A POETIC OF YIELDING
A dual-channel installation by Simone Rapisarda
March 4 鈥� 17, 2025
Lobby Screen Array
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Free and open to the public
Two worlds suspended at the edge of time鈥攐ne captured days before a hurricane erased a fishing village from existence, the other imagining children's final messages as Earth becomes unfit for life.
This dual-channel installation embodies Rapisarda's filmmaking poetic, celebrated worldwide for its yielding qualities鈥攁 practice that moves with rather than captures its subjects, allowing unseen dimensions to surface organically and honoring voices and perspectives existing at the margins of visibility. The mesmerizing images, shot ten years apart in Cuba and British Columbia, invite viewers into humanity's liminal moments鈥攁 community at the threshold of disappearance, our collective future teetering toward extinction. Each frame becomes an archive of the transient, persisting after its physical reality has dissolved.
Together, these visual meditations weave a sensory dialogue across time and geography鈥攜ielding to presence and absence, creating space for the profound gesture of bearing witness. The work demonstrates how cinema can become a practice of yielding to what is ephemeral yet essential, allowing these fragile moments to speak on their own terms.
The installation serves as both prelude and companion to the symposium "A Practice of Yielding" on March 21, 2025, at 7:00 PM in the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, where participants will explore how collaborative filmmaking can become a form of revelation through yielding to community perspectives, particularly those of young co-creators, as both preservation and quiet resistance.