Supernatural Agency and Queer Futures

“Supernatural Agency and Queer Futures” is the fourth program in e-flux’s This Was Tomorrow, a series interested in explications and inquiries of futurity. This four-part series, screened over the course of this month, presents a feature film with one or two, often experimental, short films. The films of This Was Tomorrow latch upon technology and science-fiction as modes of articulating a cinematic sense of the future. In tonight’s installment of the series, e-flux screens Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) with Isadora Neves Marques’s The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant (2016) and Peggy Ahwesh’s The Third Body (2007), which, as a whole, consider forms of embodiment, from the ghostly to the virtual.

The green star of Neves Marques’s short film is the Mimosa pudica, a plant that recoils when touched. In The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant, we observe the metal fingers of a robot descend upon the plant, also known as the “touch-me-not,” to caress its leaves. From various angles and close-ups of both plant leaves and metal digits, this two-minute short depicts the relationship of touch that transpires between the Mimosa pudica and the robot. A music loop, which quickens and fills with drama as the robot comes closer to the plant, plays in the background. Moments of the robot touching the plant are suggestive of sexual dynamics between humans, but in the film is the willing inscription of a new sexuality. The fundamental elements of sex for robot and plant remain the same; however, here is a sense of duality, and of action—touching—and response—pulling inward—that comprise an ecosystem of motion.

This very idea, the sexuality of the non-human, is the focus of Ahwesh’s The Third Body, which follows a man and woman as they awake in a strange, surreal land. The earth is cracked, the ground smoky; it could be a desert, but where these two are doesn’t seem to abide by any natural law. Their environment isn’t natural. These lone inhabitants of a new land, akin to Adam and Eve, are intercut with footage of people wearing virtual reality headsets. As Ahwesh's seven-minute short nears its end, our Adam and Eve finally come to an embrace in their virtual idyll. The Third Body moves through implication alone; the entire short is wordless, offering only eerie background music. Even though the film’s beginning might, deceptively, invite you to believe that its two figures are human beings, we eventually learn they’re only simulacra, bringing to The Third Body the flummoxing quandary of agency: What are the ethics of intimacy if neither virtual Adam nor virtual Eve truly possess their own, independent will?

The living and dead become intimate in this program's feature, Atlantics. In Diop’s film, Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) is in love with Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), although arranged to be married to Omar, a rich man she does not love. Repeatedly denied of his working wages, Souleiman—without even a goodbye to Ada—leaves Dakar on a boat toward Europe with other aggrieved workers. When Souleiman’s body later washes up on the shore, Ada’s body becomes anything but hers in grief; she is unable to take care of herself, and to eat, as her own marriage to Omar draws closer. Freakishly, on the night of her wedding, the lavish white bed where Ada is expected to consummate her marriage sets on fire. Here, Altantics becomes a ghost story. The women around Ada begin to wake up with dirty feet and in dirty dresses; at night, their bodies are possessed by the ghosts of the dead workers, who won’t rest until they’ve finally received their wages. Souleiman, too, returns, although not in a woman’s body, but the body of Issa (Amadou Mbow), the police officer assigned to investigate the arson.

Ada, whose virginity comes under Omar’s suspicion, eventually does have sex for the first time with the man she loves. Rather, the ghost of the man she loves: Their intimacy is depicted through mirrors, where we see Ada and Souleiman make love; outside of the mirrors, we see Ada and Issa make love. Atlantics, along with The Pudic Relation and The Third Body, spurs new understandings of sex. In having sex with the ghost of Souleiman, Ada is able to reassert authority over her own body and life, and finally put the ghost of her dead amour to rest. Sex is Ada's path to overcoming, her means of releasing herself from the grip of others; sex, in Atlantics, is a mode of self-determination. At the end, Ada looks directly at the camera for the first and only time in the film. She is finally ready to be herself, to be “Ada, to whom the future belongs.”

“IV. Supernatural Agency and Queer Futures” screens tonight, July 25, at e-flux as part of the series “This Was Tomorrow.”