UnionDocs is thrilled to present We Will Cut You, an exceptional program of performance and films with two artists traveling from France, filmmaker Callisto McNulty and writer Émilie Notéris.

Since 2019 McNulty and Notéris have collaborated on the making of live narrations, where they revisit  Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos’s mise-en-scène of the video SCUM Manifesto (1976). Through the use of reading, singing and film editing, the two artists respond to the news and reclaim their right to talk back to power. While expressing their anger with a lot of humor and engagement, they also trace a joyful and turbulent path out of the dominant patriarchal narrative.

This program includes a live performance followed by a screening of two films: Matthieu Ponchel’s Violences that Exist Don’t Exist based on Notéris’s investigation on state violence in today’s France, and McNulty’s documentary Delphine et Carole on Seyrig and Roussopoulos’s feminist collaborative filmmaking in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

After the screening, McNulty and Notéris will be in conversation with curator Mathilde Walker-Billaud.

Program

McNulty & Notéris reenact Delphine Seyrig et Carole Roussopoulos’s video SCUM Manifesto (1976), reading excepts from Valerie Solanas’s radical text in relation to a selection of TV news clips from 2022.

“Bodies were beaten. Hands were torn off, eyes were gouged out. Young people were humiliated. Women were raped and violated. People have been killed. But violences do not exist, we are told.”

With Kahina Ouali’s charismatic voice and Allan De La Houdaye’s percussive soundtrack, this short fim is a sensory and textural dive into Macronique, Things that Don’t Exist Still Exist, a powerful and challenging text by Notéris on state violence.

In the mid-1970s, Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos began making videos devised as political interventions to champion the struggle of women. Delphine and Carole retraces this collaboration by mixing video images filmed by the two directors, interviews, and archival material.

runtime: 79 mins

Callisto McNulty is a filmmaker, editor, author and translator (born 1990, Paris). She is interested in marginalized voices, in archives that she reactivates.

In 2017, she co-directed, with Anne Destival, Éric’s Tape (1974’ with Éric Bauer, Colette Lumière, and William Furlong). In 2019, she directed Delphine and Carole (1970), which was selected in over 30 international film festivals (Forum – 69th Berlinale, San Sebastian film Festival, Doc Fortnight-MOMA, Jeonju Film Festival, etc.) and received 7 prizes, among which was best documentary film by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics.

In 2020-2021, she was an artist member of Académie de France in Madrid (Casa de Velázquez). During this year-long residency, she developed a documentary film (in progress) and made Pénélopiade (1933, Chanoises Productions).

She is the co-editor and co-author of several books, including SCUM Manifesto (2017, Naima), Bibelot (2018, Wendy Gallery), Le Géant endormi – Brad Holland (2021, Cahiers dessinés).

Émilie Notéris is a text worker, born in 1978.  She prefaces the anarchists Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, Femmes et anarchistes (Blackjack Editions, 2014); translates ecofeminists, Reclaim! (Cambourakis, 2016), the Xenofeminist Manifesto; and feminist activists Sarah Schulman, La Gentrification des esprits (B42, 2018) and Shulamith Firestone, Zones Mortes (Brook, 2020). In August 2020, Macronique, les choses qui n’existent pas existent quand même, a political reaction text written between October 2019 and March 2020, was published by Cambourakis, collection Sorcières, mapping police violence which, like sexual violence, can simultaneously occur and not exist; and in September 2020, Alma Matériau, published by Paraguay, a feminist history of art which is not only a history of white women, and replaces the smothering heritage of fathers with the desiring quest for elective, not exclusively biological mothers. She is currently working on a draft for a biography of Monique Wittig’s eternal life, to be published by October 2022 by Les Pérégrines, collection Icônes.

Mathilde Walker-Billaud is a New York-based curator working across media and contexts, with a special interest in time-based art and discursive practices.

She held positions at the Centre national de la danse, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, Villa Gillet (NYC festival “Walls and Bridges”) as well as company nora chipaumire, and she organized public programs and workshops in various institutions including BARD College, Triangle Arts, Anthology Film Archives, the Metrograph (Flaherty NYC) and UnionDocs. Her most recent projects are the BKH Curator Award 2020 exhibition The World Is Gone, I Must Carry You at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and the live program “Jeanne Duval. A Spectre in a French Landscape” at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her writing and voice have appeared in BOMB Magazine, ART PAPERS, and the podcast Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. She received an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in 2019.

Matthieu Ponchel is a French director and photographer. He’s one of the founders of the multi-artists association Studio Lambda, with which he made several awarded short films. Societal issues such as racism, sexism and injustice drive him. In 2019, he directs Words from the ZAD, a documentary about activists who stopped an airport from being built on their land. He’s currently adapting a play by renowned author Tamara Al Saadi in a short fiction, a film that will question prejudices and everyone’s bias. And he’s developing his first long feature, The robots valley, about his youth in the french suburbs in the late 90’s, a film that is supported, among others, by the CNC.