Curating “The Apparitional, films by Sandra Lahire and Barbara Hammer” Notes by Selina Robertson, Ricardo Matos Cabo and So Mayer
Wherever I am and come from, my tongue is Lesbian. Sandra Lahire I am so aware of my body. Sandra Lahire in Arrows The viewer enters the invisible, the place unseen yet familiar, his / her body. The “holy” body. The fragile body. The experimental body. I have returned to the interior body but through the exterior remains of the first cinefluorographic motion pictures of the human skeleton and organs. As we rush into the future it behoves us to look at our history. To stop, digest, inhale, read, and reflect. To appreciate and respect; to despair and vow never to repeat. Barbara Hammer The Apparitional was a film screening presented at Birkbeck Cinema on 18th May 2016. The event was held as part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2016, sponsored by Birkbeck Institute for Moving Image and Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture. This text is a record of the screening, a compilation of excerpts taken from introductions, emails and responses to the event. Our idea for the screening was triggered by conversations with each other about how women’s psychic and social bodies, their illness and treatment have been represented in medical visual culture and in particular, in radical lesbian experimental cinema. We thought about the hidden histories of lesbian sexualities, and also about how ideas of (in)visibility are inscribed in the convergence and conflict between practices of science, objectivity, spectacle, gender, sexuality and technology. Sharing a mutual appreciation for Sandra Lahire’s and Barbara Hammer’s work, we spoke about how we might collaborate together to explore these issues through placing both filmmakers in dialogue with one another. Drawing on the concept of the The Apparitional from Terry Castle’s 1993 book The Apparitional Lesbian:
Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture1 in which she locates the “ghosts” of lesbian sexualities obscured by history, together with the documentary work and experimental films of Barbara Hammer, Dr Watson’s X-Ray (1991) and Sanctus (1990), and Sandra Lahire’s Uranium Hex (1987) and Serpent River (1989), our screening explored this idea of the apparitional within the context of specific scientific and visual objectivity and the politics of gender and sexuality in the 1980s. ***
Excerpt of an email sent to Barbara Hammer, 11 February 2016. Dear Barbara, [...] In our discussions we have been thinking about the hidden history of lesbian sexualities, and also about how ideas of (in) visibility are inscribed in the convergence and conflict between practices of science, objectivity, spectacle, gender, sexuality and technology. Discussing the use of science in relation to this subject we thought it would be interesting to address the history of medical technology and specifically that of radiography and the use of X-rays. We are interested in using this idea of the ghost and the uncanniness implied by the concept of apparition (in the broad sense of the term) and how we can relate this with the body as a subject, sexuality, illness, radiation and exposure (as vulnerability). I told Selina how much I enjoyed your presentation of Sanctus at Tate and what you said about the work you did with the archives of Dr. Watson. You also mentioned the terrible ef-
1
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
the films and words of Sandra Lahire
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