Jasmina Cibic’s film Beacons is a cinematographic journey portraying eight women who distil the archive of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement into a musical score. They translate and decipher words into sounds, music and choreography and meet within a proposition for an address recasting the unrealised promises of the past into a sonic address as a rehearsal for our present. Filmed on isolated architectures steeped in nature that once served the awakening of transnational solidarity, the project aims to re-inscribe the missing female voice into the history of world-building.
For the script, Cibic utilised the speeches delivered at the first conference of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1985, held in Titograd, Yugoslavia. During this event, academics, artists, curators, and politicians shared strategies for achieving cultural independence, spiritual decolonisation, moral rehabilitation, and the emancipation of developing Non-Aligned countries. These individuals were leaders in the cultural spheres, aiming to create new scenographic backdrops as part of the alternative world-building project of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) within the bi-polar division of the world during the Cold War.
The locations in the film present a series of architectures and sites whose role it was to announce, defend, remind and alert a multinational state in its becoming. Cibic’s protagonists here use both the architecture and the landscape as amplifiers for their voice and action and inscribe a feminist reading of patriarchal architectural sites and re-engage with their world building potential via a feminist lens. The missing female voice from systemic and anti-systemic world-building projects is here embodied as a cypher that re-inscribes a possibility of an emancipated future of collective agency.
But there is another lens through which Cibic selects the architectures for her film: all these structures are positioned within epic landscapes, serving as beacons and power verticals, metaphorically representing the pursuit of alternative world-building that they formally proclaimed. These protrusions manifest idealistic beliefs of attainable potential, which Cibic now revisits, albeit through a feminist corrective lens of their original world building purpose.
Commissioned by IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, co-produced by Waddington Studio London, IMMA and Snaporazverein. Supported by the Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory, Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro; ZOOM Europa – Cultural Association for Central and Eastern Europe, Biennale Jogja 17 and Friends of Nomad.
Jasmina Cibic’s film Beacons is a cinematographic journey portraying eight women who distil the archive of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement into a musical score. They translate and decipher words into sounds, music and choreography and meet within a proposition for an address recasting the unrealised promises of the past into a sonic address as a rehearsal for our present. Filmed on isolated architectures steeped in nature that once served the awakening of transnational solidarity, the project aims to re-inscribe the missing female voice into the history of world-building.
For the script, Cibic utilised the speeches delivered at the first conference of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1985, held in Titograd, Yugoslavia. During this event, academics, artists, curators, and politicians shared strategies for achieving cultural independence, spiritual decolonisation, moral rehabilitation, and the emancipation of developing Non-Aligned countries. These individuals were leaders in the cultural spheres, aiming to create new scenographic backdrops as part of the alternative world-building project of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) within the bi-polar division of the world during the Cold War.
The locations in the film present a series of architectures and sites whose role it was to announce, defend, remind and alert a multinational state in its becoming. Cibic’s protagonists here use both the architecture and the landscape as amplifiers for their voice and action and inscribe a feminist reading of patriarchal architectural sites and re-engage with their world building potential via a feminist lens. The missing female voice from systemic and anti-systemic world-building projects is here embodied as a cypher that re-inscribes a possibility of an emancipated future of collective agency.
But there is another lens through which Cibic selects the architectures for her film: all these structures are positioned within epic landscapes, serving as beacons and power verticals, metaphorically representing the pursuit of alternative world-building that they formally proclaimed. These protrusions manifest idealistic beliefs of attainable potential, which Cibic now revisits, albeit through a feminist corrective lens of their original world building purpose.
Commissioned by IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, co-produced by Waddington Studio London, IMMA and Snaporazverein. Supported by the Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory, Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro; ZOOM Europa – Cultural Association for Central and Eastern Europe, Biennale Jogja 17 and Friends of Nomad.