HOW DOES THE WORLD BREATHE NOW?
Film As Witness, Archive, and Political Tool

Out of frustration and exasperation with the state of the world in 1960, Indonesian poet Willibrordus Surendra Broto Rendra asked himself: “How does the world breathe now?”

The film series conceived by SAVVY Contemporary between 2016 and 2018 was a response to our own dismay at the continued injustices that the world faces. Each week, SAVVY invited a different guest who chose a film that they felt answered, or asked more questions of the question: “How does the world breathe now?” More than just a series of screenings, the film series became a kind of ciné-club where we also ate, drank, and danced together, and out of which new concepts, collaborations, and polemics emerged. With this publication we hope to offer readers another mode of thinking about films, and to pick up on some loose threads or unfinished conversations of the film series.

The publication is comprised of the three sections Bearing Witness: Old & New Filmic Practices With Political Clout; Archiving, Preserving, and Accessing Film; and New Relationships, New Practices: Towards Sustainable & Ethical Filmmaking, which bring together the voices of contributors such as Sarah Maldoror, Filippos Koutsaftis, the Spotters of the TRIBUNAL “Unraveling the NSU Complex,” Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Talal Afifi and Viola Shafik, the *foundationClass, and Olivier Marboeuf, among others. Together, we explore how film may be a constructive tool to examine the state of the world and its cruelties, and we ponder how to form a more stable and supportive culture of film production and distribution.

SAVVY Books aims at promoting epistemological diversity, resonating with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s claim that “Another Knowledge is Possible.” By acknowledging the limits and faults of academic disciplines and advocating for processes of unlearning, our effort is thus to create a platform which encourages extra-disciplinary knowledges – and promotes the thinking and writing of authors, artists, philosophers, scientists, and activists whose practices challenge Western epistemologies: looking towards epistemic systems from Africa and the African diaspora, Asia-Pacific, the Middle-East and Latin America. 

The series brings together SAVVY Contemporary and Archive Books in a collaboration based on the shared interest in a multiplicity of knowledges beyond the Western canon and a commitment to foster critical discussions and forge new collaborations and coalitions. We like to think of the books in this series as “borderlands,” to use an expression by Chicana poet and feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, by which we mean spaces where “a new story to explain the world and our participation in it” can be elaborated and told; spaces where epistemological disobedience (Walter Mignolo) and divergent thinking can be practiced.