The Future of Survival Public Event: Digital Migrations

The conference "The Future of Survival Public Event: Digital Migrations," scheduled for Wednesday, August 14th at 5:30 p.m. at the Locarno Film Festival Basecamp (Istituto Sant'Eugenio), is the second of three events open to the public as part of the USI Cinema and Audiovisual Futures Conference 2024.

It will feature Suneil Sanzgiri as the main guest, in conversation with Greg de Cuir Jr. (Kinopravda Institute) and Devika Girish (Film Comment Magazine and New York Film Festival).

Suneil Sanzgiri utilizes a dazzling array of technological and mediatic approaches to explore the effects of migration on peoples, nations and cultures. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Blending 16mm film, desktop aesthetics, 3D renderings, and direct animation, Sanzgiri’s films utilize an aesthetics of distance and proximity to gesture to tensions, possibilities, and replications of what we find when we search for ourselves in the remnants of colonial histories. In his keynote, he will share his research behind his first feature-length work, currently in development, focused on the bonds of solidarity that developed out of resistance to the Portuguese empire between India and Africa.

How can cinema respond to colonial legacies of extraction and violence? How can artists and activists use digital technology in ways that bring attention to questions of structural violence and histories of anticolonial struggle? This event will explore the themes of migration, deracination, and diaspora and the ways in which films, and especially the video essay, can travel across space and time, as social and visual journeys in the process of healing distances provoked by colonialism and violence.