re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 2: Shifting Ground, 53' ―

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Indoor Screening
Friday 08 August 2025 · 6:00pm screening
CineCycle; 129 Spadina Avenue, Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

This program confronts the violent realities of colonialism, genocide, and ongoing struggles over land, history, and representation. From staged images used to justify the genocide and dispossession of the Modoc people in Northern California, to the lived experience of a Palestinian family enduring occupation and genocide, and the ecological devastation caused by invasive Common Reed and plastic sheeting on the traditional lands of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag peoples, these films expose how settler colonial powers claim and control territory by controlling how stories are told. Spanning Cree territory, Puerto Rico’s occupied shores, and contested urban spaces, these works challenge dominant narratives of power and belonging. Through intimate moments, historical reckoning, and acts of defiance, the artists demand we confront who owns the past—and who will shape the future. Bold and unflinching, this program invites urgent reflection on sovereignty, justice, and the fight to reclaim what colonialism seeks to erase.

Soup Over Bethlehem · Larissa Sansour Black Glass · Adam Piron Isla Flotante · Jezabeth Roca González Practice, Practice, Practice · Kevin Jerome Everson Plastic Aortas · Malic Amaliya opwêyakatâmêw · Tyson Houseman

Isla Flotante

Directed by Jezabeth Roca González
Puerto Rico · 2024 · 5'00

Isla Flotante begins with a phone call between the artist and their cousin, recalling a father’s comment that Puerto Rico shifts a few centimeters each day. This quiet detail unfolds into a layered meditation on colonialism—U.S. occupation, forced migration, environmental crisis, and political abandonment. Through voice and image, the film traces the ways Puerto Ricans are made to drift in and out of their homeland, caught between memory and imposed distance. The “floating island” becomes both a metaphor and a reality: always tethered, never fully free.

Jezabeth Roca Gonzàlez is a multidisciplinary maker and educator working in collaboration with their family. Through multimedia installations Jezabeth makes use of video, photography and ephemeral materials such as soil, and plants to explore the intimacy of place and the ever-shifting, migratory movement of people between the U.S. and Puerto Rico–known colloquially as El Va y Ven.

By implementing autobiographical methods they explore the banality of everyday life. Invested in generating visual records of their own family dynamics, which include themes of generational difference, altered landscape, and the cultures and aesthetics of care. Combining and contrasting the autobiographical with the speculative, Jezabeth constructs video vignettes and builds multiple, parallel realms that question the manner in which colonial legacies shape the land and the duality inherent in everyday life.

Jezabeth is an Instructor of Record for the Photography & Video Department at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, previously at the Film & Video Department at The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). They have also been awarded numerous residencies, including the University of the Arts iLAB residency, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Bemis Centre for Contemporary Arts, and in 2020 They were one of four national recipients of the Dedalus MFA Fellowship. Their work has been screened or exhibited internationally including at Taller Comunidad La Goyco (San Juan), Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia), Video Caribx at Documenta Fifteen (Kassel) Germany, and Hessel Museum of Art (New York) CCS Bard College. [↗]