Courtney Stephens – Terra Femme

27th February 2026

Address: WET, Hillevliet 90, Rotterdam 3074 KD

 
WET presents Terra Femme, an intimate live performance by Courtney Stephens – a landmark work that has become widely regarded within contemporary art and expanded documentary contexts. The performance forms part of WET’s 2026 programme, WHO FILMS WHO?, which explores the ethics and power dynamics invoked when filming others. Moving between archival practices, animation, banned films and documentary, the programme raises the question: who makes the rules and what happens when they’re broken?

 

Terra Femme is an essay film comprised of amateur travelogues filmed by women in the 1920s-1950s. With a score by Sarah Davachi, the film moves between geographical essay, personal inquiry, and historical speculation, examining these films as both private documents and accidental ethnographies. The films present a new type of traveller: no longer a male seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a cruise to the North Pole. Representing the world through women’s eyes, the films raise questions about female representation in the archive and the role of amateur movie-making plays in understanding the participation of women in early non-fiction filmmaking.

 

One thing these films encode is a profound absence: the general absence of women in the film archive and the larger absence of female figures in the historical record. They also explore the attempt to concretize one’s own experience through the act of making cinema, while also acknowledging the other forms of power that gave these women access to film cameras in the first place. At once a film about longing for past worlds through cinematic excavation, this force flows in both directions: as women from the past convey themselves into the present through the power of their gaze.

 

The film will be presented as a live lecture-performance, similar to the way these films might have been exhibited nearly a hundred years ago when they were shot.

 

Courtney Stephens is the director of four feature films.The American Sector (with Pacho Velez) documents slabs of the Berlin Wall installed around the US. Terra Femme, composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick and has toured widely as a live performance. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (with Michael Almereyda) explores the life of neuroscientist and psychedelics pioneer John C. Lilly, and Invention is a hybrid fiction film about an esoteric healing device. Both The American Sector and Invention were named among The New Yorker‘s best films of the year. Her work been exhibited at MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, The Barbican, Fondazione Prada, Jeu de Paume, ICA London, the Performa Biennial, The Academy Museum, and film festivals including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Locarno, Viennale, New Directors/New Films, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, Hong Kong, and the New York Film Festival. Her work has been released theatrically in the US, UK, and France and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and grants from the Sloan Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

She has co-curated the miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014, and organized film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Flaherty NYC, and Human Resources. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, BOMB, Filmmaker, The New Inquiry, and Cabinet.