Event details

Join scholar and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva (New York University) for a screening of Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023), an award-winning film by Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman.

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is the latest work within Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s ongoing collaboration Elemental Cinema, which explores the classical elements through experimental film. The series undermines patterns of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. Shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the film follows the wind from the Sahara to the Amazon and along the Pacific coast, tracing stories of migration and displacement and reflecting on the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet regime.

Following the screening, Ferreira da Silva will be joined by Rachel Price (Spanish and Portuguese) in conversation about the work.

Open to the public. This event is hosted by the Gauss Seminars in Criticism and supported through a collaboration between the Humanities Council and the Princeton Humanities Initiative. It is co-sponsored by the Program in Media + Modernity, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. An academic and an artist, Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva writes on crucial global issues, which she approaches from an anticolonial black feminist perspective. A prolific author, her field-changing books – such as Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt (2022 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association — have been published by major presses. Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), and Ancestral Clouds/Ancestral Claims (2023, winner of the Best Feature Film at the 2025 St Moritz Film ) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings, Sensing Salon, and Reading with Echo, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Reina Sofia (Madrid), The Belkin (Vancouver), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Kunsthalle Hamburg (Hamburg), Guggenheim (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), and MoMa (New York) as well as 10th Berlin Biennial,35th São Paulo Biennial, 2024 Venice Biennale, Kadist (Paris), Document14, 2022 Singapore Biennial, to name a few. She has held Visiting Professorships at major research universities, such as University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, La Trobe University, Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and University of Copenhagen. She held the 2023 International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8 and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Fine Art, at Monash University .

She is a member of several boards, including the Third Text editorial collective, the Advisory Board for the International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs and the editorial boards for journals Postmodern Culture, Catalyst, Social Identities, and Dark Matter.

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims

SYNOPSIS

The film is the latest part of a series called Elemental Cinema; each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four elements. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being.

Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s work undermines patterns of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident to us underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims turns the spotlight on the persistence, though in altered form, of this modern relation to the Earth in the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet regime.

The film 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.

In Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, the wind—air is the classical element taken up in this part of the series—travels from the Sahara to the Amazon and along the Pacific coast. Like the film’s off-screen voices, the composition and movement of material reality tells stories of migration and displacement, but also of another geography drawn by the winds.