Through experiments with storytelling, documentary forms, and installation, this project fabricates a memory of the first Third World Filmmakers Meeting, held in Algiers in 1973. The event, coorganized by an Argentine filmmaker and an architect, and sponsored by the Algerian Office National pour le Commerce et l'Industrie Cinématographique, served as a hub where “third-world” filmmakers discussed the role of cinema in anticolonial struggles and made agreements to support each other’s work. A second iteration of the meeting was held in Buenos Aires, in 1974. Supported by the short-lived Third World (research) Institute “Manuel Ugarte” at the University of Buenos Aires, the organizers—together with another Argentine architect working in Algiers, the artist’s mother—planned the making of a documentary about the anticolonial movements in Africa to inform and inspire a Latin American audience. Based on an archive the artist inherited from her mother, the film installation of A Non-Coincidental Mirror explores the role of architecture and cinema in this decolonial project, considering what productive frictions can be traced between architecture and filmmaking within the critique of social “commitment” and its relevance to our contemporary times.

Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina based in Los Angeles. Her projects encompass research, film, sculpture, sound, text, and installation to examine the emergence of collective imaginaries, identity formations, and conceptions of history that determine the political imagination. She has exhibited at Artists Space, New York; table, Chicago; Human Resources, Echo Park Film Center, and E.D. Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Biquini Wax, Mexico City; and Museo Trabucco, Buenos Aires. She was assistant curator at the Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, and research fellow and assistant curator for the Getty PST: LA/LA project, The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War. Amengual was a fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program 2021–22, and is a recipient of the 2022–24 Vera List Center for Arts and Politics artist fellowship. She graduated in comparative literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and holds an MFA from CalArts.