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Charles de Agustin is an artist based in Brooklyn who primarily makes films. Rooted in essay and diary cinema alongside an expanded practice in writing and performance, his work considers ideas around critique, access, intimacy, and capture, often in the context of cultural institutions.
2023-24 solo screenings focused on Mission Drift, a “video and discussion” project exploring tensions between seductive philanthropy, state support, and grassroots organizing. The tour across New York and the Midwest included Gene Siskel Film Center, Maysles Documentary Center, Arts + Literature Laboratory, Spectacle Theater, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, among others.
2021-24 group exhibitions, screenings, and performances have included New Contemporaries / South London Gallery & Firstsite, England; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; Kassel Dokfest, Germany; Rhode Island School of Design, US; Alternative Film/Video, Belgrade; Saigon Experimental Film Festival, Vietnam; ISFF Nijmegen, Netherlands; Alliances & Commonalities, Stockholm; Athens Film + Video Festival, Ohio; Revolutions per Minute Festival, Boston; Film Diary NYC/Milwaukee; XINEMA, Vancouver/Brooklyn; and Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival, Chicago.
de Agustin has been supported by the Conditions Online Programme (2024-25), New York State Council on the Arts (2024), Brooklyn Arts Council (2024), Locarno BaseCamp Academy (2023), Center for Book Arts’ Fine Press Seminar (2023), The Elephant Trust (2021), and Mansfield-Ruddock Art Prize (2021). Writing about his work has recently appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, cinemóvil nyc, and Screen Slate.
de Agustin received a BFA in filmmaking and philosophy on a presidential scholarship at Rutgers University, and an MFA in studio art on a slade bursary at the University of Oxford. His artistic practice is mutually informed by various pedagogical, curatorial, and organizing projects. de Agustin manages public programming at The 8th Floor in New York (since 2022), organizes an evolving platform called Present (since 2022), and founded/curated the NOFLASH experimental film festival (2017-20). He has taught courses and workshops at Oxford, Rutgers, Syracuse, OSU, MIAD, and is currently at SVA.
Recent select works (reverse chronological):
The works available in full below are online for personal and classroom consumption. If you teach at a university, please consider asking your library to purchase an educational license copy. Reach out here to request links for other works that aren’t public yet, or to pursue institutional presentations.
Sunset Seduction, 2024, US. 45-minute film, artist contract, discussion.
contact for a screener and further details.
Sunset Seduction stars a liberal philanthropist yearning for his next fling with radical politics. Made as the Palestine solidarity movement escalated in 2024, the work unfolds in essayistic fragments considering ideas of freedom, violence, and the seductive capture of revolutionary ideology. Sunset Seduction is a personal, conceptual, and activist work that claims a film, contract, and discussion as its materials, together aiming to materialize the particular responsibilities of cultural workers in the global north.
Mission Drift, 2023, US. 13-minute video (b/w, sound) with extended discussion. Audio description and open captioning.
excerpt here, contact for full version.
zine by Emily Rose Apter published by cinemóvil nyc and distributed via Printed Matter
Mission Drift follows a nonprofit art gallery worker who tries to stay afloat when a horny sadomasochistic philanthropist infiltrates the organization. An experimental essay film tinged with noir and fantasy, the work is driven by research into the sparse history of federal US arts funding since the 1930s and more recent universal basic income trials. Mission Drift links the insufficiencies across commercial, nonprofit, academic, and DIY institutions to the broader American disdain for public services, with relevance far beyond the US. The film’s tragic narrative takes aim at how seductive philanthropy can be and points toward the need to constantly reinvent strategies against mechanisms of capture.
Audio description and open captions are integral to the work, alongside the commitment to narrativized research as spoken prose over a sustained white screen. The synthesized crescendo that plays throughout Mission Drift is an extremely slow version of the THX Deep Note, a 30-second glissando of equal sonic forces pushing downward and upward at the same time. Often played before movies begin since 1982, the sound is famous for being perceived as much louder than it actually is, also having sentimental qualities for many audiences. Simultaneously minimal, didactic, and poetic, these decisions are intended to explore the relationships between accessibility, complicity, precarity, and cinema.
The medium of Mission Drift is described as “video and discussion:” the work may only be publicly presented if it is followed by a robust audience discussion on the issues at hand, structured in consultation with the artist if he is not already present. To this end, Mission Drift is not intended to be an airtight argument, but a series of prompts on how art is funded and circulated today.
Hook, 2023, US/UK. Paperback book, 5x8 inches, black and white, 103 pages.
Available for purchase here, or contact for NYC pickup
At a used bookshop in Oxford, England, I found a tattered relic of local tourism/imperialism published in 1850. I liked the dismal state of the book, so I digitally scanned and deep-fried it. I’ve spent a lot of time with one particularly destroyed image, where I can still feel the spirit of a book; a line, a gesture; it looks like a hook. A hook is the part of a song that usually sticks in your head; what pierces a fish on the line to be reeled in. A hook is a method of capture.
Hook is a book of poetry and images by Charles de Agustin mostly written at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford starting in 2020, followed by a period in London and a long stretch of editing in Brooklyn, completed in 2023.
Exaggerations, 2022, US/UK/NL. Video, color, sound. Audio description and open captioning. 20 minutes.
A supernatural road trip in the Scottish village of Foyers, the American hamlet of Grovers Mill, and reading breaks in an Amsterdam film library. We try to pick at belief and clarity. Difficulties between loving your work, working at loving, making a living. Language piles up, crashes down, and maybe becomes something else.
Audio description and open captioning are inseparable parts of this work. The film intends to dwell on accessibility through an audiovisual and socioeconomic lens, presenting a central question halfway through: “what does it mean to have a complete experience?” It’s difficult to embrace the messy ambiguities of this goal.
Two main characters emerge from the two voices. They both grow sleepy and impatient with the film but still work through it alongside the viewers, playing with their authority, ethics, and dogmatic forms of artistic/political expression. The narration text appropriates diverse sources such as Orson Welles, Carolyn Lazard, monster sighting websites, a Twitter thread by a depressed rich person, and more threaded into my own poetic writings.
supported by The Elephant Trust and Mansfield-Ruddock Art Prize
Reading Time (minimum 17 minutes), 2021, UK. Video, sound, text.
Video, sound, text. Seminar room, bullet points. Narrator, gestures, QR code. Distance from white guilt, malaise. Scales of death, datedness. Zoom out, in, out (as nobody is pure, the contradictions in striving toward an ethics of practice are insurmountable). Big drop. Scream.
in Mansfield College permanent collection, Oxford
Dramatic Narrative, 2020, 64 minutes, video (color, sound). Elegy (2020-22), 18 minutes, video (b/w, sound).
excerpt here, contact for full version
Grand ambitions and failures: cinema, fraternity, whiteness, consent, appropriation. Content warning for hateful language and discussions of sexual assault.
“(…) For all of its pervasiveness, however, the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead.” - Karen Weisman
Charles Prigmore: Crescendo (it’s like the Holocaust), 2019, US. Performance-installation.
Masking tape, burnt Gucci flip flops, Gucci receipt copies, computer monitor (untitled video), knife, digital text sign, PA speaker, sound, the artist, the artist’s dog, dog leash, various cables. Approx. 45 min. for performance; installation approx. 7’x7’ with 8 min. video loop.
Full statement and documentation here.
thank johnson i’m woke, 2019, US. Video, color, sound. 12 minutes.
Part essay, part diary, part panic attack. A narrator attempts to attribute the gentrification of New Brunswick, New Jersey since the 1970s to the longtime stature of Johnson & Johnson’s world headquarters in the American city, but is possessed by the past civic-corporate figures in question through the urban space. The voice escapes from these appropriated reflections into personal anecdotes, emerging as a caricature of the white gentrifier, perpetually anxious about their useless wokeness. I aim to dwell on the impossibilities between whiteness, complicity, and a radical praxis through the unclear relationship between “the narrator” and myself as the artist.
Charles Prigmore’s Swamp, 2018. Multimedia lecture-performance. 37 minutes.
In Charles Prigmore’s Swamp, I take on the titular character of Charles Prigmore: an emerging interdisciplinary artist who recently moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey to connect with his roots and start a new art gallery. Following in the footsteps of the late-1600s Prigmore colonizers, Charles Prigmore proudly furthers problems of gentrification in his city and cultural appropriation in general. Appropriation also exists on the level of the performance script itself, as I lifted the majority of its contents directly from interviews (e.g. Jordan Wolfson, Jill Medvedow), local news articles (early as 1854), essays (Danto’s “The Artworld”), song lyrics and more, sometimes in full-paragraph chunks. The work uses the traditional podium/audience/projection lecture setup as a starting point, but quickly emerges as a work of theater dependent upon a wide range of edited/live media, including videos, websites and computer interfaces. Prigmore embodies what Ajay Kurian calls our “contemporary pollution” of white victimhood/entitlement. The audience will question the truth evaluability of any supposed “real shit” and the distance between myself and Prigmore, especially within the quasi-transhistorical structure of narrative fragments.