Ithaca College

The 24th edition of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) continues the theme of INFILTRATIONS and invites submissions for its online exhibition, Entangled Infiltrations. We are seeking community-based media, counter-games, interactive documentaries, new media art, prototypes, radical cartography, tactical media, ultra-short videos

Makers of selected projects will be invited to participate in one of FLEFF’s Rapid Response Roundtable events. The work will be featured on the FLEFF website.

2020/2021 has cracked open a push-and-pull between regressive and progressive forces.

On the one hand, COVID-19 exposes the fissures and inequalities in local and global public-health systems. On the other hand, new forms of pandemic camaraderie have formed in mutual-aid societies and urgent calls for public discourse on public health.

On one hand, the pandemic exposes the extent of the global rise of nationalism and fascism. On the other, collective resistance and new coalitions have emerged across class, gender, national, race, sex, and other divisions.

The year 2019 closed ominously. The coronavirus was spreading from human to human. It infiltrated our lives through neoliberalism’s global connections and racialized structural inequalities. The biggest outbreaks occurred in places with the most air, land, and water connections.

The biggest victims were historically marginalized communities, who often lost jobs and already suffered from chronic illness and lack of medical access. Streets in Ecuador were deserted in April 2020 because hospitals were over capacity. Victims’ bodies lay on the streets. State-wide lockdowns in India in May forced migrant workers to walk hundreds of kilometres to get home. Domestic violence surged globally. Economic, political, public-health, and racialized crises exposed the larger climate crisis.

Yet during this violence, transformative resistance emerged, signalling hopeful movements towards environmental, gendered, racial, and sexual justice.

In June, Black Lives Matter protests against the US police brutal murder of George Floyd occurred across the globe.

In September, feminist movements demonstrated against inequality and sexual violence across Latin America.

In October, Chilean student/youth movements helped overturn the Pinochet-era constitution by popular democratic vote, a major victory for democracy around the globe.

In December, Argentina legalized abortion and 250 million workers in India staged a strike against farm reforms.

These entwined structural inequalities will not disappear with elections any more than COVID-19 will vanish with mass vaccination. They require sustained reflection on how the pandemic lays bare entanglements in every aspect of our lives.

We seek work and work-in-progress that helps us to reconfigure and to rethink these entangled infiltrations moving into biological, political, and virtual bodies. Entangled Infiltrations seeks work and work-in-progress that consider infiltrations entwining almost every aspect of our lives: the coronavirus, free market economics, reactionary nationalist politics, patriarchal privileges, state violence, structural racism.

Please submit a 150-word synopsis, 75-word artist bio, and link to: FLEFF Digital Curator Dale Hudson (New York University Abu Dhabi) and FLEFF Assistant Digital Curator Claudia Costa Pederson (Wichita State University) by 15 February 2021 at fleff.digital.curators@gmail.com. Submissions must be accessible for online exhibition without passwords but can include documentation of live performances or gallery installations.

The exhibition will launch in conjunction with FLEFF, located in Ithaca (New York), United States from 22 March–11 April 2021. Due to the continuing pandemic, this year’s festival is 100% virtual.

For additional information, visit: https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/. Previous exhibitions include Radical Infiltrations, Networked Disruptions, Invisible Geographies, Iterations as Habitats, and Interface/Landscape. Projects from past editions appear in Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places.

FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT