Porous Film: Collaborating with Communities
Screening and conversation with belit sağ and Jasper Coppes about making films with communities.
Doors open 15:45, starts 16:00 sharp, end time 19:00. Including food and drinks!
Reserve a free seat at the link above.
belit sağ and Jasper Coppes are both artists who have worked collaboratively with communities to make experimental documentary films. belit’s current project Remembering Otherwise is an archival research project on labor struggle of a group of first generation migrant women from Turkey in the Netherlands in 1978. Jasper’s practice questions the dominant stories we tell about landscapes and the processes that take place within them, leading him to work with experts from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) to understand indigenous perspectives on environmental changes, to communities and scientists investigating industrial contamination of lakes in a Dutch nature reserve.
We are excited to invite belit and Jasper into dialogue with each other for the first time through screenings of their short films, a live reading and a conversation between the artists. Taking the notion of ‘porosity’ as common ground for their practices, Jasper and belit will consider how the process of making film can be influenced by people and non-human collaborators. How do communities breathe life into the work?
Jasper and belit have also both worked as theory tutors at KABK for MA Artistic Research and MA Non Linear Narrative respectively. We will ask them about the role of research and theory with their work: in what way are the films (and their making) a research in itself, how do we recognise the research, and how important it that we (try to) (re)construct its meaning?
We look forward to seeing you there!
About Jasper's films
Kali Waal (2024), 22 mins
A nature reserve in the Netherlands is the setting for an ecological controversy. Decades of industrial sand extraction created lakes so deep that no light can reach the bottom. Industries recently started to dump contaminated mud in these lakes, claiming that such undeepening will increase the biodiversity. A group of young researchers gradually discovers that this landscape is neither an innocent rewilding project, nor an ecological dead-end. As resilient forms of life take centre stage a new ecology of plants, alga, animals, and machines increasingly takes over the film.
Aasivissuit (2020), 23 mins
The film follows two park rangers at work and on expeditions through the sunlit grasslands of West Greenland. As they talk, they exchange new and old knowledge of the land, for example, how ancient fertile sediment from Greenland is used to fertilize depleted soil abroad, and how microbes have adapted to deal with pollution. In the meantime, the landscape and its inhabitants perform their acts.
Bog (2017), 5 mins
A single roll of analogue film records the materiality of peat cut out of the largest peatlands in Europe. The film roll was left inside the bog for two years, in order for the local ecology to take control over its cinematic representation.
About Jasper's films
Kali Waal (2024), 22 mins
A nature reserve in the Netherlands is the setting for an ecological controversy. Decades of industrial sand extraction created lakes so deep that no light can reach the bottom. Industries recently started to dump contaminated mud in these lakes, claiming that such undeepening will increase the biodiversity. A group of young researchers gradually discovers that this landscape is neither an innocent rewilding project, nor an ecological dead-end. As resilient forms of life take centre stage a new ecology of plants, alga, animals, and machines increasingly takes over the film.
Aasivissuit (2020), 23 mins
The film follows two park rangers at work and on expeditions through the sunlit grasslands of West Greenland. As they talk, they exchange new and old knowledge of the land, for example, how ancient fertile sediment from Greenland is used to fertilize depleted soil abroad, and how microbes have adapted to deal with pollution. In the meantime, the landscape and its inhabitants perform their acts.
Bog (2017), 5 mins
A single roll of analogue film records the materiality of peat cut out of the largest peatlands in Europe. The film roll was left inside the bog for two years, in order for the local ecology to take control over its cinematic representation.
About belit's films
Sevil (2024), 7 mins
Sevil Tunaboylu, a contemporary artist from Turkey, recounts her experiences of censorship and self-censorship following an attack on her painting featuring a Kurdish guerrilla in 2016. The act of retelling reveals the isolating and familiar experience that the artists go through when censored.
Layers of a Dispute (2025) 15 mins
How do the former female migrant workers involved in a 1978 labour dispute in a vegetable processing factory in Veghel remember the times they worked there? By revisiting the archived materials with the participants of these events, the video centers lived experiences as historical knowledge
Live Reading: Female Migrant Workers Enter the Factory, 1978, Veghel (2025), 10 mins
In a repeated television news fragment from 1978, a group of female migrant workers are filmed entering the vegetable processing factory they work at in Veghel. The text attempts to re-read this fragment with the help of different archival findings.
About belit's films
Sevil (2024), 7 mins
Sevil Tunaboylu, a contemporary artist from Turkey, recounts her experiences of censorship and self-censorship following an attack on her painting featuring a Kurdish guerrilla in 2016. The act of retelling reveals the isolating and familiar experience that the artists go through when censored.
Layers of a Dispute (2025) 15 mins
How do the former female migrant workers involved in a 1978 labour dispute in a vegetable processing factory in Veghel remember the times they worked there? By revisiting the archived materials with the participants of these events, the video centers lived experiences as historical knowledge
Live Reading: Female Migrant Workers Enter the Factory, 1978, Veghel (2025), 10 mins
In a repeated television news fragment from 1978, a group of female migrant workers are filmed entering the vegetable processing factory they work at in Veghel. The text attempts to re-read this fragment with the help of different archival findings.
