August 2022 AIR Event
Film Screening and Discussion of “The Machine that Kills Bad People” by Roberto Rossellini with Lyndon Barrois Jr.
Film Screening with Discussion to Follow with Lyndon Barrois Jr.
August 26th from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
At LATITUDE Chicago (1821 W. Hubbard Street, Suite 207 Chicago, IL 60622)
In the film La Macchina Ammazzacattivi (1953), a village photographer’s cursed camera petrifies a donkey in the village square by re-capturing its image. It is one of many films that contain, as Barrois describes it, a kind of vampiric re-emergence of the same figure in a separate time and space. From Black Narcissus (1948) to Big Top Pee Wee(1988), the donkey has traversed time, geography and genre on screen, which echoes its condition as a laborious body around the world for millennia. Barrois Jr’s research is interested in the donkey a transnational icon whose image has persisted in the periphery of civilization around the globe. La Macchina Ammazzacattivi (The Machine that Kills Bad People) by Roberto Rosellini, as it is also a parable on the devastating potential of photographic representation.
Lyndon Barrois Jr.
Lyndon Barrois Jr. (b. New Orleans, LA) is an artist and writer based in Pittsburgh, PA as an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He is half of LAB:D, with artist Addoley Dzegede, with whom he has collaboratively staged two exhibitions, and co-authored a book of essays (Elleboog, at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2019). Using magazines, advertising, cinema, and vernacular imagery as primary subjects of inquiry, Barrois’ multimedia practice breaks down and re-configures the languages of print, design, and popular culture in order to investigate underlying ideology, ethics, and conceptions of value. He enjoys cooking for others, film clubs, reading groups, and exploring cities on foot.