O Ghosts of the World, Arise!
In a climate where the ruling regime aims to rewrite history to fit its narrative, I would like to preface this program with a few questions.
What if we were to start by returning to the essence of storytelling?
What if we were to see that every story is worth telling?
What if we were to write the truth rather than record it?
Then, what if we free ourselves to tell stories more imaginatively about anything and using various forms or approaches to storytelling?
In other words, what if we see subjectivity as a method, and of course without compromising respect for the truth?
Reading You (Angeline Teh, 2023), L’Mina (Randa Maroufi, 2025), Lion’s wrinkle and Crow’s feet (Juliette Léonard, 2024), The Flow of Resilience (Pranami Koch, 2024), My Grandmother is a Skydiver (Polina Piddubna, 2025), Apoleon (Amir Youssef, 2024), Last May in Theaters (Arief Budiman, 2025), and Sharp Objects (Taufiqurrahman Kifu, Hattie Wade; 2025) have answered and transcended those questions. Their makers believe that the past is never truly disappear. It is always there, just buried somewhere, like ghosts waiting to be rediscovered.
These ghosts of the past can be both present and absent. They take the form of fragments in various shapes and sizes: videos or film footage, objects, sounds, faded photographs, written archives, or incomplete and blurred pieces of memory, like ghosts that creep into narratives that are not always chronological and/or presented as facts.
The ghosts of the past are presented to us as an attempt to evoke an affectual experience. They are presented not to show what happened in the past as a completely factual truth, but as a way of remembering or feeling the past as truth. Can it then fill the gaps or cracks in the spectrum of the greater narrative and become a counter-perspective to the narrative constructed by those in power? I think this will be inevitable if we manage to arouse the ghosts of the past.
