problem space

Though I wasn’t conscious of this linkage when curating our Winter 2026 issue, on subsequent review I realized all three films incorporate split screens. Though the video essays and cinepoems in this issue are tonally and formally different from one another, there is a preoccupation with doubling throughout each one – sometimes for a mirroring effect, but also to create a dialectic between the two moving images that generates a new idea or visual polyphony. I love thinking of each of these works as pieces that invite you through the looking glass: of commerce, time, or desire. These films will haptically, intellectually, and emotionally touch you, as well as open up new ways of seeing with kaleidoscopic brilliance and formal prowess. 

In Esé Emmanuel’s artist statement of problem space (2025), she writes, “My body is a camera, a blinking, unsettled machine. There is a real interest in its mimetic desire – like a cancer, growing, needing containment. An enactment of the violent hyper-productive regime of global capital.” Emmanuel’s words recall Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s observation from “Toward a Third Cinema,” that, “The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.” Both Emmanuel and Solanas and Getino are asking: how can cinema disrupt economies, social mores, or bourgeois entertainment? For Emmanuel, the answer is to embody the camera as it moves through a cramped market in Lagos, furtively inventorying various fabrics and clothes. And yet, the camera and the filmmaker can never fully divest themselves from the “hyper-productive regime of global capital.” problem space is a kinetic exploration of global commerce and waste, as well as the ways in which machines primarily meant for entertainment can be “weaponized” to interrogate and critique the very visual economies they capture.