I AM THE WORLD is a speculative video that explores how an archive of networked moving images, featuring famed ballroom hosts Selvin "MC Debra" Mizrahi and Kelly Gorgeous Gucci, enables worldly ways of seeing.

I AM THE WORLD is part of a project entitled Scenes of Category Destruction, which emerged from a single-take viral video filmed in 2014 for the "AFTERMATH" series of ongoing YouTube archive, "Ballroom Throwbacks TV". The work, the first in a planned series of video-led presentations, narrates a search for ways of seeing in between the end of this humanist world and the next one, in which, as the emcee said already, they are the world. Their images guide our crossing to an alternative present; one made of and for transformed genres of existence, in which the narrator finds his seeing - and possibly, his being - anew.

Research | Film Direction | Edit | Script | Production | Secondary Cinematography | Sound Mix | Voiceover: C Applewhaite
Original Music | Sound Design: Pavel Lebedev
Archive Material: https://www.youtube.com/user/BALLROOMTHROWBACKS/videos
Production: Ben Evans James, transmediale / Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg
Production Support: "Vision And Power" Seminar, David Joselit, Harvard University Department of Art, Film And Visual Studies

Production format: HD Video

Art Exhibitions:
transmediale 2022, Berlin, DE (world premiere)
Things We Do In the Dark, Express Newark, NJ, USA, 2023
Selected 16, national touring exhibition, UK, 2026

Film Festivals:
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, CO, USA 2022
American Anthropological Association Meetings, Seattle, WA, USA, 2022
Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, Bristol, UK, 2023
Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, UK, 2023