The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow and Towards Estate
18 November – 24 November
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow
2002, 15′
SYNOPSIS
From today’s menu, I recommend Capitalism or Cannibalism; Communism is off. Our Catholicism is rather good, though; it comes with a liberal sauce or tourist topping. This is our pre-theatre-of-poverty menu.
Meanwhile, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow grows over-rapidly large on a forced steroidal diet. Elsewhere, the cousins of The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow pluck and hack in feathered ecstasy over the carcass of a chicken too careless crossing the road. This bright and colourful scene is but a moment of a clamorous market economy busy with flies and children; industrious striped-potbellied pigs rummaging through heaps between houses half- sunk in muddy water, while villagers jump from stone to stone.
Cannibalism has long been a favourite on western menus. Other peoples’ cannibalism, that is. More than a colonial culinary oddity, it divided the men from the animals; the savagery of the conquistadors was projected onto their victims – after all, they, too, sported feathers. Rumours of cannibalism persist in tourist guides and travel books today; some people still wear feathers (though most of them have long since died of influenza).
Specially breed with less feathers and more meat, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film that dream-walks from the beaches of Mirtsdroy, where huge tourists, plucked and oiled, baste themselves standing up, to the muddy markets of Sumatra, via an archipelago of Export- Processing zones and television archives. Hand processed with bacterially cultured stock, the images are themselves in organic decay; all the colours and forms of the scrap heap. Between dream and nightmare, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a traversal of here and elsewhere, first and third world; a fairytale of production, resources, capitalism, globalisation, refuse and refusal: The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film not about the struggle to be seen, but about the struggle to see.
With thanks to the Prelinger archive
Film courtesy of LUX
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
Towards Estate,
2012, 15′
SYNOPSIS
Towards Estate (2012) is a short film assembled from the diverse elements of the long term production of the Estate feature project, edited in its own terms concisely to relate several of the narratives of Haggerston estate, historically and in the present.
Capturing a moment of imminent transition, Towards Estate (15min, 2012) reflects on urgent matters of regeneration, gentrification and architecture; its reasons, possibilities and consequences. But more importantly, it is a film about time and place, and the ability of holding forms of dreaming and the capacity for wonder within ongoing and growing daily systemic pressures. During this moment of transition (in social and architectural terms), where one structure has broken down, and a new one is about to emerge, another space unfolds; a space of proposals, of uncertainty, and of absolute initiative. In this opening, how might we ask important questions of our ideas of home, of history, always in the making, and of our capacity for an ambition of the imagination in straitened times; that which influences not only how we’re seen, but also how we see; how we dream…
ESTATE, A REVERIE
Estate, A Reverie (2014) tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate (1938-2014) in Hackney and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with an unruly celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity. Filmed over seven years, Estate, A Reverie seeks to reveal and celebrate the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents’ own historical re-enactments and dramatised scenes, the film asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and through geography even?
The world premiere of Estate, A Reverie (2014) will be at the Rio Cinema, 2:30pm 22 November, accompanied by an opening set from singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney followed by a short introduction by Ken Worpole. There will be a post- screening discussion with the folm-maker.
Book here
More information about the project here
I AM HERE
i am here is a public art work generated from within an increasingly transformed residential area in Hackney, East London. It is a direct response to the experience of living in an estate in the process of being regenerated. The Haggerston estate, and Samuel House, is located alongside Regents Canal in-between Kingsland Road and Victoria Park in Hackney, London.
More information about the project here
FUGITIVE IMAGES
Fugitive Images are Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and David Roberts.
Fugitive Images platform grew out of a desire to capture the peculiar moment of the place where they live and work immediately prior to it being demolished. Haggerston Estate is suspended somewhere between it first being occupied in the 1930’s and imminent demolition in 2009 (second phase of demoloition is in 2013), a place in transformation, in wait.
More information about the project here
BIOGRAPHY
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a filmmaker, artist and cultural activist. Andrea grew up in the largest council estate in Munich and left school at 16 to become a hairdresser. After coming to London in 1991, she went on an Access course at Tower Hamlets College.
She won the 2014 Artangel Open award for her collaborative project Cycle with Adrian Jackson (of Cardboard Citizens). Her feature essay film Taskafa: Stories of the Street (66mins, 2013), a film about resistance and co-existence and voiced by John Berger, from his novel King, is told through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul. It premiered at the city’s international film festival, and in the UK at the London Film Festival.
She is co-founder of the artists’ collective Fugitive Images (responsible for the photographic installation i am here and the artists’ book-work Estate: Arts, Politics and Social Housing in Britain). Her forthcoming feature essay film Estate tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in Hackney, London and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with an unruly celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity.
Filmed over seven years, Estate, a Reverie seeks to reveal and celebrate the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents’ own historical re-enactments and dramatised scenes, Estate, a Reverie asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and through geography even.
She was a founding member of Vision Machine, which worked in the USA and Indonesia, exploring the impact of globalisation, power, and denied histories. She has presented widely on her work and its concerns at numerous conferences, symposia, film festivals, cinemas, and cultural/activist spaces within the UK and internationally.
Her PhD (University of the Arts London, 2007) examined the relationship between spectacular (Hollywood) and spectral (covert and special military operations) representations of political violence. From this period developed her essay-film ID – Prisoner of War (2015), which investigates US militarism and foreign policy through a character study of one of its most enduring rogue agents.
LINKS