The USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures present

Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims

January 18, 2024, 7:00 pm

Ray Stark Family Theater (SCA 108) 

University of Southern California

Post-screening discussion with Denise Ferreira da Silva

Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims was shot in the Chilean Atacama Desert, home to some of the world’s largest mines. The elevated, extremely dry terrain and clear air of the desert preserve history. Today you can find prehistoric stone drawings there, but also that labor camps from colonial times which were later reactivated during Pinochet’s dictatorship and used to exploit opponents of the regime. While telescopes are used to observe the sky in this place with the clearest and driest air on the planet, these stories of violence stay hidden in plain sight. Neuman and Ferreira da Silva‘s work experiments with thinking and sensing simultaneously the various moments of material existence: the quantic, cosmic, organic/mechanic, historic/geologic. It often departs from a particular site, but then moves through and weaves together various times and places to show the planetary scope and historical depth of pressing geopolitical issues. 

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, New York University. Her artistic and academic work reflects and speculates on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Unpayable Debt (2022), Dívida Impagável (2019), and Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text; Theory, Culture & Society; philoSOPHIA; Griffith Law Review; Theory & Event and The Black Scholar, among others. Her artworks include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath /Corpus Infinitum (2020), Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) with Arjuna Neuman and Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri. 

Special thanks to the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures for their generous support of this event.