Sonsbeek 20-24 force times distance

Sunday Open Kino: You Fear No Inferno When You Are Born Amidst Flames X HIBERNATION

Vrijdag, 27 augustus 2021
20:00–22:00

Location: Open Kino Pavilion at de Steile Tuin

Link to official website

It’s time to fight!

We would like to invite you to a radical feminist sci-fi movie night.

This movie night will be a kick-off to our research project HIBERNATION, which will focus on unlearning internalized patriarchal and capitalist values such as succes, competition and individualism.

Sunday Open Kino: You Fear No Inferno When You Are Born Amidst Flames X HIBERNATION

This event took place August 27th in the Open Kino at Sonsbeek 20-24 force times distance.

The movie Born in Flames by Lizzie Borden takes place in a future where the USA went through a socialist revolution. The movie follows multiple feminists from different backgrounds with different approaches as they struggle within patriarchal systems. (spoiler alert ahead!! go watch the movie!!!) A turning point is reached when Adelaide Norris, a black queer woman is murdered in prison and all these different characters start understanding the importance of a shared struggle and the power of collectivity. They start working together on changing the narrative by hijacking air time from mainstream media.


This was such a rich and interesting film as it covers so many important themes including but not limited to; revolution, police violence, intersectionality, white feminism, class struggle and direct action.


As a kick-off to hibernation these are all relevant, we want to actively and consciously reject the idea of an artist as inherently part of an art system that oppresses on the basis of capitalism. For that we need intersectional feminism, direct action, time, rest and a hibernation.


We asked everyone who attended some questions and gave them the chance to write them down and mail them to us. We got some amazing responses from which I want to share some excerpts.

The storyline in the movie that I recognized most within my experience in art school was the storyline about the white feminists who were highly educated and had successful careers in male dominated fields. These women were journalists and had direct influence on the narrative followed by the status quo. They reminded me of the trope ‘’The Exceptional Woman’’, a woman who is deemed exceptional by her ability to thrive in male dominated worlds by putting other women down and conforming to the status quo, or to put it in meme terms; gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss. I have had many experiences where I misjudged a woman in a powerful position for fighting the same fight whilst she was actually working to keep things as they are.
- Anonymous


Once I was walking in the narrow Dutch streets, the flowers that were planted in the front yard / graveyard of a house screamed to me in despair asking me to pick them and take them away from that prison, even if that will cost them their lives. I couldn’t do it because I was afraid the house owners will call the police on me, I still think of these flowers and I feel sad that I let them down.
- Omarleen


With this film, Borden explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in a 1983 united states socialist democracy. Set in a future that is seemingly identical to the time of its making, leftism isn’t enough to start systematic change. As a viewer, I got presented with a series of questions; Do you hand out flyers? Do you speak up and strike? How do you convince people to listen to you? And at what point do you pick up arms? The movie ends (spoiler alert) by the blowing up of the twin towers, which where – let me quote this amazing sentence by Borden herself - “the buildings we loved to hate because they were two phallic towers in the middle of nothing”. After watching this film, I keep on wondering what would happen next? When I look around me now, thirty-eight years later, I feel like we are still presented with the same questions. Even though calls to action are being made all the time now, it feels like this movie is doomed to continuous cycles of prescience.
-Anonymous