Over the last ten years philosopher-artist Denise Ferreira da Silva and artist-writer Arjuna Neuman have collaborated on a series of films and artworks that they call Elemental Cinema. In these works, the four elements — water, earth, fire, air — inform the artists’ considerations of questions such as: How can we understand existence other than from the post-Enlightenment notions of nature and world? What does it mean to disorder Western thinking? What other ways of knowing – across cultures, time, space, and form – can we learn and relearn? The films are fractal compositions, interfacing between the quantic, cosmic, organic, and historic, and drawing from visual arts, sciences, and philosophy.

For this night at The Poetry Project, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman will come together to read from the script of the in-progress fifth and final film in their series. The film, called Wild Fury / On Complicity, turns to fire as a material for imagining together how the world was, how it could be, how it must be, and how it wasn’t but could have been – anterior potentials, future revivals, and indeterminate urgencies. In a historical moment of deepening and maddening brutality, the film blurs tenses in order to ask how rebellion and refusal look and feel in the past, present, and future simultaneously. In addition to their reading from Wild Fury, Ferrera da Silva and Neuman will also present their 2020 film Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and engage the audience in a conversation about their practices.