Output details

Eija-Liisa Ahitla: The Palpable Event.

Brief Description

An article on the film-maker Eija-Liisa Ahitla in the peer-reviewed journal Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image devoted to the issue of Embodiment and the Body. In this article Conio claims that contemporary critiques of the installation form perpetuate now stagnant debates between formalism and illusionism, and that Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s film installations recompose this debate through her creation of works that ‘think’ through the interplay between the affective, the perceptual and the cognitive.

Research Rationale

Conio uses philosophical concepts rarely used in film theory, ‘Aion’, ‘Chronos’ and ‘The Event’, in order to identify a productive encounter between philosophy, film and the installation form. He claims that the film installation works of Ahtila produce this kind of encounter. In a similar fashion to his work on Picasso in Palestine (journal A Prior No 22 2011) Conio tests concepts by taking them from one context and applying them to another, in so doing questioning their originating sense and producing new meanings.

Strategies Undertaken

Through the deployment of the Deleuzian concepts of time and ‘The Event’ the article argues that Ahitla’s Where is Where? (2009) is an exemplary rendition of The Event structure of life and reveals the potential of the cinematic installation to make this palpable. In this way, ‘The Event’ (as something that happened and is depicted in the film) is intensified, in turn transforming the installation into an Event itself.

Conio presented the results of this research to a Research Seminar at the University of Kent in 2012. Professor Ahtila provided DVD’s and materials to support the writing of article and commented, that the writing is ‘very inspiring, and super important to me that you write with that kind of approach’.