also, whenever and wherever. Money can build and destroy.

East Side , Carlo Nasisse and Patricia Nogueira, 10
East Side explores the changing neighborhood of East Austin.

The Leisure Class, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 2
“The Leisure Class” is a punk queer feminist détournement of a found wedding template: a critique of cis privilege, class privilege, white privilege, bridal fantasies, enforced hetero-normativity, the wedding industry, excess consumption, wealth disparity and coerced gender ‘norms.’ All too often, wedding fantasies are used to market the appearance of “privilege”; they encourage the masses to over-spend and “pretend for a day” as if are the 1%, ever increasing the problem of perpetual debt and widening wealth disparity. “Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.” —James Salter

I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, Beatrice Gibson, 20
By turns raucous and reserved, ‘I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead’ ponders the future of a world in flux as seen through the eyes of motherhood accented by poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles.

Image: Take It Down, Sabine Gruffat