Abundant Feminisms: A conversation with Erika Balsom

Can we rethink notions of linear progress? How do feminist filmmakers redescribe reality? And what kind of conversations should we be having across generations? Film scholar and critic Erika Balsom is the author of books like Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017). During the pandemic, she started researching feminist nonfiction films with curator and director Hila Peleg, which led to the exhibition No Master Territories (2022­–2023, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and Museum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw) and the accompanying edited volume Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (2022). Following this research, Balsom composed the film programme Cut the Line at the Beursschouwburg, Brussels. Julia Alting spoke with her about the problems with the feminist wave model, structures of forgetting, and claims of novelty. ‘These films try to represent the world in a way that would create change.’