Ruins not Monuments: Three Short Films

While many cities are recognized for their eternal monuments, the full story is made up of temporariness, ruins, gentrification, rubble, vacant buildings, and the unspectacular—everyday geometries of shared spaces. These three works—made by an anonymous collective of Syrian filmmakers, a site-specific artist, and an experimental filmmaker—excavate and reassemble complex histories, documenting urban spaces through their openings and blind spots.

The Day After (2015)
Dir. Abounaddara
2min, Digital

Made by Abounaddara, an anonymous collective of Syrian filmmakers, this short chronicles the coexistence of war and day-to-day tasks of survival as two men reinstall the door frame of a destroyed home.

Conical Intersect (1975)
Dir. Gordon Matta-Clark
19min, Digital

For the Paris Biennale in 1975, artist Gordon Matta-Clark made large cone-shaped holes in two houses near the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris as a critique of gentrification. While his site-specific works were temporary structures and experiments, this resulting “nonument” or “antimonument” was documented in Conical Intersect, leaving a record of Matta-Clark’s socially engaged provocations around the power that structures urban space.

still/here (2000)
Dir. Christopher Harris
60min, DCP

“still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence.” —Director Christopher Harris