The evening started with the screening of Scorpio Rising (1964): a “Camp” masterpiece of subversive blasphemy by underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, which was introduced by Amir Vudka. To follow, artist and writer Sebástian González de Gortari performed a lecture specially composed for the night. With tongue-in-cheek, he summoned the figure of Georges Bataille, advocating for the powers of total consumption and cannibal ecstasy. The evening continued with a mix of music and samples from the archive and library of radio host and curator Radna Rumping.

Sampling, subverting, appropriating, drawing on parody and humor, are strategies used by the guests. They somehow are attempts to crack open a gaze which is paradoxically built on the remains of a trope: the cannibal and its metaphoric power.

The figure of the cannibal signals anomaly, the ultimate otherness. It conflates the inside and outside, blurring the line between the self and the other. The cannibal embodies as well a figure of emancipation by assimilating (culture and nutrients) and by resisting a fixed categorization. It reveals the act of eating as an act of semantic confusion that enables one to become another: a metabolic phenomenon that calls to mind the encounter of two particles which, by attraction, consume and elicit one another, in an open-ended process of becoming.

About the artists & contributors

Kenneth Anger is the author of films whose radical originality has transformed the way cinema is thought and made and has inspired filmmakers such as Lynch, Scorsese or Fassbinder. One of his most famous films, “Scorpio Rising” (1963) combines queer, macho and pop aesthetics with mass culture. It is emblematic of Anger’s continuous endeavour to critically and playfully challenge stereotypes. As Jonas Mekas described in his column for the “Village Voice in 1963, Anger’s films “are illuminating and opening up sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts […] It is a world of flowers of evil, of illumination, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.”

Sebastián González de Gortari is a shaman of moderately ill repute, limited mystical means, and great dark unbridled ambitions. He has cast an undisclosed number of curses whose effects are still to be determined, acquired the guidance of three powerful but capricious spirits, and lost his mind and whereabouts decidedly too few times. Desperate, he turned to Academy in the hope of improving his trickery-and-bedazzlement game. As a Ph.D. researcher in “Audio and Visual Arts” at the Hasselt University, he might acquire, if not to fame and fortune, at least some new phantasmagorical presences in his body.

Radna Rumping is an independent curator, writer, and radio host based in Amsterdam. Her work is embedded in music culture, (contemporary) art, communality and a critical view of present-day communication. She has realized exhibitions and public programmes at a variety of small and large institutions, stimulating new encounters between bodies and buildings, artists and audiences. Radna is part of the Non-fiction collective, hosts a radio show at Red Light Radio and is co-founder of Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, online radio dedicated to the arts.

Amir Vudka is a lecturer at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. He is the film programmer of De Nieuwe Regentes theatre in The Hague and the artistic director of Sounds of Silence festival for silent film and contemporary music.