Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12
Oct 4, 2026 at 7:30 pm
Under the Sky of Fetishes
With Caroline Déodat & Yasmina Price
UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY
We’re delighted to welcome Caroline Déodat for a special evening of films and conversation with writer, researcher, and film programmer Yasmina Price!
Working at the intersection of ethnography and fabulation, archival research and critical theory, Déodat’s films explore the spectral lives of images and the histories of violence that continue to haunt them. Moving through colonial archives, personal genealogies, myth, dance, and landscape, her work asks how histories erased or distorted by dominant narratives might be encountered otherwise.
The evening will bring together three of Déodat’s films, Landslides (2020), Under the Sky of the Fetishes (2023), and her newest work, Nostra Memoria (2026). Across these works, Déodat traces the enduring imaginaries of slavery, colonialism, fascism, and Empire, while experimenting with forms that unsettle the authority of the archive and the hegemony of the visible.
Following the screening, Déodat will join Yasmina Price in a conversation about their shared work around African and Afro-diasporic expressive cultures, aesthetic remembrance and the politics of camera-based technologies.
Don’t miss it, come through!
Program
Under The Sky Of The Fetishes (Sous Le Ciel Des Fétiches)
HD video, ~17 minutes, 2023
Under The Sky Of Fetishes responds to the complexity of showing the ubiquitous presence of colonial archives. The film reinvests the spectres of a haunting gaze to tell the story of Mauritian sega – a practice of dance and music born during the slavery period within communities of fugitives. How do we project – literally bring out of ourselves – the narrative of the aggressor?
Nostra Memoria
HD video, 19 minutes, 2026.
Nostra Memoria is a film-collage shot in Rome, Italy, that examines the precariousness of modern citizenship and the enduring imaginaries of fascism, slavery, and Empire through the figure of the foreigner. Set in the gardens of the Villa Medici, a place haunted both by the legacy of its founder Colbert and by the canon of Western art, the film brings together personal archives, documentary footage, analog animation, and peplum imagery. These fragments interrogate the persistent obsession with national origins, purity, and heritage, revealing the political fictions through which Empire continues to shape our understanding with the notion of origins. Multiple women’s voices come together around a polyphony of intimate narratives, historical facts, and myths, as a way of writing history or caring for the dead.
Landslides
HD video, 12 minutes, 2020.
Landslides is a cinematographic essay/poem where fictional images are created from research about a Mauritian ritual born during the slavery period. The contemporary Mauritian dancer Jean-Renat Anamah crosses mythical territories of Sega which combine with intimate places of my own story. From the pixel of digital image and the shadow of electronic rhythm, this film exhumes in layers of landscapes the spectrum of a ritual erased by History through a personal genealogy: between hauntological memory and delayed archive.
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
Caroline Déodat’s practice operates at the intersection of ethnography and fabulation, archival research and critical theory. Her work explores the spectral dimension of the moving image, its capacity to haunt as well as processes of alienation, myths, and histories of violence in response to punitive architectures. Through film and installation, she seeks to create conditions of enunciation that unsettle disciplinary cartographies and challenge the hegemony of the visible.
Holding a PhD in Anthropology (EHESS), she completed the postgraduate Art program at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon (ENSBA Lyon). Déodat’s work has been shown at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, in international festivals such as Jih.lava International Documentary Film Festival, at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, at the 14th Bamako Encounters, at the CAPC – Museum of Contemporary Art of the City of Bordeaux, and soon at the 16th Dakar Biennale.
Her book Dans la polyphonie d’une île. Les ficitions coloniales du séga mauricien
(Éditions B42) has been awarded by the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Philosophical
Literature Outstanding Book Award from The Caribbean Philosophical Association in
2025.
Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anticolonial cinema, and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her work pays particular attention to the materiality of image-making and the politics of memory. She has programmed at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, and the National Gallery of Art. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes, museum catalogues and journals such as The Nation, Film Quarterly, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, World Records Journal and Criterion’s Current. She holds a Ph.D. in Black Studies and Film & Media Studies from Yale University.
From the Event
