The World I Left Will Not Leave Me

“That is why, even if the transclass takes on the colour of the places where she sets herself down… her contexture is always a tincture. She cannot deny her mutation and claim to return her native colour in full, for any return home carries the patina of the distant stay or the invisible varnish of the detour. The transclass is thus characterized by a twofold affiliation: she is in the middle of milieus, at the intersection, in the in-between.”
Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-reproduction — Chantal Jaquet

To be transclass is to exist in the in-between: between taste, cultures, and ways of imagining and being in the world. It is to leave one’s origin — by choice or necessity — through acquiring social, economic, or cultural capital. This mobility, however, often comes at the cost of dislocation from one’s roots, without ever fully arriving in the class one moves towards. It is an imperfect ascent. The interiorised effects of class formation in early life continue to shape one’s experience, distinguishing the transclass from those born into the world they later enter.

The World I Left Will Not Leave Me assembles works made by filmmakers from working-class backgrounds as they navigate this in-betweenness, reaching back across the gap that has opened between their current social position and that of their origin. The films take multiple stances on their histories and adopt varied forms — from fiction to essay to documentary — reflecting the polyphony of class experiences. Together, they illustrate what happens when those economically, socially, and culturally marginalised from artistic production, seize the means to narrate their own experiences and represent their own communities. The program brings together films from varied geographical contexts — from Lebanon to Canada, Spain to Sweden — made by filmmakers that exist within diverse racial, gender, and sexual contexts. It approaches class intersectionally, accounting for both differences and shared conditions, showing the complexity of working-class experience.

There is a central uncertainty within the program’s title. “The world that will not leave” can be read as a haunting: an inability to escape where one came from, shaped by shame, obligation, and a perpetual running away. It can also be read as an insistence on remembering one’s origins as one moves between classes. An intent to allow those early experiences to shape the work that comes and — as Annie Ernaux states in her early diaries — to “write to avenge my people.” The films selected contain these tensions and ambiguities, uncovering the multiplicity of ways of relating to one’s origin that resist the flattening of these experiences. They show what aesthetic and poetic forms can emerge from those historically excluded from the cultural world. They do not seek to reduce working-class experience to a singular narrative. Instead, they introduce nuance into an all-too-often reductive discourse around class and artistic production — a simplification that ultimately serves to obscure structural questions of who is able to access and produce culture.

This program serves as the opening event for the research project Mis-Shapes: Class and Moving-Image Production. Along with it, The World I Left Will Not Leave Me is a discursive intervention into the underdeveloped and inadequate narratives around class realities in creative fields. It is a step towards turning the alienated ‘I’ of the in-between into the collective ‘we’ by gathering the experiences of artists and filmmakers emerging from the working-class backgrounds.

Curated by Kristofer Woods
In the context of the research project Mis-Shapes: Class and Moving-Image Production (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent)

A 2 hour conversation unfolded between the filmakers in the season on April 4.

My film showed in this section of the program on April 5th
The Capacity for Adequate Anger / While The Gods Were Busy With Another Child / Les enfants ont des oreilles
Films by Vika Kirchenbauer, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Kumail Syed

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