Shezad Dawood (London) on Parallel Universes and a Possible Film, with guests Hicham Khalidi (curator, Brussels) and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (writer and critic, Beirut).

How can violence function as an act of resistance?

The development of Shezad Dawood’s project, Towards the Possible Film, is the result of research involving a number of key fictional, theoretical and anthropological texts, including Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy (1979), a science fiction novel exploring quantum mechanics and parallel universes. Dawood’s film focuses on a scene from Wilson’s novel, in which astronauts and tribal group confront one another ­– a clash that speaks to another novel, this time Pierre Clastres’ Archaeology of Violence (1979) in which the war among South American Indians is read as a strategic avoidance of state formation.

Inspired by a series of trips to Morocco, where “working sessions” were staged at Dar Al Ma’Mun, Marrakech and Sidi Ifni, Shezad Dawood’s Towards the Possible Film traces, or ‘documents’ a series of fictional journeys that upset our sense of time and space. Riffing on science-fiction and anthropology, this film in becoming promises to engage with concepts of indigenousness, non-linear time, and the politics of language, all the while prompting encounters with the mystical.