CCA Highlights: June 2023
In addition to its regular scheduling of some brilliant film screenings and exhibitions, the CCA will be extra lively this month with the arrival of two immersive arts festivals
About to Take Off / A Punto De Despegar
(Cinema, 6 Jun)
CinemaAttic, who curate screenings and retrospectives of Spanish and Ibero-American cinema, have arranged a showing of A Punto De Despegar, or About to Take Off, a 2015 documentary by Lorena Best and Robinson Díaz. The film explores San Agustín, a small village on the outskirts of Lima endangered by a planned expansion of the nearby international airport. In order to avoid objectifying San Agustín’s residents through their filmmaking, the documentarians become personally intertwined with their struggle, as they cover a fragile ecosystem already endangered by a sprawling, neoliberal urbanisation.
Spit it Out
(Cinema, Clubroom, Theatre, 16-17 Jun)
Returning for its second annual iteration, the Spit it Out festival is dedicated to building intersectional communities, and supporting their role in sharing information on Transformative Justice and healing trauma through creativity. Programmed by the grassroots charity of the same name, the festival reaches venues from Summerhall to King Tut’s, but regarding what’s on at CCA, you can catch events such as Fantasy and Kink with sex educator Ruth Elliot, Kwaku Adjei’s talk on allyship in anti-racism, a writing workshop by Glasgow’s female-and-nonbinary songwriting collective Hen Hoose, and loads more events and exhibitions.
Pinkie Maclure: Lost Congregation
(Gallery, 16 Jun-12 Aug)
Award-winning artist Pinkie Maclure has developed an immersive multimedia installation that will see the CCA Gallery transformed into an otherworldly church that has lost its congregation. Maclure then fills this liminal space with highly personal symbolism, utilising skills in engraving, painting and layering to create stained glass windows that depict scenes of addiction and wasteful consumerism. Maclure mourns the losses of small, rural communities, the kinds that would have filled places like this chapel, whilst revering the natural world for its power to overwhelm and reclaim territory. The significance of grassroots activism is juxtaposed with the authoritative ethos of the church, in what will be a colourful, illuminating experience.
Present Futures
(Cinema, Clubroom, Intermedia Gallery, Theatre, 22 Jun-24 Jun)
Present Futures is a multidisciplinary festival that platforms local and international artists who seek to explore the relationship between the world now and what the world might one day be. This summer's fifth edition of the festival explores new mythologies, and the act of creating myth itself, as a natural by-product of the antagonistic uncertainty by which recent years have been defined. Things to see include Performance of Scent, where choreographer Louise Ahl and scent designer Clara Weale share environmental scents created for an experimental opera, and a screening of Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the unfinished film by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. There's also The Divine Cypher, the newest performance by Ana Pi which was choreographed in response to Deren's film, and much more.