Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva: 4 Waters / Deep Implicancy | Exp. documentary | hdv | colour | 0:29:00 | United Kingdom, Chile | 2018

Synopsis

“4 Waters – Deep Implicancy” is as much a film project and an experiment in collaboration as it is a set of fragments drawn from a reimagined cosmos.

These fragments, sounds, and stories help us convey the experiential moment of entanglement, or rather, they describe an entangled moment prior to separation, what we call “Deep Implicancy”.

One such story we follow is water, both as it phase transitions with and into other matter including life, but also as it combines disparate geographies, bodies of/in water, and four islands within them – Lesvos, Haiti, Marshall Islands, Tiwi.

Through a series of experimental migrations and elemental crossings we begin to question the form of the universal human, its calcified and exceptional origins, and in particular its ethical program.

Wandering and wondering through a transformative figuring of justice, we ask, what if our image of the world recalled phase instead of measure? And what becomes of ethics if we let go of value?

Biography

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her  artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022) amongst many other titles.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020), Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues such as MACBA (Barcelona); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna),  the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and more. In Februrary 2024, they opened a retrospective of their work at the Munch Museum in Oslo; in May 2024 the Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp opened a solo exhibition of their work.

They have a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books.