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SCRATCH COLLECTION #4 : SOWING TROUBLE

A BIENNIAL FILM SERIES
Light Cone presents the fourth edition of Scratch Collection, a biennial series that proposes a journey through its catalog of over 7000 films, with the goal of establishing an atlas of experimental cinema from around the world while rediscovering a collection that aims to stay open and vibrant.

Light Cone entrusts each edition of this series to an invited guest (a film historian, curator, programmer or filmmaker) who, over the course of the residency, revisits the history of experimental cinema through the prism of this exceptional archive. Eschewing any encyclopedic ambition, since the aim is not to compile another anthology of classics, the guest curator is invited to take a fresh and unique gaze at Light Cone’s collection that would be marked by their personal sensibility. Each edition thus becomes a rediscovery of a catalog that is in perpetual evolution.

GUEST CURATORS: TERESA CASTRO AND ALICE LEROY
The program of this fourth edition of Scratch Collection has been entrusted to the researchers, film curators and critics Teresa Castro and Alice Leroy. They have decided to explore Light Cone’s collection under the guiding light of the philosopher Donna Haraway and her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016).

SOWING TROUBLE
Ecocritical crossings through experimental cinema

Experimental cinema has always challenged the history of forms, destabilizing perception of space and time and blurring the boundaries between matter and beings – in other words, cultivating trouble. One could even argue that experimental cinema is trouble, in the strong and creative sense given to this word by the American philosopher Donna Haraway. In Staying with the Trouble, she delivers a radical ecological analysis, affirming the necessity to invent new conceptual and political tools in order to rethink the relationships that we forge with all terrestrial creatures, including technical, artificial or virtual ones. Accompanied since a long time by her writings, as well as by the tumultuous and joyful forms of experimental film, we have devised a program that follows Haraway’s thought paths in order to draw a few inventive connecting lines through experimental cinema history. Her invitation to sow trouble was therefore our compass in navigating Light Cone’s collection. We have charted a path in the form of a string figure, echoing the tangled balls of yarn that the philosopher uses to illustrate the links between our histories and all kinds of creatures and companion species.

This string figure has six entry points, each associated with an action verb: reseed, terraform, become-with, compost, entangle, unravel. These proposals call for never dissociating filmmaking from a concern for multispecies eco-justice, since cinematographic forms themselves arise from relationships with the matter that constitutes them and the environmental histories in which they are inscribed. These programs also invite to change scales and perspectives, because those of Anthropos and all its -cenes are both "too big and too small" for the kinds of films that we need. Rather than proposing alternative narratives to spare ourselves apocalyptic ones or, worse, those of providential techno-messiahs, we have chosen another path: that of restoring to films – these alliances between image and movement, and sometimes sound – powers that are both imaginative and active. In short, these six screenings do not simply outline subjective histories of experimental cinema, but propose a community of perspectives and sensibilities. These are situated, rather than alternative, histories. Tentacular, rather than linear. Compostist, rather than progressive. Because there is no stable order, we must learn to live with the trouble – or even cultivate it.

– Teresa Castro and Alice Leroy

FILM PROGRAMS
Screenings begin at 8.30pm

Thursday, October 9th, 2025
RESEED: SOWING TROUBLE
Opening screening followed by an informal reception

Tuesday, October 14th, 2025
TERRAFORM: LIFE OF FORMS

Tuesday, October 21st, 2025
BECOME-WITH: FORMS OF LIFE

Tuesday, November 4th, 2025
COMPOST: COSMIC GARDENS AND POLLUTED EDENS

Tuesday, November 18th, 2025
ENTANGLE: STRING FIGURES

Tuesday, November 25th, 2025
UNRAVEL: SCIENCE-FICTIONS AND SPECULATIVE FABULATIONS
Closing event with a performance by Mika Taanila

The screenings will be presented by Teresa Castro and Alice Leroy and followed by discussions with the filmmakers in attendance

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