e-flux Screening Room, Smack Mellon, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are pleased to co-present a single-channel iteration of A Non-Coincidental Mirror by Carmen Amengual. A conversation with the artist and art historian Soyoung Yoon, Director of Parsons Fine Arts MFA at Parsons School of Design and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, follows the screening. This program is organized in conjunction with Carmen Amengual’s solo exhibition at Smack Mellon Gallery, on view through February 9, 2025.

A Non-Coincidental Mirror is an ongoing film project resulting from research that Amengual started in 2022 about a little-explored event in the cultural history of Global South solidarities: the first Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in 1973 and its second iteration in Buenos Aires in 1974. The event served as a hub where self-identified “third-world” filmmakers discussed the role of filmmaking in anti-colonial struggles, made agreements, and strategized about how to produce and distribute films under dire political conditions. The research grew out of an archive Amengual inherited from her mother, who collaborated with the meeting organizers in Algiers. Using architecture as an entry point to the utopian horizons of the past, and to the ruinification of these in the present, the film intertwines an inquiry into political cinema with questions about the contemporary decolonial project as it emerges in filmic portraits of buildings and urban infrastructure made by the artist during her research trips.