Tuesday, Apr 7 from 4 pm to 6 pm
Innis College, Room 222E / Deluxe Screening RoomToronto, ON
Space is limited: Please register @ EVENTBRITE
You are invited to the public screening of Dialogues with the Future (2026), a new 47-minute film that revisits one of the most consequential—and overlooked—philosophical encounters in modern history. Inspired by Wicked Liberty, chapter II of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the film returns to the 1690s dialogues in Quebec between the Wendat leader and philosopher Kondiaronk and the French Baron de Lahontan, first published in New Voyages to North America (1703). Through layered historical reconstruction, contemporary reflection, and the interwoven story of a rebellious 18th-century Genevan woman, the film reconsiders the Enlightenment not as a purely European invention, but as a cosmopolitical event shaped in dialogue with Indigenous thought. Blending philosophical inquiry with interviews with the actors addressing settler–Indigenous representation in Canada today, Dialogues with the Future invites audiences to reflect on how ideas of freedom, justice, and equality emerged from cross-cultural exchange. The screening of the film will be followed by a Q & A with the filmmaker.
About the filmmaker:
Ursula Biemann (born 1955, Zurich) is an artist, author, curator, and video essayist whose research-driven practice investigates ecology, mobility, resource extraction, and climate change. Trained in art and critical theory at the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, she is known for works that combine sustained field research with cinematic and conceptual inquiry. Her projects draw on sites ranging from the Arctic and Greenland to Amazonian rainforests, tracing how oil, ice, forests, and water are entangled with social and political life, and her videos often braid documentary footage with theoretical reflection and Indigenous knowledge. Biemann has exhibited widely internationally, co-initiated the World of Matter collective (2010), and has published work including (recently) Becoming Earth (2021) and Forest Mind (2022). Her contributions have been recognized with honours such as the Swiss Grand Award for Art (Prix Meret Oppenheim, 2009) and the Zurich Art Award (2022). Website: www.geobodies.org