Welcome to Episode 16 of the Abandon Normal Devices podcast, âYearning for new ways to make and circulate: towards an infrastructure of being longingâ. This podcast is a recording of a keynote given by writer, researcher and producer Jemma Desai, as part of our first-ever New Cinema Days in April 2023.
What happens when we use the phenomenology of yearning to appraise our cultural production infrastructure? Not yearning to belong to what we have, but yearning to be longing: to embody a desire for something else? Instead of envisaging âresilientâ systems that re-form, adapt and shift, might we be able to imagine systems of transmutation that can hospice old ways of being, led by new practices of longing?What new images might appear? How might they circulate differently? In caring for our longing, what might we no longer accept and what might we fight to care for?
Note from Jemma Desai:
This audio piece is a recording of a performance which took place at New Cinema Days which I called Infrastructures of Yearning. In the live version I spoke over a reel of clips that I had assembled as part of my research.
During this research I was thinking about the invitation to deliver a keynote, and what that meant. I thought about âKeynoteâ as a sound that might be translated into an image - the first note or the key on which the rest of music plays. If there is a keynote to these images it is one of contradictory desires - yearnings that compete with one another.Â
I gather here some moments I had come across or been drawn to where images had been made through desire for change, or movement, or attentiveness. I was drawn to both utopic and more sinister longings and so I gathered clips where images had been made of everyday resistance which felt seismic for those who were there when they happened or when grand historical inequities mingled with moments of celebration or spectacle. Moments where a feeling of yearning was distilled into a filmed clip or performance, and moments where yearnings and desires clashed with each other, creating discordance that appeared harmonious due to the ways that it was performed, the ways it was or was not filmed, preserved, presented or written about.Â
The reel showed clips from: A 2018 news report of a gathering Bollywood actors called Bollywood Shalom where Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu recreated the viral 'Oscar selfie'posed with Bollywood superstars as a sign of the 'great friendship' between India and Israel. Ceddo Film and Video Workshopâs (1985) detailing the way that media misrepresentation suppressed, misrepresented and hindered justice for victims of state violence; Little Simz performing a song about the artists search for freedom and integrity in capitalist and historically racist structures and industries at the EE BAFTA Film Awards 2023 in front of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the charityâs patrons; actress Shabana Azmi speaking out (to applause and in the presence of the people she directly addressed) at the hypocrisy of the political and artistic establishment at the International Film Festival of India in 1989 shortly after the the murder of a prominent communist playwright Safadr Hashmi; archival footage of Grunswick protestors including Jayaben Desai clashing with the police; the trailer, including press quotes from American and English critics, of Indian director Payal Kapadiaâs (2021), a clip of a domestic workersâ unionâs demands as recorded in the Yugantar Film Collectives (1981), sections of musings on geopolitics and belonging in Alnoor Dewshiâs (1992) and a 1976 performance of Nina Simone singing. During the Q&A the reel continued to show footage of the M11 Link Road protests in East London, pre-gentrification Hackney including images of activists and places of community significance in the area which people have tried and failed to have films commissioned about, but which are attended to and recorded in these clips.Â
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