Festivals like TBA encourage people to go into overdrive: see more, do more, run around and try to catch everything before it disappears.

This can be lots of fun, but it’s also exhausting, and maybe not the best way to take in art. Allowing yourself to slow down creates a certain space, like an adult quiet time. Today seems like a good day for it. And Rite of Spring, the enchantingly understated and powerful film by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor on view at The Works, provides the perfect excuse for lingering.

“This pieces, I know I’ll be hearing about in two years,” Kristan Kennedy, PICA’s visual art curator, told me yesterday during a thoughtful tour through some of her choices at this year’s festival. “Some of the ones that are more immediate, I won’t. And there’s room for both.”

Indeed there is (it’s one of the strengths of Kristan’s curatorial structure). This afternoon, I hope to make some room for Rite, and its many ruminations—on political and social legacies, the beauty within violence, how history haunts our present. Maybe I’ll see you there.

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