Exploring the emergence of collective imaginaries, Los Angeles-based Argentine artist Carmen Amengual examines how conceptions of time and history shape political imagination. Her expansive project, A Non-Coincidental Mirror, follows this line of inquiry, investigating two often-forgotten events in the cultural history of Global South solidarities: the Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in 1973 and its second iteration in Buenos Aires in 1974.

Published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name, presented in the context of the artist’s 2022–2024 VLC Fellowship, A Non-Coincidental Mirror is the first monograph on Carmen Amengual and extensively examines the filmmakers’ meetings and their myriad aftermaths from an artistic and historiographical perspective. The book brings together a visual collage of Amengual’s research, film stills, and architectural models alongside a reflection on the trajectory of Amengual’s project by exhibition curators Eriola Pira and Rachel Vera Steinberg; a conversation between the artist and independent curator and writer Natasha Marie Llorens on shared political desires, loss, and utopian imagining in Algiers and Buenos Aires; and an essay by film historian Mariano Mestman contextualizing cinematic Third-Worldism in the 1960s and 1970s.

The impetus for A Non-Coincidental Mirror, the first and second filmmakers’ meetings served as hubs where self-identified “third-world” filmmakers discussed the role of filmmaking in anticolonial struggles, made agreements, and strategized about how to produce and distribute films under dire political conditions. Drawing from an archive inherited from her mother, architect Malena Fernández—who had collaborated with the organizers of the Algiers meeting—Amengual embarked on a field investigation to follow the thread of these meetings across Algiers, Buenos Aires, and Rome. Tracing the thread of these forgotten events, Amengual seeks to reimagine a failed documentary project that the organizers attempted to make as part of the follow-up meeting in Argentina.

Experimenting with fragmentation, storytelling, documentary forms, research methodologies, and architectural design, Amengual’s project does not set out to uncover truths or present a historical account of these meetings so much as to engage with their legacy, residue, and significance in the present, be they real or imagined.

Carmen Amengual: A Non-Coincidental Mirror is published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name, co-presented by the Vera List Center and Smack Mellon at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, December 2024–February 2025, as the culmination of Amengual’s 2022–2024 VLC Fellowship.