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In a historical city on the brink of an ecological disaster, seafront houses wear a coat of armor. A young artist returns to his hometown after many years and finds that it no longer feels like home. He begins wandering the city with a friend to reconnect with his childhood memories. During their journey he witnesses firsthand how environmental issues are eroding the city's once vibrant appearance and character. The artist's sense of alienation from the city acts like armor, helping him confront his fears and traumas. Through this film he also strives to rediscover himself.

David Apakidze (b. in 1998, Poti) is a visual artist, curator, art historian, co-founder of the Fungus Project and Fungus Gallery, queer art initiatives based in the Caucasus. He studied Art History at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, focusing on medieval Orthodox art—an influence that continues to shape his practice. His practice spans sculpture, embroidery, printmaking, and stained glass, reinterpreting Georgian Orthodox iconography through a queer lens. His research-based practice explores identity, traditions, and queerness. Apakidze has participated in residencies and exhibitions both locally and internationally, including Lerblabor (Berlin, 2021), Open Out Festival (Tromsø, 2023), Gallery Artbeat (Tbilisi, 2024), Gallery Zacheta (Warsaw, 2024), and MeetFactory (Prague, 2025).

Look at Me addresses the artistic struggle for visibility and recognition in a world of digital information overload. The boundary between what is perceived and reality continuously blurs: those who receive attention are perceived and can participate in realities; those who fall into oblivion risk never having existed. The performance showcases an economy of attention in which the audience's gaze becomes the decisive currency in the face of the fear of insignificance: 100% Sale. During a seemingly grotesque dance, 8-meter-high air sculptures controlled in real-time compete directly with three performers, vying for the audience's attention. Between human effort and mechanical presence, the struggle for attention reveals itself as a moment of artistic self-reflection: driven by the fear of insignificance, the unbridled greed for visual dominance culminates in powerlessness.Wiederholen

Niklas Apfel is a Berlin artist focused on graphic design and installations. His work blurs the lines between applied and fine art, featuring abstract figures, scenes, and typography. The performance "Look at Me" was created during his postgraduate studies at UdK Berlin. Collectif Blitzbereit uses performances to challenge taboos around body, sexuality, and emotions. Through nonverbal, humorous expression, they reach broad audiences in public spaces. In "Look at Me," they compete for attention, critiquing art world dynamics while pushing themselves to exhaustion in endless competition. Their anarchic work style reflects their belief against rigid structures.

Beyond the white boundary of wired fences, birch trees and snow, men living in solitude as the world crumbles.

Lorenzo Apolli was born in a small city in the North of Italy, where he studied music and visual arts. After graduating in architecture he entered a documentary film-making institute, focussing on visions from the past and trying to explore the possible, mutual contributions among sound and image in the use of archival materials. He currently works as a researcher in a multidisciplinary documentation centre specialising in contemporary history, for which in the last few years he has been rediscovering archives of still and moving images.

DIE is a collaboration between Turner Prize winning artist Martin CREED who made the song "Die" and feature filmmaker Josh APPIGNANESI who created a response to the song. The film brings into play multiple notions of being exposed and yet remaining mysterious; rendered utterly naked under the spotlight with reference to torture imagery and Abu Ghraib, and yet withholding the mystery of the interior, with reference to papparazzi photos of celebrities holding up their hands. The result is strangely joyous. In terms of the ongoing collaboration between the artists, the piece crosses over between experimental film and music video and in so doing makes reference to Creed`s own previous video work in this vein, as well as to Appignanesi`s feature film work such as Song Of Songs (2005.)

Josh APPIGNANESI is a writer/director based in London. He directed the feature films The Infidel and Song Of Songs. Working across genres, he has also made short films, video art, music videos, documentaries, commercials and artworks, working with cast such as John Malkovich, Richard Schiff, David Tennant, Omid Djalili, and Tom Hiddleston. He teaches internationally. www.joshappignanesi.com Martin CREED is a renowned British artist and musician working internationally. He won the Turner Prize in 2001. www.martincreed.com

Set in a fictitious lunar base Nagasaki, HONEYMOON is the Japanese director Yu Araki’s take on Japonisme. He re-examines and re-interprets the wedding scene from Madame Butterfly (dir. Carmine Gallone, 1954), where B.F. Pinkerton sits in seiza (??), which is the Japanese term used for the proper, formal traditional way of sitting by kneeling on the floor and have legs folded underneath the thighs. Although seiza-style is widely known as “correct”, it didn’t permeate until after Japan opened up to the Occident, that is, after the culture of the “chair” had taken hold, hence the formality of what the Japanese thought had long history was only a modern, arbitrary construct. Inspired by this historical fact, Araki connects seiza with another element to contemplate the arbitrariness of humanity: constellation, which, incidentally, is a homonym with seiza (??) in the Japanese language. In addition, the aforementioned film Madame Butterfly has been known as one of the most iconic collaborations between Italy and Japan, with a strong intention from the Japanese production side to “correct” the twisted imagery of Japanese depiction in which they succeeded. However, Araki critically poses the question of what does it mean to understand another culture “correctly”. In Araki’s version, B.F. Pinkerton is replaced by a real-life photographer Adolf de Meyer (1868 - 1946), and the matchmaker with an anthropologist Frederick Starr (1858 - 1933), and having Suzuki and Dr. Tatsukichi Irisawa (1865 - 1938), who was known for his essay “On the Japanese Way of Sitting” (1921), joining in as broadcast commentator to describe the situation from a distance. The loose, gossipy dialogue between the off-site personnel ranges from fashion to spies, interweaving various elements while the performers patiently wait in perseverance until their legs fall asleep.

Yu Araki (b.1985, Yamagata City) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, U.S.A. in 2007, and completed his Master of Film and New Media Studies from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. In 2013, he was selected to participate in Tacita Dean Workshop hosted by Fundación Botín in Santander, Spain. During 2017-8, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, and Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include Pola Museum of Art, Shiseido Gallery, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, MUJIN-TO Production; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; and Okayama Art Summit, Okayama. His films have been programmed in international festivals such as BFI London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he won the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award in 2018. He was shortlisted as one of the 21 artists for the Future Generation Art Prize hosted by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2019. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.

The film shot on Super 8 was filmed at the Zoology museum in Bologna. The museum was founded in 1860 part of the University of Bologna and is the largest and most significant in Italy. Rows and rows of cabinets filled with strangely shaped animals. It traces its roots all the way back to the very first cabinet of curiosity and the collection of Ulisse Aldrovandi, who allegedly coined the word Geology and is undisputedly one of the fathers of natural history. The film follows Arancio?s fascination with the human? s preoccupation to bring order to the world around us and the aesthetics related to the systems of classification used for this purpose. With this work the artist presents us with a subjective vision of the ornithological collection created by Zafagnini-Bertocchi in the first half of the 20th Century. Through the juxtaposition of deep gravitational rumbling sounds by LA cosmic cult music project Expo 70 and Arancio? s precise editing, still close ups and slow camera panning, the film exposes the sinister and uncanny nature of the displays, resulting in an ambiguous temporality, a visionary experience that transcends and transforms the original scientific illustrative purpose of the cabinets.

Born in Catania, Italy in 1974. Lives and works in London. He received his MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art. His artistic signature is photo-etching, but he works across a range of media such as sculpture, collage, animation and video. Arancio?s main interest lies in the potential of images. Departing from their literal meaning, he creates new juxtapositions that are both beautifully evocative and deeply disquieting. He looks to nature and science for his sources of inspiration, while unsettling any hint of the sublime by re-framing the images and the viewer?s experience. His constructed landscapes contain a sense of both the familiar and the unknown that enhances their symbolic readings and implications. Selected exhibitions: PROJECT: Salvatore Arancio, Rachel Cattle & Steve Richards, James Pyman, Maureen Paley Gallery, London, UK, 2013; PROJECT 03: Data, Contemporary Art Society, London, UK, 2013 (group show); Le Ragioni della Pittura. Esisti e prospettive di un medium, Palazzo de Sanctis, Castelbasso (Teramo), Italy, 2013 (group show); Curiosity. Art & the Pleasure of Knowing (Hayward Touring), Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2013, touring to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, UK, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland, de Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (group show); Cyclorama, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico DF, Mexico (group show), 2013; Alternating Layers of Contrasting Resistance, Rowing Gallery, London, UK; The Little Man of the Forest With the Big Hat, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, Italy; Relatively Absolute, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK; Solo Presentation, Art Rotterdam 2013-New Art Section, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; The Little Man of the Forest With the Big Hat, MCZ-Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza, Italy, 2012; An Arrangement of the Materials Ejected, Spacex, Exeter, UK, 2011; To See an Object to See a Light, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene d?Alba, Italy, 2011; Shasta, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Roma, 2011; Sentinel - PPS//Meetings#4, Palazzo Riso - Museo d?Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, Palermo, Italy, 2011; SI-Sindrome Italiana, Le Magasin - Centre National d?Art contemporain de Grenoble, France, 2010; An Account of the Composition of the Earth?s Crust: Dirt Cones and Lava Bombs, Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London, UK, 2010; Catastrophe? Quelle Catastrophe!, Manif d?Art 5, The Quebec City Biennial, Engramme, Quebec City, Canada, 2010; Prague Biennale 4, Karlin Hall, Prague, Czech Republic, 2009; I giovani che visitano le nostre rovine non vi vedono che uno stile, GAM-Galleria d?Arte Moderna, Turin, Italy, 2009. Arancio was selected fot the Résidences Internationales aux Recollets, Paris, France, 2013; Sundaymorning@ekwc, European Ceramic WorkCentre, SG ?s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands; Wysing Arts Center Artist Residency, Cambridge, UK and Artist Residency and Ceramic Workshop, Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza in 2012. He won The Elephant Trust Grant, London and The Art Omi Residency, New York in 2011, the Premio ?New York? in 2009 and was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2006.

The film focuses on the New York's State Pavilion, an iconic building and one of the few surviving structures of the New York World`s Fair, held in Flashing Meadows in 1964. In Arancio's timeless abstract film, the camera slowly panning from the ground to the top end of the building, presents us a subjective reading of its architectural elements. Shot on Super 8 in one take, the film aims to juxtapose the construction's original utopian visionary aesthetics with Arancio's interest in apocalyptic representation and fascination for transient beauty.

Salvatore Arancio
 was born in Catania, Italy in 1974. He lives and works in London. He studied Photography at the Royal College of Art. His most recent exhibitions include: An Arrangement of the Materials Ejected, Spacex, UK, 2011; To See an Object to See a Light, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene d?Alba, Italy, 2011; Shasta, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome; ?Sentinel - PPS//Meetings#4?, Palazzo Riso - Museo d`Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, Palermo, 2011; ?SI-Sindrome Italiana?, Le Magasin - Centre National d?Art contemporain de Grenoble, France, 2010; ?Catastrophe? Quelle Catastrophe!? Manif d?Art 5, The Quebec City Biennial, Engramme, Quebec City, Canada, 2010; ?An Account of the Composition of the Earth?s Crust: Dirt Cones and Lava Bombs?, Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London, UK, 2010; Prague Biennale 4, Karlin Hall, Prague, Czech Republic, 2009; ?I giovani che visitano le nostre rovine non vi vedono che uno stile?, GAM-Galleria d?Arte Moderna, Turin, 2009. Arancio was the recipient of the Art Omi Residency (New York) and a grant from The Elephant Trust (London) in 2011, and of the ?New York? Prize in 2009. He was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2006.

Set within the historic Ceralep factory in Saint Vallier, France, a site long devoted to the production of high voltage electrical insulators, Transmission unfolds as an environmental documentary that slips deliberately into the territory of the speculative. In this film, Salvatore Arancio transforms a seemingly prosaic manufacturing plant into a theatre of poetic estrangement, where industrial routines become choreographed gestures and machines attain the enigmatic presence of autonomous beings. Arancio’s point of departure is his fascination with the cold precision of mechanised porcelain production. What might initially appear as a linear, utilitarian process is reimagined through his lens as an almost ritualistic encounter with matter. The camera lingers on conveyor belts, extrusion devices and rotating moulds with a sense of reverence, elevating the workshop’s standardized operations into a study of form, rhythm, and transformation. At times, the film’s stark geometries and modulated lighting propel the viewer into a quasi science fiction atmosphere, where the boundary between documentary observation and visual abstraction becomes intentionally porous. The narrative arc of Transmission traces the journey of raw material, through the factory’s labyrinthine production line, ultimately emerging as the ceramic components that populate electrical infrastructures around the world. Yet Arancio refuses any didactic explanation; instead, he invites viewers to inhabit the sensorial and symbolic dimensions of the manufacturing process. The result is a meditation on energy, labour, and the complex ecologies of industry, an inquiry into how the material world is continually shaped by the interplay of human and machine. Integral to the film’s hypnotic effect is its electronic score by British musician Robin Rimbaud (AKA Scanner). Commissioned specifically for the project, Rimbaud’s composition folds together ambient tonalities with field recordings captured onsite. The hum and resonance of the factory floor become both musical texture and narrative agent, heightening the sense that the machinery is speaking in its own coded language. This sonic layering underscores Arancio’s commitment to cross disciplinary experimentation, revealing a productive friction between mechanical sound, electronic composition, and the film’s sculptural images. In Transmission, Arancio offers more than a document of industrial manufacture or a site of labour, but as an arena for imagining alternate relations between technology, environment and artistic vision.

The main interest at the centre of Salvatore Arancio’s artistic practice lies in the potential of images. Particularly in how images and their meaning can be re-framed or re-viewed. Each facet of his practice contains an intertwining juxtaposition of the roots and representation of images: natural and artificial, mineral and vegetable, scientific and mythological. Departing from their literal meaning, through the use of a range of media such as ceramics, etching, collage, animation and video, Arancio creates new juxtapositions that are both beautifully evocative and deeply disquieting, aiming to create a sort of atlas of confusion. He participated to the following biennals: Esposizione d’Arte Internazionale, La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia, Italy (2017); BI-CITY Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzen, China (2020); Biennale Ceramica – 60° Premio Faenza, MIC, Faenza, Italy (2018); Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, Icheon, Korea (2017); Manif D’Art 5, The Quebec City Biennal, Quebec, Canada (2010); Prague Biennale 4, Karlin Hall, Prague, Czech Republic (2009).

Seafarer is an experimental narrative film. It combines an essayistic style with field recordings, fragments of visual studies, experiments with actors, and fictionalized reflection on artistic production rooted in personal experience. It presents a single monologue over mostly long-take shots depicting quotidian moments shot across New York City: a sunset over the Hudson River; people at the beach; a film projected in a movie theater; golfers at a course in Chelsea Piers, and so on. The visual montage is linked by a ruminative, first-person voiceover by Miami-based singer, Little Annie, who performs the character of an anonymous film director. Her haunting words, spoken with humor and earnestness, offer a meditation on the cracks in her life as an artist. They touch on a variety of topics, including our ambiguous relation with capital, the complex relationship between actors and directors, the experience of being in a cinema, and the periods when new ideas are scarce. Seafarer keenly elicits tensions between observer and creator, and what is scripted and what is captured by chance.

Mauricio Arango was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives and works in New York City. He is an alumnus of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum and has participated in residences at Headlands Art Center in San Francisco, the MacDowell Artist Colony, USA; Museo El Barrio, New York. He earned and MFA from the University of Minnesota. His films have been screened at art and film festivals including New Directors/New Films at the Lincoln Film Society and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kino Der Kunst, Münich; VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo; FiD Marseille, Rencontres Internationales, Paris; IndieLisboa, Lisbon. He has received awards in the form of financial support from institutions including The Foundation For Contemporary Art, New York; RivieraLab Coproduction Fund, Mexico; Secretary of Culture, Colombia; Filmmakers Fund, Rooftop Films, New York; Matt Robert Arts, London; Bush Foundation For the Arts, Saint Paul, USA; The Jerome Foundation, New York; the National Fund for the Arts from the National Association of Latino Artists and Communities, USA; and The Minnesota State Arts Board, among others.

Everything Near Becomes Far follows a day in the life of a couple living in a cabin nestled deep within the Andes mountain range in Colombia. They begin their day as usual, but something seems strange to the woman. A fearsome group of men awaits them. An atmosphere of dread develops gradually through the sounds and silences, a looming landscape and the threatening visions of wild animals observing the main characters from the distance. The film`s title is inspired by an observation the poet Borgues made on Goethe: ?Alles Nähe werde fern, everything near becomes far. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes far. It is true. At nightfall, the closest to us seems to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eye, perhaps forever. Goethe could be referring not only to twilight but to life. All things go off, leaving us. Old age is probably the supreme solitude -except that the supreme solitude is death?.?

Mauricio Arango was born in Colombia and lives and works in New York. He is an alumnus of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum (New York, 2007), was a resident at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg (2005), Austria and earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota (2003). He is a fellow at the MacDowell Artist Colony, USA. His films and works have been shown in multiple festivals and screened in more than twenty countries including New Directors/New Films at the Lincoln Film Society and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kino Der Kunst in Münich, VideoBrasil in Sao Paulo, IndieLisboa in Portugal. He has received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York; Rooftop Films, New York; and The Bush Foundation for the Arts, USA, among others.

Augusta, 2008 Video Duration: 7?23?? Text: Based on Aristofanes comedy ?The Birds?. Voices: Peter Shaw; Walter Bilderback Variable dimensions The video is reflection of the power abuses and political ideologies in the world through a conversation of two stone lions about a new place to live.

BIOGRAPHY Vasco Araújo was born in 1975 in Lisbon, the city where he continues to live and work. He completed his first degree in Sculpture in 1999 at FBAUL (Lisbon University School of Fine Art), and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Maumaus in Lisbon, from 1999 to 2000. Since then, he has participated in various solo and group exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad, also taking part in residency programmes, such as The University of Arts, Philadelphia (2007); Récollets, Paris (2005); and the Core Program (2003/04), Houston. In 2003, he was awarded the EDP Prize for New Artists. Amongst his solo exhibitions have been Eco (2008), Jeu de Paume, Paris; About being Different (2007), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, U.K.; Pathos (2006), Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca; Dilemma (2005), S.M.A.K., Ghent; L?inceste (2005), Museu do Azulejo, Lisbon; The Girl of the Golden West (2005), The Suburban, Chicago; Dilema (2004), Museu de Serralves, Porto; Sabine/Brunilde (2003), SNBA, Lisbon. Amongst his group exhibitions, the most important have been his participation in the "Em vivo contacto", 28º Bienal de S. Paulo, Brazil; ?Experience of Art?, La Biennale di Venezia. 51st International Exhibition of Art, Venice; ?Dialectics of Hope?, 1st Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow, (both in 2005); Solo (For Two Voices), CCS, Bard College (2002), New York; ?The World Maybe Fantastic? Sydney Biennial (2002), Sydney; Trans Sexual Express, Barcelona (2001), a Classic for the Third Millennium (2001), Centre d?Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona. His work has been published in various books and catalogues and is represented in several public and private collections, such as at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d?Art Moderne (France); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal); Fundación Centro Ordóñez-Falcón de Fotografía ? COFF (Spain); Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Centro de Arte (Spain); Fundação de Serralves (Portugal); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (USA).

Hereditas, this piece confronts us with a paradox. The action is intriguing, and the location suggests something strange, yet magical. A child comes out of the forest?s depths and, with guileless steps, leads us into a dilapidated sanatorium?s long, empty corridors, in a timeless, lonely, sometimes spectral itinerary. The paradox lies in the simple, straightforward way the mountain?s findings are handled. It represents an encounter with something essential, thought hidden, and which may reveal itself with a surprising cruelty, harsher than death itself. Hereditas it is a work on childhood, loneliness, pain, love, death and the desire for knowing and understanding the great enigmas and interrogations of our human, all too human condition.

Vasco Araújo was born in 1975 in Lisbon, the city where he continues to live and work. He completed his first degree in Sculpture in 1999 at FBAUL (Lisbon University School of Fine Art), and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Maumaus in Lisbon, from 1999 to 2000. Since then, he has participated in various solo and group exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad, also taking part in residency programmes, such as The University of Arts, Philadelphia (2007); Récollets, Paris (2005); and the Core Program (2003/04), Houston. In 2003, he was awarded the EDP Prize for New Artists. Selection of his solo exhibitions: About being Different (2007), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, U.K.; Pathos (2006), Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca; Dilemma (2005), S.M.A.K., Ghent; L?inceste (2005), Museu do Azulejo, Lisbon; The Girl of the Golden West (2005), The Suburban, Chicago; Dilema (2004), Museu de Serralves, Porto; Sabine/Brunilde (2003), SNBA, Lisbon. Amongst his group exhibitions, the most important have been his participation in the ?Experience of Art?, La Biennale di Venezia. 51st International Exhibition of Art, Venice; ?Dialectics of Hope?, 1st Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow, (both in 2005); Solo (For Two Voices), CCS, Bard College (2002), New York; ?The World Maybe Fantastic? Sydney Biennial (2002), Sydney; Trans Sexual Express, Barcelona (2001), a Classic for the Third Millennium (2001), Centre d?Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona. His work has been published in various books and catalogues and is represented in several public and private collections, such as at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d?Art Moderne (France); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal); Fundación Centro Ordóñez-Falcón de Fotografía ? COFF (Spain); Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Centro de Arte (Spain); Fundação de Serralves (Portugal); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (USA).

Brief Synopsis The tropical greenhouse is the pinnacle of the construction of nature as spectacle, a montage of discontinuous seasons, climates, and ecosystems, narrating ecological travelogues for the spectator passing through the hard cut of the glass door. Within, ‘nature’ is a collage inherited from the colonial period, an image practice, emergent contemporaneously with the nascent technologies of photography, and ultimately the bricolage strategy of cinema, and calling for specific relations of care and ecology building. In this film volunteers at a colonial era greenhouse in a small Dutch village collaborate to produce a sonic environment, soundtracking their maintenance labour with vocal re-creations of animal and bird calls, transcribed in the 1820s as western musical notation by Hercule Florence, the Brazilian ‘isolate inventor of photography’. Detailed synopsis This film is a work on the construction of ‘nature’ as image practice, emergent in the colonial period contemporaneously with the nascent technologies of photography, recording, and ultimately the bricolage strategy of cinema. Volunteers at a colonial era greenhouse in a small Dutch village soundtrack their labour maintaining a tropical spectacle with vocal re-creations of animal calls, transcribed in the 1820s in Brazil by Hercule Florence, the Brazilian ‘isolate inventor of photography’, whose writings pre-sage the spectacle and compression of space and time of cinematic form. The tropical greenhouse is the pinnacle of the construction of nature as spectacle, a montage of discontinuous seasons, climates, and ecosystems, narrating ecological travelogues for the spectator passing through the hard cut of the glass door. Within, ‘nature’ is a collage inherited from the colonial period, that has left us with composite ecologies, gardens, parks, and farms, montages of ecosystems and climates forming relations according to aesthetic, cultural, and commercial values and calling for specific relations of care. In the 1820s, while on the Langsdorff expedition into the interior of Brazil, Florence, employed to illustrate scientific and anthropological encounters, developed a new method for transcribing animal calls as European style musical notation. His fragments of sound were sent to the scientific institutes of the Metropole, but, the expedition ending in sickness, unrecognised. In the mid-1800s, with printing outlawed in Brazil, Florence developed a photographic process, and a rudimentary camera 15 years before Daguerre, with the aim of reproducing and publishing his work. Bound together in his writing, and in his sound and image practice ‘nature’ emerges in the 1830s as construct, as an image making spectacle, a quasi-cinematic re-assemblage of isolated elements into a sensory, and, above all aesthetic framework. “Gardens, like dreams, would seem to lose their innocence in analysis. However, dreams, like gardens, were never disconnected from the every day damage, responsibilities, and contaminations of the seemingly more “real” spaces of our lives. The dried plant specimen bound in the monograph with coloured plants may lead us from botany to rivalry and the problems of power and desire, but, in that path, the dream of the botanical monograph also shows us that the transports of pants and passionate attachments to flora hold in their train an inescapable history of the effects of imperium. Though we are implicated in the history of the dream of the botanical monograph, we cannot just disavow the botanical, claiming that it has no place, especially if we are to have a place at all in this global environment not necessarily of our own making. The problem then becomes how to re landscape the overdetermined “garden” we may most want to displace.” Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empore, Landscape and Colonisation.

Sol Archer (1983) is a Netherlands based artist working through collaboration with professional and non-professional groups, considering the encounter as a space of production. Frequently working with video, Sol is focussed on ways individuals and communities constitute themselves through their association with collective cultural activity, and how identities and histories entwine through the performance of cultural attachment. This extends into a pedagogical practice on structures and systematising group environments focussed on self reflexive film-making practices and the legacy of collaborative film practice. Sols work has been exhibited widely, including in the Sydney Biennial, Sydney, AU; Rozenstraat, Amsterdam, Golden Thread, Belfast, Northern Ireland, NL; Le Crac19, Montbeliard, FR; Index Foundation, Stockholm, SE; TULCA, Galway, IR; Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, FR; MuKHA, Antwerp, BE; and more.

In 2022, a major Russian cyberattack left the Norwegian islands of Bjørnøya and Hopen cut off from the world. On Air traces how a small group of Norwegian radio amateurs stepped in to re-establish contact, revealing the vital role of analog technology in an increasingly fragile digital society. Seen through the curious eyes of extraterrestrial anthropologists, the film explores how Morse code and radio signals may one day safeguard our hyperconnected world.

Astrid Ardagh is an artist and filmmaker from Engeløya in Northern Norway, with a bachelor’s degree in moving images from Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her site-specific works delve into the interconnections between people and their environment in a rapidly changing world. By merging her interest in anthropology with aesthetic storytelling, her films become immersive and sensory experiences that transcend traditional human-centred perspectives. Ardagh's short films have been screened at acclaimed festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand and Kortfilmfestivalen in Grimstad, as well as galleries and art museums such as Kristiansand Kunsthall, the Eye Film Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

A selection of joyful rebellions from the Argos distribution catalogue by Anke Buxmann and María Palacios Cruz Asked to compile a screening program for the first Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin to be held at Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes, Argos decided to borrow the title from Joëlle de la Casinière?s 1973 film "So Happy" in which de La Casinière, barefoot against an abandoned and ravaged metropolitan background, promotes her book "Absolument nécessaire" ("Absolutely indispensable") in the streets of New York. Nothing is true, everything goes. Her joy, freedom, and social commitment can be found in the three videos which Argos will present in Madrid. The selected works by Charley Case, Sarah Vanagt, and Joëlle de La Casinière herself are all jubilant rebellions with the street as a common background. Revealing great sensitivity to political and social debate, the videos in this program militate for freedom of expression and movement somehow naive but absolutely joyful.

Argos is a Brussels based centre for art and media that was founded in 1989. Over the years the organisation has developed from a distributor of artists' video and film into a broader art centre incorporating functions such as exhibitions, screenings and events, production, conservation and preservation, publishing, and the development of a public media library. As an interdisciplinary centre for art and audiovisual media, the goal of Argos is to create a production, presentation, distribution, and preservation platform for contemporary Belgian and international audiovisual and visual arts, and more generally all forms of artistic expression moving on the crossing point with the audiovisual media. In a rapidly evolving social and cultural landscape, Argos wants to track characteristic developments in the audiovisual and visual arts, and the socially speaking visual and media culture as a whole, in a critical way providing a frame of reference and interpretation to the public.

The video, set in Barcelona, shows the artist performing an iconoclastic action. During the night, using fire and a bottle of absinth, Argote sets on fire a statue representing a bishop showing the way to a native. The statue is on the pedestal of the Columbus monument, in the Christopher Columbus circle at the end of the Rambla, close to the harbour. By setting this symbol on fire, the artist shows all his disapproval of the European vision of colonisation, in which the colon is a hero.

Ivan Argote is Colombian artist who lives and works in Paris, Argote (31) deals with the way that man relates with the myriad changes that take place daily in the historical, economic, political and moral realms. His aim is to question the role of subjectivity in the revision of these concepts. Argote involves the body, and emotions in the construction of his thinking, and develops methods to generate reflexion about the way we construct certainty in relation with politics and history. By creating interventions and performances for the public space, which are sometimes further developed in the format of films and installations, the artist explores the city as a space of transformation. His works has been shown in several cities all around the world, including: Intersections, Cisneros Fountanals Foundation, Miami, 2015; Between the Pessimism of the Intellect and the Optimism of the Will, 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki, 2015; Levitate, Museum Quartier, Vienna, 2015; L’éloge de l’heure, MUDAC, Lausanne, 2015; Reddish Blue (solo), DT Project, Brussels, 2014; Let’s write a history of hopes (solo), Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo, 2014; Strengthlessness(solo), Galerie Perrotin, Paris, 2014; La Estrategia (solo), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); Un millon de amigos (solo), Galeria ADN, Barcelona (2013); Tectonic, Moving Museum, Dubai (2013); Los irrespetuosos, Museo Carrilo Gil, México DF (2013); 30th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo (2012); Sin heroísmos, por favor (solo), CA2M, Madrid (2012); Girarse, Joan Miró Fundation, Barcelona (2012), among others.

Reddishblue Memories by Iván Argote, uses the artist’s affective memories as part of an ongoing project of research and speculation based on a rumor associated with the history of George Eastman’s Kodak company, and its switch from Kodachrome to Ektachrome. This was allegedly done for ideological reasons : in the late 1960’s they realized that Kodachrome pictures turned reddish with time, and in the context of Cold War decided that the United States’ archives could not end up with the enemy’s color, and so developed the Ektachrome process, in which pictures eventually turn blue. The film, which was made in Ukraine as part of an art exhibition, is narrated simultaneously in Ukrainian by Oxana Shachko founder of Femen, and in Spanish by Ivan Argote himself. In the film, many issues concerning the relationship in between colors and politics raise, as orange revolution, white and black armies, purple and red revolutions in South America.

Iván Argote (Bogotá, 1983, lives in Paris) works explore the relationship in between history, politics and the construction of our own subjectivities. His films, sculptures, videos, collages, and public space installations temps to generate questions about how we relate to the others, to the state, to patrimony and traditions. His works are critics, sometimes anti-establishment, and deal with the idea of bringing affects to the politics, and politics to the affects with a strong and tender tone.

What would La Seine say to us if she could talk to us? Does it remember everything we've dreamed, imagined and said about it? Its luminous passages, its dark corners? All its secrets? Words of love? Sorrows? Le Fond de la Seine speaks to us in the first person, revealing a poetic portrait of a river charged with life, luminosity, stories and dark spaces. This portrait, created using underwater and landscape images, narrated by a powerful voice and accompanied by a moving soundtrack, builds as the film progresses. From its timid source, the origin of many Paleolithic myths, through gentle, crystalline corners that slowly become a mighty mass of water, industrial road, urban passage and power that finally empties into the ocean, merging heart and soul with all the bodies of water on earth. Le Fond de la Seine speaks to us in a sensitive way, about the feelings and fantasies we project towards this river we know so well, yet which hides so much from us.

Iván Argote, Bogotá 1983, lives in Paris. Iván Argote is a Colombian artist and film director based in Paris. Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, he questions our relation with others, with power structures and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour through which he generates critical approaches to dominant historical narratives. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale ephemeral and permanent public artworks, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic and political uses of public space. Argote studied graphic design, photography and new media at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and holds an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Art (ENSBA) in Paris. Solo exhibitions include: 'TO MOVE AND BE MOVED', KØS Museum, Copenhagen, DK (2024); 'The Burden of the Invisible', SCAD MOA, Savannah, GE (2024); 'Prémonitions', Perrotin, Paris, FR (2022); ‘Aliens en Madrid’, Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid, ES (2022); ‘Chaflierplatz’, Dortmunder Kunstverein, DE (2021); ‘A Place for Us’, Perrotin, New York, US, (2021); ‘All Here Together’, Artpace, San Antonio, TX, US, (2021); ‘Juntos Together’, ASU Museum, Phoenix, USA (2019); ‘Radical Tenderness’, MALBA, Buenos Aires (2018); ‘Somos Tiernos’, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico (2017); ‘Somos’, Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo (2017); ‘La Venganza del Amor’, Perrotin, New York (2017); Let’s write a history of hopes, Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo, BR (2014); La Estrategia, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013 ); Sin heroísmos, por favor, CA2M, Madrid, (2012) . Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York, US); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, US); Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, US); Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, Colombia); Kadist (San Francisco, US); MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

What do monuments want, do, and stand for in our memories and public spaces? Levitate, a new film by Colombian artist Iván Argote, questions the histories, functions and possible futures of colonial icons that still today define the identity of modern European cities. In what the artist calls three anticipatory actions, organized as grand-scale performances in the centers of Rome, Madrid, and Paris, we are confronted with three emblems of control and domination that still exert, undisturbed, their symbolic power from atop their pedestals. The Flaminian obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, which came to Rome at the behest of Emperor Agustus in 10 B.C.; the statue of Christopher Columbus erected to commemorate the day of the "discovery" of the Americas; and the statue of French military officer and colonial administrator Joseph Gallieni, are suspended, displaced from their position as vertical markers of power and tools for propaganda. Their disruption, albeit ephemeral, immediately opens up a space of public discussion.

Iván Argote is a Colombian artist and film director based in Paris. Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, he questions our Relation with others, with power structures and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humor through which he generates critical approaches to dominant historical narratives. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale ephemeral and permanent public artworks, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic and political uses of public space. Iván Argote studied graphic design, photography and new media at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and holds an mfa from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-art (Ensba) in Paris. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Albarrán Bourdais Gallery (Madrid, 2022), Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund, 2021), Perrotin Gallery (New York, 2021 & Paris, 2018), Artpace (San Antonio, TX, 2021), Asu Museum (Phoenix, 2019), Malba (Buenos Aires, 2018), Museo Universitario Del Chopo (Mexico City, 2017), Galeria Vermelho (Sao Paulo, 2017), Palais De Tokyo (Paris, 2013) and Ca2m (Madrid, 2012). Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York, Us); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Asu Art Museum (Phoenix, Us); Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, Us); Colección De Arte Del Banco De La República (Bogotá, Colombia); Kadist (San Francisco, Us); Macba (Barcelona, Spain).

A real-estate developer who is a Vampire wants to convert the local community house into a luxury spa. The city man gets nervous. The Vampire calls a friend: the Wizard, who casts a spell on the neighborhood to create chaos. Soon the neighbors organize resistance. Buurthuis 2 is a fantasy film realized with the community center De Witte Boei in Amsterdam’s Wittenburg neighborhood. Visitors and staff take on the roles of vampires, wizards, and zombies who are entangled in a real-estate development scheme to turn the residential neighborhood into a luxury spa resort. Anchored by a Dutch fairytale about the pitfalls of preposterous wealth, the plot and characters were developed in scriptwriting workshops together with the artist. In the process, Josefin Arnell explores the social fabric of a place that is highly specific and at the same time faces the same problems as many other communities. The film draws from and reflects on the historic social ideals of community centers in the Netherlands, that used to serve as a tool to educate the lower classes. What does it mean to be a “good” citizen in the context of increasing wealth disparity, housing shortages, and welfare cuts?

Josefin Arnell (1984, Sweden) lives and works in Amsterdam. The work by Josefin Arnell defines a loaded visual language combining anger, desire, disgust and pleasure. Her films present complex realities, socially marginalized characters and absurd fictionalization. Through storytelling loosely narratives are often centered around characters that try to navigate in contemporary infrastructures with impossible demands. In 2015 and 2016 she participated in the residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2018 she won the Theodora Niemeijer Prijs for emerging female artists in the Netherlands. In 2023 she was nominated for the art prize Prix de Rome Netherlands with a presentation at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Places where her work has been shown include: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; WIELS, Brussels; Cell Project Space, London; Index, Stockholm; UKS, Oslo; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Athens Biennale; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Auto Italia, London; Kunsthalle Münster, Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin and IDFA International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam.

Wild Filly Story is starring a pack of adolescent girls on a therapy horse stable in the outskirts of Amsterdam. The casts are regular visitors, who are simply there to ride, who are there for occupational therapy, or there as a temporary replacement from school. Playing out a fictional, yet custom-fit script that prompts questions of friendship, misfit, normativity, fetishization, and female empowerment. The young girls method-act through stages of agitation, thriving on the artist’s own rural childhood trauma in Sweden, a horsegirl´s obsessions, and her recent short-lived career as a porn film director: teens pulling hair, grand stallions being objectified, food fights, horse healing, and in the backyard of the barn a kissing scene is being made. A red thread through the film: a young girl’s horse is taken away to be slaughtered that the horse community later feast on. A ghost—an EMO teen, white-painted, unfitted, potentially dead—grimes her way through a hardcore song from the London underground “Drop Dead” with the gang of horse girls as her backing choir. Meanwhile, a cowgirl talking about a stallion having its balls cut off, giggling through her characterization of its masculine rage being tamed.

Josefin Arnell (1984) has recently presented exhibitions, screenings, and performances at Athens Biennale; Wiels, Brussels; UKS, Oslo; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Auto Italia, London; Kunsthalle Münster; Beursschouwburg, Brussel. In 2018 she won the Theodora Niemeijer Prijs; a national art prize for emerging female artists living or working in the Netherlands. Arnell lives and works in Amsterdam Through combining modes of autobiographical and fictional storytelling, she explores representations of femininity, the aesthetics and politics of violence, and the way expressions of power and control manifest in group dynamics. The Teenage Girl, The Horse, and The Mother are recurring characters placed beside clumsy allegories of conflicted human conditions or environmental catastrophe. These characters have endless monologues rather than conversations while navigating contemporary infrastructures with impossible demands. She uses humor and absurdity as political devices, but also as important tools to access moments of emotional catharsis. Trashy performativity, camp aesthetics, the grotesque, and soap opera affects are set in combination of documentary, scripted, and improvisation methods. Additionally to her solo work she is involved in multiple collaborations and self initiatives. Most noticeably the artist duo: HellFun aka Josefin Arnell & Max Göran. HellFun prefers to be brave and pathetic rather than drowning in shame.

Equal parts systems literacy and kaleidoscopic ecological fantasia, “Pervading Animal” is a film about butterflies, computer viruses and all the things they touch. Tracing the creation, spread and destructive legacy of the first ransomware computer virus the film finds in its wake surprising connections between the US invasion of Panama, the aesthetics of pioneering computational art and the construction of a butterfly conservatory in New York.

Graeme Arnfield (b. 1991, UK) is an artist filmmaker and composer living in London, raised in Cheshire, UK. Producing sensory essay films from networked imagery his films use methods of investigative storytelling to explore issues of circulation, spectatorship and history. Research topics have included: the politics of digital networks, the distribution of ecological matter such as peat and asbestos and the adaptive circulation of global and local histories. His work has been presented worldwide including Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Transmediale, IMPAKT Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Plastik Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, LUX, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Berlinische Gallerie, Signal Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and on e-flux & Vdrome. He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University.