The AgX Film Collective and the Lucy Parsons Center co-present a screening of Chicago-based artist and filmmaker M. Woods’ feature film BODY PROP as part of a multi-city screening tour this spring, THE DEATH SPIRAL TOUR 2025. This independently-produced tour is dedicated to the spirit of David Lynch and other radical auteurs who created their own methods of distribution. See the full tour info and dates here.
Following the screening will be an in person discussion with the filmmaker.
BODY PROP (2020-2024, 75 min) is an avant-garde essay film and attack against the ontology of white imperialism. Made of mostly hand-processed super 8 film - the rejected pieces of film used in other pieces of The Numb Spiral. The piece, in five movements, takes on the subject of the Body as a prop, as a body politic, as a simulation, and as a necropolitical expense, creating a “Cadaver Decomposition Island” of discarded scraps of Super 8 and archival material reveal the shadow of US nihilism within the advanced stage of hyperreality.
Combining original manifestoes (in the style of Situationism) with excerpts of Jean Baudrillard’s A System of Objects, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and other treatises on phenomenological existentialism, Biblical passages from Genesis and Ecclesiastes, impeachment transcripts, Beloved by Toni Morrison, the speeches of Malcolm X, YouTube news archives, and dozens of other texts in conversation in a tumult of signs, oscillating in a trance between attempting to situate within and disassociate from the Body Prop. The cinema itself is a Body Prop - simultaneously full and devoid of feeling and sensory. Featuring an original score composed of Hip-Hop beats and experimental soundscapes created by director M Woods.
Warning: Body Prop contains accounts and representations of racism, violence, sex, and nudity. Parts of this work are based on actual events. Some parts contain fast edits and strobing imagery and that may negatively impact those viewers with epilepsy and other light-sensitive disorders.
Book Releases:
M. Woods will also have two new self-published works of analog photography and poetry for sale while on tour, [TEMPORARY] CUSTODY and THE ABRIDGED OXONIAE PHOTOGRAPHAE.
About the artist:
M. Woods (He/Him/They/Them) is a multidisciplinary artist implementing avant-garde strategies under the studio name “Disassociative Productions”. M is a first-generation US citizen, born to a Costa-Rican/Ecuadorian mother.
M was the recipient of the Erna Plachte Award at the University of Oxford (MFA 2021), and they have exhibited their work extensively for the past 15 years, including at IFFR, the Flaherty Seminar, The Royal Society of British Artists, The Oberhausen International Film Festival, the Bodleian Library, Prismatic Ground, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where they also served as special curator. They have received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Light Cone Paris, The Filmmaker’s Coop, and Collectif Jeune Cinema.
