Recorded Lecture: Akira Mizuta Lippit, "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe"

Ever since 'Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture' announced its open research program, it has been hard to dismiss its excellent line-up of speakers, both academics and artists. Amongst the names is that of Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose presentation "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe" at The Museum of Kyoto on 21 June 2013 was expanded into an essay published digitally in both Japanese and English.

Broaching such classic subjects as mixing metaphors, catastrophe and kitlers, Lippit performs his hallmark critical analysis with gusto on the films of D. W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl and Alain Resnais, quite cheekily linking catachresis, cats and filmic representation, and suggesting by the end, "Isn't every film image ultimately a cat?"

"But does a real cat (and cats are always real, it seems) have to be in every scene of catachresis? Is this the way to underscore the rhetoric as if there were some natural and thus non-catachrestic relation between the image of the cat and the trope of catachresis? Are cats the real figures of catachresis? Is a scene of catachresis without a cat incomplete, a catalexis?"

The essay can be found on the Parasophia website, available for download in ePub and pdf formats.

Exhibition: The Part in the Story Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else, Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art, 22 May - 17 August 2014, Rotterdam

Photo courtesy of Anne Schwalbe

The BiM team relish a little garnish of intertextuality with our intertextuality and thus couldn't resist flagging this quirky and fleeting morsel in Rotterdam over the next few months. "The Part Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else" at the Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art, exhibiting from 22 May to 17 August of this year, promises to deliver on its title by both "spinning off" from and playing epilogue to their now closing long-term program "Moderation(s)", which teamed The Netherlands with Hong Kong to produce some stunning and considered work.

Over forty artists from around the world come together to conceive what it means to interpret, moderate and transmit. Amongst the associations, "time, duration and space", "memory and inscription", "transformation", "pleasure" and "encounters" take centre-stage, all of which themes developed organically throughout "Moderation(s)" over its two-year stint at the Witte de With.

"An epilogue is the final chapter at the end of a story. It can occur a significant period of time after the main plot has ended, and may offer scenes only tangentially related to the subject of the story. An epilogue can continue in the same narrative style and perspective as the preceding story, although occasionally the form can be drastically different from the overall story."

 Celebrating the flows and divergences from its mother-project, "The Part Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else" savours a messy, entangled process of conversation of works between, amongst, and becoming other works, produced by artists, curators and audiences who have had almost two years of creative dialogue to feed upon.

Read more about the exhibition and their concurrent public program on the gallery website. Also included is a fairly thorough exhibition guide and information on the previous project "Moderation(s) for those who choose to read further.