Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Now Instant Image Hall, Los Angeles
*Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims* is a film and installation project by artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Since 2016, the duo collaborates on a series of films, that each follow a classical element (water, earth, wind, fire) to help us reimagine the world speculatively and reparatively. Their ‘elemental cinema’ merges poetics and critical theory, to propose a poignant and emotional take on the ethical-political challenges of the global present, through human and non-human perspectives. Part documentary and part personal essay, their films transform our ways of seeing, knowing and being. The third film in their series, *Ancestral clouds Ancestral claims* follows the wind and what it carries -from dust to clouds, ideas, stories and voices- as a guide and an analytical framework. Filmed in Chile, in the Atacama desert it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past present and future, in this site. Taking us on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism and their dissemination. Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries, acts as a prism that reveals that which is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism.