Issue #2 / Winter 2025
Let’s spoil!
The second issue of Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine turns to practices of recycling, salvaging, replicating, appropriating, reappropriating, regurgitating, and remediating, as they are used in film and performance works that examine environmental, epistemological, historical, and socio-political structures as if they are notional spolia: fragments to plunder, retrieve, critique, and refashion.
About blessed
asher hartman and Jasmine Orpilla
Hartman and Orpilla share with us three pieces about their production “Blessed with Switch” (2024): the script of the theater production, a text about the production, and a rehearsal video.
POWERNAP
Nina sarnelle
Extrapolating from her performance piece “POWERNAP”, Nina Sarnelle asks whether care work is a form of solidarity. In her essay, she explores clicktivism, protest culture, and fauxtomated labor as sites of coming to terms with care work, and her own artistic practice.
The Trouble with the Archive
Tatum Howey
Looking at the work of Sanaz Sohrabi, Miranda Pennel, and Onyeka Igwe, Tatum Howey finds the limits and dangers that the legacies of British Petroleum’s archives pose to the filmmakers and films that embark on a mission to stage an intervention in them. Films of Sanaz Sohrabi and Miranda Pennell
Workers Fleeing the Factory
ryat yezbick
Examining news media coverage of mass shootings in the U.S. since the 1960s, Yezbick investigates the impact of public violence on contemporary culture
lost gazes
mohamed abdelkarim
“I have always wondered how we ended up here, in this place where time no longer moves forward but instead coils around itself.”
A speculative story in a future, dystopian Egypt.
Fire, Form and F(r)ictions in Under the Hanging Tree
Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja
Tracking the way Namibian histories are haunting Perivi Katjavivi’s feature film, Mushaandja looks at the film’s potentialities in crafting mode of addressing them.
ABOUT MIMESIS MAGAZINE
MIMESIS IS A PLATFORM FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS AT THE INTERSECTION OF CONTEMPORARY FILM PRACTICES AS ACTS OF PERFORMANCE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF OUR EVERY DAY AS FUNDAMENTALLY SHAPED BY THE CINEMATIC AND THE MOVING IMAGE. WE SEE FILM’S TRANS-TEMPORAL COMMUNICATION CAPACITY AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO HELP DECIPHER POWER STRUCTURES WITHIN OUR SENSORIAL WORLDS. WRITING ON FILM PERFORMANCE PRACTICES GUIDES OUR LEARNING PROCESS AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION OF THOSE MODES OF POWER. WE EMBRACE THE COMPULSION FOR THE MIMETIC AS A CHANCE FOR MUTATION AND FAILURE.
MIMESIS IS AN INDEPENDENTLY PUBLISHED MAGAZINE FOR AND FROM PRACTITIONERS OF FILM AND PERFORMANCE. WE ARE OPEN TO EXPERIMENTAL, POETIC, THEORETICAL, FICTIONAL, AND INTERVIEW CONTRIBUTIONS.
Mimesis Magazine is a privately produced, artist-run journal, based in Oakland, CA (USA), Mumbai (India), and Berlin (Germany).
Published by Mimetic Publishing.
Issue #2:
Editors: Neha Choksi, Lior Shamriz, and Elbe Trakal
Contributing Editors: Matt Polzin and Anna R. Winder