reopening black hole cinematheque

black hole cinematheque is an artist-run, community-based microcinema project/archive which began in 2009 and ran free & public, weekly screenings of experimental, artist-made moving images and performances with a local and international focus out of our West Oakland location from 2011 - 2019. Our core beliefs that art & culture is a basic need that should be accessible to all regardless of class, race, or gender and that all artists/artworkers deserve fair payment for their labor continue to be a central and guiding principle.

In 2019, we lost a years-long struggle to fight the eviction of our exhibition space and home of the last decade. This struggle was triggered by the tragic events of the fire in Oakland on December 2nd, 2016, which claimed the lives of so many of our loved ones & friends. Due to the subsequent actions of landlords who saw this horrible tragedy as an "opportunity" to force out low-income tenants, and despite the monumental efforts of our community and tenant's rights organizations to prevent it, we lost our space in July 2019. As the space also served as our living quarters, we became effectively forced out of the Bay Area. Due to the highly unexpected events of the Covid 19 pandemic, we found ourselves stranded back in Oakland while on a fatefully timed visit back in March 2020. In the intervening years of detrimental social isolation, we found the need to gather together for the sharing of art and community more important than ever. With these aims, we have begun to reconstitute the idea of black hole cinematheque in the form of a roving series that will be held at a number of like-minded spaces in Oakland.

However, in the intervening years since the closure of our original space, much of our gear has fallen into disrepair after a decade + of usage, and we are hoping to raise funds to help pay for a much-needed new digital projector and the servicing and repair of our 16mm projectors.

We hope to return to screenings on a twice-a-month schedule, stretched out over a seasonally partitioned year (averaging about 14 programs), running from late Winter to early Summer and again from Fall to Winter in 2023. These would incorporate curated screenings of recent and archival films and in-person programs of touring/invited filmmakers. Previously our model had been for each screening to be completely free to attend, with donations accepted, all of which went to help pay artists who appeared in person. We will continue this model but hope that additionally, part of the funding we might receive from this to establish a more solid base amount to pay for each artist presenting, as well as a small budget to rent prints and videos for curated programs.

Over a decade of programming, we have developed strong ties to a number of interwoven communities that make up the vast networks of experimental filmmakers and artist-run cinema spaces around the world. In opening up our series again, we hope to continue to provide a node through which these image-making communities can continue to engage with Bay Area audiences and artists, as well as to provide a welcoming platform for local filmmakers to present their works in a way they previously might not have had access to.

Our approach is one of community building and mutual aid, something we feel increasingly necessary in a prohibitively precarious Bay Area environment. We hope to continue our work in presenting art in a way that endeavors to remove financial and status-based barriers of engagement and moves us away from merely artistic production and consumption in the capitalist mode and towards the nurturing of a wholistic social organism responsible to each other.