Larissa Sansour will present In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain, 2015 as a part of Art Dubai's Cinema programme on Saturday, 19 March. Cinema Saturday is a day-long rolling programme of new artists’ films, marking Art Dubai 2016’s closing day.
The film is a combination of sci-fi and archival imagery set against a deeply mesmerizing musical score and ambiguous time and place. At times it projects itself into the past and at others propels itself into the future with a view to creating a manufactured history. A female protagonist who describes herself as a "narrative terrorist" is questioned by her interlocutor, whose identity remains unknown and is open to speculation - is she a journalist, a psychiatrist or an interrogator?
The protagonist tells of being part of a resistance group seemingly on the brink of the apocalypse where "archeology is the frontline". The weapons of this unknown opposition group are unconventional - elaborate porcelain decorated with the Kefiyyeh motif typically worn in Palestine and symbols of their decades of resistance. In the film's most dramatic scene these porcelain pieces, which belong to an entirely fictional civilization, are delivered to their location and buried into the ground. A dark horizon is dotted with spaceships dropping bombs onto the open desert landscape that crack as they hit the ground, spilling out the plates. These are "the facts on the ground for future archeologists to excavate", their aim to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands: once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this people.
