Speculations
Ben Balcom, 16mm, 16’10’’, 2016
Midwestern science fiction. An affective portrait of place. An exploration of the city as abstraction. A portrait of Bellona. Catastrophe lingers on the periphery. Shadows crossing shadows. Standing side by side, some of these people we used to meet at random while out working or walking. They talk their way through this precarious place. Most of them are gone now. The city soaks them up.

Ben Balcom
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Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator currently living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is the co-founder and programmer of Microlights Cinema, an artist-run microcinema which has been operating since 2013 and has hosted artists from around the world. Recently, his films have taken a lyrical approach to documenting the spaces and legacies of now-defunct experimental schools. Prior to that he made a series of introspective landscape films that engaged with Milwaukee’s progressive political past and contemporary anxieties about the future. Earlier films used abstraction to explore the tensions between perception and communication, with a reflexive attention on the medium itself.
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IG: @be_right_balcom • X: @benbalcom