Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued

Official Selection, 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Official Selection, 2025 MoMA Doc Fortnight

In 2021, Julian Castronovo, a young, handsome, and depressed artist moves to the Lower East Side of New York. He receives a letter from an unknown sender and then finds hidden objects inside his walls. This sets Castronovo off on an investigation that leads him into the worlds of Shenzhen art forgery factories, Hollywood pitch meetings, and San Diego’s Mt. Hope Cemetery–all in hopes of finding a decades-missing conceptual artist, Fawn Ma, a woman he’s never met but feels intimately connected to.

A hypnotic work of metafiction about parsing truth and delusion on glitching pixelated screens, DEBUT, OR, OBJECTS OF THE FIELD OF DEBRIS AS CURRENTLY CATALOGUED is like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego meets I Saw the TV Glow. Castronovo makes paranoia into praxis. The feeling that everything is connected and somehow related to you is, after all, the promise of the social media era. Combining artistic methods (puppets, CGI, miniatures, diaries) with forensics (brain scans, court documents, surveillance tapes), Castronovo’s film is a doomscroll detective story about finding meaning beyond mediation.

– Lev Kalman

Join us on Wednesday, Nov 12, 4-5PM for a FREE Artist Talk with Julian Castronovo at University of San Diego, Warren Auditorium as part of USD’s Department of Art, Architecture + Art History Lecture Series.

Meter/paid parking is available. Check Venues for more information.