Free Cinema School Salon:
On Pedagogical Film, Part II with Daria Martin and Massimiliano
'Mao' Mollona
Thursday 24 January 2013
FREE, no booking required
7pm
Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place
London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)
In this second part of our series of salons on pedagogical film, January's
Free Cinema School will be a presentation of
Steel Town (2013) a film by
Daria Martin and
Massimiliano Mollona. The film is shot on location at Volta Redonda, a Brazilian steel town whose economy, and consequently its citizens' lives revolve around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest steel mill in Latin America. Following years of research with unions,
Steel Town focuses on working-class life in Volta Redonda, building a critical dialogue between documentary, ethnography, art and activism in a film that involves members of the Volta Redonda community, workers of the steel mill and a director from Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed Centre (Centro de Teatro do Oprimido - CTO).
Daria Martin was born in San Francisco, USA, in 1973, and lives and works in London. Daria Martin's films aim to create a continuity or parity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between the internal and social. Martin trained in humanities at Yale University and painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Kunsthalle Zurich, among other international public galleries, and a solo survey is forthcoming at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, in 2013.
Massimiliano Mollona is an anthropologist based at Goldsmiths College, London. Specialising in political and economic anthropology and experimental filmmaking, his main research focus is on the anthropology of work and class. He conducted long-term fieldworks in Sheffield (UK) and Volta Redonda (Brazil) (still ongoing), two steel-towns deeply affected by privatisations and radical class changes. Mollona also uses film as a tool of political reflection and intervention, with a focus on experimental ethnography, the politics of realism and working class representation. In 2000 he wrote and directed Steel Lives, a film about a community of steelworkers in Sheffield in the post-Thatcher era. In Brazil he developed several media projects in favelas and hosted film discussions in homes, communities and shopfloors. He has published extensively on political anthropology and film and is regularly invited to talk on film and work at various galleries, festivals and workshops in the UK and abroad, including in 2012, Raven Row, GasWorks, BFI, Steirischer Herbst festival (Graz) and Il Festival della Filosofia in Modena.
For more information please contact:
Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator
+44 (0)20 7298 1535
jannag@serpentinegallery.org
Amal Khalaf, Assistant Curator, Projects
+44 (0)20 7723 3162
amalk@serpentinegallery.org
See more Past Edgware Road Project
Daria Martin and Massimiliano Mollona
Steel Town 2013
Film still
© 2013 Daria Martin and Massimiliano Mollona
