Kuznitsa

Engaging with the poetry of Langston Hughes, this film investigates the afterlives of Vladimir Lenin in eastern Germany.

Filmed throughout Ukraine just months before the full-scale Russian invasion, this vérité visual ethnography explores the overlaps of memory, hope, progress, and nostalgia at the scale of everyday life.

This is the story of unruly desire, one that poisons and impoverishes: the tale of a modern King Midas, crossing borders and unearthing everything that is presumed to be valuable. Yet here, the golden shine that should emanate from the king’s touch is missing, and all that’s left is an all-encompassing abstraction. This filmic fable speaks to the anonymous racialized bodies trapped under the impossible demand to fill a growing void that leaves only annihilation in its wake.

This video essay focuses on the landscapes of the Sonoran Desert—and the project of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—as a way of investigating the manner in which something as seemingly generic as a wall can take on particular political and affective forms. This short provocation explores the ways that violent and distasteful objects create, and subsequently come to characterize, malevolent spectacles.