A Non-Coincidental Mirror is a film installation by Los Angeles-based, Argentine artist and 2022–2024 VLC Fellow Carmen Amengual. This exhibition results from ongoing 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.

Based on an archive Amengual inherited from her mother—who collaborated with the organizers of the meeting in Algiers—the artist embarked on an field investigation that took her to Algiers, Buenos Aires, and Rome to follow the thread of this forgotten event, and film in these locations as she looked to reimagine a failed documentary project that the organizers, together with the artist mother, attempted to make as part of the follow up meeting in Argentina.

The exhibition consists of a film installation that creates a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of this experience. Using architecture as an entry point to the utopian horizons of the past, and to the ruinification of these in the present, the multi-channel film installation intertwines three storylines: an inquiry on political cinema and its methodologies, as they manifested in the Filmmakers’ Meetings; a question about the role of architecture and the decolonial project—reflecting on some of the architectural projects in Algiers and the student-led efforts to decolonize architecture education at the University of Buenos Aires; and a question about the present, as it emerges from the filmic portraits of buildings and urban infrastructure that the artist conducted during her research trips.

As part of the film-installation, Amengual designed a series of functional sculptural objects and exhibition display structures that further underscore the cross-continental entanglement of localized, anti-Imperialist pedagogy and cultural expression. They offer a space for attentive viewership, communal reflection and study, while also showcasing the research, documents, facsimiles, and other printed material from Amengual the artist’s ongoing project.

Told in the present, A Non-Coincidental Mirror speaks of Global South solidarities and reclaims for the current moment a concrete experience of transnational, self-organized collaboration, while foregrounding the social and historical conditions that made it possible.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program, a screening program, guided tours, and a publication featuring new commissioned essays and designed by Jacob Lindgren.