SUNSET SEDUCTION
Dir. Charles de Agustin, 2024
United States. 45 min.
Contract terms unique for each presentation.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15 – 7:30PM
FILM FOLLOWED BY DISCUSSION
$5 — NO ONE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS
Access: The film has embedded audio description and open captioning. A discussion will follow the screening. There is one small step to enter Spectacle and the space is not wheelchair accessible. Please reach out at least one week in advance to request any accommodations and best efforts will be made to meet your needs.
SUNSET SEDUCTION by Charles de Agustin, an evolving project centered on a 45-minute film alongside site-specific contracts and discussions, stars a liberal philanthropist yearning for his next fling with radical politics.
Made as the Palestine solidarity movement escalated in 2024, the film unfolds in essayistic fragments considering ideas of freedom, violence, and the seductive capture of revolutionary ideology. Nonprofit organizations—even those driven by equity, decolonization, abolition—are tied to an unsustainable infrastructure that consistently creeps toward establishment liberalism. Sunset Seduction revitalizes the spirit of INCITE’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (2007); emphasizes collective grassroots action in the popular imagination, which may include siphoning and subverting philanthropic resources, far beyond electoral politics and do-gooder grantmaking; and works toward a “more radical form of complicity” (Moten & Harney).
With influence from Faye R. Gleisser’s notion of “risk work” and histories of the contract as artistic intervention, a scene in the film explains that the artist will work with each exhibiting institution’s staff to enact a “genuine and disruptive act of treason against the socioeconomic interests of the ruling class” in order for the work to be presented, intending to materialize the particular responsibilities of cultural workers in the global north.