THE BROKEN PITCHER
dirs. Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Marina Christodoulidou, 2022
69 mins. Cyprus/Germany/Lebanon/Spain.
In Arabic, German, Spanish, Greek and English with subtitles.
SATURDAY, MARCH 11 – 2:30pm followed by Q+A with Natascha Sadr Haghighian moderated by May Makki (This event is $10)
ONE SCREENING ONLY!
Tracing the effects of financialisation and austerity, THE BROKEN PITCHER by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou and Peter Eramian attends to a concrete case: A crucial meeting at a bank, negotiating the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaka, Cyprus in 2019. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s film FIRST CASE – SECOND CASE (1979, Iran), the filmed reenactment of the bank meeting is shown to people from various backgrounds who are asked to respond to the question: “In your opinion what should the bank employees do?”. The responses encompass perspectives of people from different interest groups in Cyprus and beyond, including housing rights activists in Barcelona, Berlin and Beirut, persons who are similarly affected by these policies, public figures, lawyers, economists and artists. Foreclosure are one of the austerity measures that were imposed on the Cypriot government by the Troika (the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) after the financial crisis in 2012. THE BROKEN PITCHER situates the case in relation to the colonial history of finance, debt and property and seeks out potentials for changing the script of interacting with it.
NATASCHA SADR HAGHIGHIAN (born Budapest, 1987 or Sachsenheim, 1968 or 1976 or Australia, 1979 or Munich, 1979 or Tehran, 1967 or Iran, 1966 or 1953) is an artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany or Kassel, Germany or Gütersloh, Germany or Santa Monica, California, USA or the Cotswolds, Great Britain. Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to imagine infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Her practice is deeply invested in collaboration, sensual play and listening as modes of unraveling liberal individuality and the boundaries of cognition. Recently she has been interested in epistemic disobedience as a mode of unlearning coloniality. She co-founded various collectives and coalitions, among them the institute for incongruous translation together with Ashkan Sepahvand, and kaf together with Shahab Fotouhi and Tirdad Zolghadr. She was part of the Society of Friends of Halit and the Tribunal “Unraveling the NSU Complex”.
MAY MAKKI is a curator and cultural worker. She works and lives in New York City. Her research focuses on economies of artistic production. She is currently a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.