Event #1 Sunday March 8, 2026 UKRAINIAN FILMS — fundraiser for NGO Zgraya
Space is limited. Reserve your place by email: Les places sont limitées. Réservez la vôtre par courriel: [email protected]
These screenings are curated by Ceci n'est pas un musée friend and Museum Keeper, Anna Kovalenko. This is a pay-what-you-wish fundraising event (cash at the door) with all proceeds going to the NGO ZGRAYA: https://zgraya-help.com/en/home/#donate . You are welcome to sign up for one, or both, screenings (subtitles in English). To reserve your space, please send an email to [email protected]
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ABOUT THE FILMS:
Although they were made 35 years apart, Earth (1930) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) are deeply connected through their depiction of land as a living agent intertwined withhuman destiny. Both films dissolve the boundary between landscape and humans. The land is not owned — it owns, shapes, and absorbs human life. Where Earth emphasizes the agricultural cycle and collective survival, Shadows… emphasizes mystical continuity and emotional immersion. One is solar and expansive; the other is ecstatic and tragic but both are cinematic hymns to the interconnectedness of human life and nature.
1:00 pm - 2:30 pm Earth (original title: Zemlya)1930 Director: Oleksandr Dovzhenko Running time 1h 15m Subtitles in English
A cinematic masterpiece, Earth (1930), directed by Olesandr Dovzhenko, is a silent, visually poetic drama set in a Ukrainian village during early Soviet collectivization. Through lyrical images of wheat fields and peasant life, it portrays the cycle of life and death while exploring the deep bond between Ukrainian people and the land they cultivate.
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (original title: Tini zabutykh predkiv)1965 Director: Serghiy Parajanov Running time: 1h 37m Subtitles in English
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), directed by Serghiy Parajanov, is an aesthetically stunning folk tragedy set among the Hutsul people of the Carpathian Mountains. Blending romance, ritual, and folklore, it portrays human love and loss as inseparable from the wild, spiritual landscape that surrounds and shapes the characters’ lives and where the natural and the supernatural are intertwined.
Event #2 Saturday March 28, 2026 Presentation: ANTONI GAUDI'S CRISIS
Space is limited. Reserve your place by email: Les places sont limitées. Réservez la vôtre par courriel: [email protected]
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Event #3 Sunday March 29, 2026 MUSIC
Space is limited. Reserve your place by email: Les places sont limitées. Réservez la vôtre par courriel: [email protected]
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ABOUT THE MUSIC AFTERLIFE REQUIEM Liner Notes
"I was once on earth like you". - misremembered statement by W.G. Sebald
Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working. The death of my mother and the death of composer/friend Johann Johannsson.
During this time, as I was writing and recording this music, Johann Johannsson's death kept making itself apparent. I don't know why. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening… but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. In this instance, it was to be Johann's death which had happened a few years before.
After his death, I had been given the music left on Johann Johannsson's hard drives from his studio in Berlin to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of both formation and dissolution. An index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else.
The music I have written is distant and smeared, damaged, ghost-like and haunted, only hinting like a half-forgotten memory of what once existed; a condensed depiction of decay and erasure. For "Afterlife Requiem" I have taken short abandoned fragments from Johann's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure – and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. These disappearing elegies I have composed are not so much music as they are the remains of music. In this way I always work towards the subtraction of meaning.
After her medically-assisted death, in clearing out my mother's apartment, I realized that I was erasing the physical manifestation of her world - and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording.
For months, I listened to these remains of Johann's music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Johann before he died. On these hard drives, many times I would find that he would leave the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. Given his state of mind, he seemed to not be aware that the music had ceased or maybe he was distracted by something else. Perhaps his brain didn't register this was the end of the music. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and deeply touching.
I have underlaid the whole of this new piece, from beginning to end, with these disembodied silences from Johann's own work, space, and time. Now gone forever, his recorded silence remains. A monumental vacancy lost to the world.
The piece exists in alternating sections, a form I find that works well for my music. Like everything, it wasn't predetermined but made itself apparent as I worked.
Throughout the piece, and especially in the ghost fragment/Memorial Environment sections, I incorporate countless natural-world sounds, everything from volcanic lava to freight elevators to human blood flow to turbine hiss to suicide injections.
My work is about disappearance - of the present, the past, of everything. This music gets slower and slower over its duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down - it is disappearing.
Artist Robert Smithson said decades ago, "it is the dimension of absence that remains to be found".
For me, this music measures how time runs out. In fact, time already has run out. Eternity has already begun. - Matthew Patton (Those Who Walk Away)