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Neuland - 7min 22sec - 4:3 - dv_pal - 2009 A dutch landscape. The video-work `Neuland` (Virgin Soil, Unknown Territory) belongs to a series of landscape studies. The definition of the `Argument` and the `By-work` is questioned. It remains unclear if the `Argument` refers to the subject aimed by the camera or the one passing by. The attention is turned to an artificial landscape which stands for modernity and progress. Routine reveals itself as mechanical ritual. Seen from this perspective there is no place for the individual.

Biography José Miguel Biscaya, born in Lisbon in 1973, is a Mixed-Media Artist and Curator living and working in Amsterdam. He graduated at the Sandberg Institute where he received his Master-degree in Fine Arts (MFA). His work has been shown in numerous international festivals and group-exhibitions. He co-curated and produced several shows, including Volume and Hiscox Art Award. In 2007, he created in association with Jonathan Sullam and Tom Hillewaere the Mobile Institute in Brussels. As a jury member of the Media Art Friesland commission in 2009, José co-curated and lined up the Friesland International Media Art Competition program. Currently he is working on a new series of video-works.

Inside a 1940?s film-noir set the FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone a.k.a. Donnie Brasco is questioned by the artist about his six years long undercover operation inside the American Mafia (1976-1982). Pistone was the first FBI agent able to infiltrate the New York mafia and report ?inside? information back to the FBI. His undercover role was so convincing that he was able both to involve some of the mafia members with criminal activities that were entirely set up by the FBI (The King?s Court Bottle Club) and also to introduce other FBI agents as ?criminal partners?. He created a complete fictional context that acted as a trap for the Mafia. In The Undercover Man, Joseph D. Pistone is not only a character but a living memory, the only person that knows what happened and contains all the information. Cinema, with all its devices of form and construction, is used as a reference point for what is real. The film is shoot in a specially designed and constructed film-set that revisit the noir aesthetic from the 1940s. The myth of the underworld, the double face of reality (dark and light, investigator and investigated) connects the story by Joseph D. Pistone both with the history of gangsters and with our knowledge of it given by the American cinema.

Rossella Biscotti (Molfetta, Italy, 1978; lives and works in Rotterdam, Holland) is famous for her videos regarding the traces of lives of others, that are usually anonymous in history. They are sources that stimulate a reflection on the situation of (collective and personal) identity and memory, in present time. Her recent exhibitions include the solo shows: The Undercover Man, Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam (NL); You have to be focused, prometeogallery, former church of San Matteo, Lucca (IT); Everything is somehow related? site-specific project for Museion in Bolzano (IT) in 2008. Group shows: Cabinet of imagination, Netwerk, Aalst (BE); Peripheral vision and collective body, Museion, Bolzano (IT); Dai tempo al tempo, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (IT) in 2008; Looking for the Border, De Garage, Mechelen / Cultuurcentrum Strombeek (BE); Premio NY, Italian Academy at Columbia Univesity, NY, (USA); Nessuna paura, Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato (IT); Work_show in progress, Galleria Civica di Trento (IT) in 2007; Sense and Sensitivity, TENT Rotterdam Center for the Arts, Rotterdam (NL) in 2006; Adam, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (NL) in 2005. In 2007 her video The Sun Shines in Kiev won The City of Geneva Grand Prize at the 12th Biennial of Moving Images, Centre pour l?image contemporain, Geneva (Switzerland), and the Golden Cow at Gstaadfilm, Gstaad (Switzerland).

A selection of inhabitants from the township New Crossroads (Cape Town), attempt to change the location with a not functional working intervention. In a public field, they build a tower of 5 meters by stacking beams of wood, painted in a vivid green. When the structure is at its highest point, other residents are invited to come and dismantle it, to take the materials to use for their own purposes. The ?tower? finds its meaning only after it is taken down and fragmented. The image of the tower like a unique symbol and reference point of the township fades away in the horizontality of the neighborhood.

The collaboration between the two artists Rossella Biscotti (Molfetta, Italy, 1978) and Kevin van Braak (Warnsveld, The Netherlands, 1975) started with the project in the township of New Crossroads in Cape Town (South Africa). It is based on their common interest for the exiting relationship between the real, pure or idealist environment and the fictional, man-created context inside of the contemporary society. In their work these aspects come together. The collaboration started with the movie New Crossroads filmed in a township in Cape Town (South Africa). They worked together in different projects involving photography, installations and sculpture. In 2006 they directed a second movie, The renovation of the empty bath, about a renovation of a swimming pool in Rome, built during the fascist period. Together they have exhibited in the Fonds BKVB in Amsterdam (NL), in the American Academy in Rome and in Fondazione Adriano Olivetti in Roma (IT). As independent artists they have exhibited also in different galleries and museums.

Inside a 1940?s film-noir set the FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone a.k.a. Donnie Brasco is questioned by the artist about his six years long undercover operation inside the American Mafia (1976-1982). Pistone was the first FBI agent able to infiltrate the New York mafia and report ?inside? information back to the FBI. His undercover role was so convincing that he was able both to involve some of the mafia members with criminal activities that were entirely set up by the FBI (The King?s Court Bottle Club) and also to introduce other FBI agents as ?criminal partners?. He created a complete fictional context that acted as a trap for the Mafia. In The Undercover Man, Joseph D. Pistone is not only a character but a living memory, the only person that knows what happened and contains all the information. Cinema, with all its devices of form and construction, is used as a reference point for what is real. The film is shoot in a specially designed and constructed film-set that revisit the noir aesthetic from the 1940s. The myth of the underworld, the double face of reality (dark and light, investigator and investigated) connects the story by Joseph D. Pistone both with the history of gangsters and with our knowledge of it given by the American cinema.

Rossella Biscotti (Molfetta, Italy, 1978; lives and works in Rotterdam, Holland) is famous for her videos regarding the traces of lives of others, that are usually anonymous in history. They are sources that stimulate a reflection on the situation of (collective and personal) identity and memory, in present time. Her recent exhibitions include the solo shows: The Undercover Man, Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam (NL); You have to be focused, prometeogallery, former church of San Matteo, Lucca (IT); Everything is somehow related? site-specific project for Museion in Bolzano (IT) in 2008. Group shows: Cabinet of imagination, Netwerk, Aalst (BE); Peripheral vision and collective body, Museion, Bolzano (IT); Dai tempo al tempo, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (IT) in 2008; Looking for the Border, De Garage, Mechelen / Cultuurcentrum Strombeek (BE); Premio NY, Italian Academy at Columbia Univesity, NY, (USA); Nessuna paura, Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato (IT); Work_show in progress, Galleria Civica di Trento (IT) in 2007; Sense and Sensitivity, TENT Rotterdam Center for the Arts, Rotterdam (NL) in 2006; Adam, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (NL) in 2005. In 2007 her video The Sun Shines in Kiev won The City of Geneva Grand Prize at the 12th Biennial of Moving Images, Centre pour l?image contemporain, Geneva (Switzerland), and the Golden Cow at Gstaadfilm, Gstaad (Switzerland).

A selection of inhabitants from the township New Crossroads (Cape Town), attempt to change the location with a not functional working intervention. In a public field, they build a tower of 5 meters by stacking beams of wood, painted in a vivid green. When the structure is at its highest point, other residents are invited to come and dismantle it, to take the materials to use for their own purposes. The ?tower? finds its meaning only after it is taken down and fragmented. The image of the tower like a unique symbol and reference point of the township fades away in the horizontality of the neighborhood.

The collaboration between the two artists Rossella Biscotti (Molfetta, Italy, 1978) and Kevin van Braak (Warnsveld, The Netherlands, 1975) started with the project in the township of New Crossroads in Cape Town (South Africa). It is based on their common interest for the exiting relationship between the real, pure or idealist environment and the fictional, man-created context inside of the contemporary society. In their work these aspects come together. The collaboration started with the movie New Crossroads filmed in a township in Cape Town (South Africa). They worked together in different projects involving photography, installations and sculpture. In 2006 they directed a second movie, The renovation of the empty bath, about a renovation of a swimming pool in Rome, built during the fascist period. Together they have exhibited in the Fonds BKVB in Amsterdam (NL), in the American Academy in Rome and in Fondazione Adriano Olivetti in Roma (IT). As independent artists they have exhibited also in different galleries and museums.

Interweaving stories inside a multi-storey car park.

Far from their former reality, in an ancient now deserted palace, a group of men and women share their life stories and explain how they survived, living and sleeping in the streets of Porto.

A former painter and visual artist, Christophe Bisson co-directs his first film, White Horse, with Maryann De Leo in 2007. The documentary is nominated for a GoldenBear at the Berlinale and broadcasted on the American TV Channel HBO. Since then, Christophe Bisson has directed more than 15 films, either documentaries or art videos, often based on literary texts (Isaie, Feast of Crispian, etc.) , or on the question of norms, pathologies and solitude (Road Movie, Into the World, Liquidation, Sfumato). Produced by Triptyque Films since 2013, his documentaries have had increasing success over the years and his work is now selected in the most prestigious French and international film festivals such as the Viennale, Cinéma du Réel (Paris), FID Marseille, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, etc. His latest documentary, Silêncio , has received one of the main prizes of the FIDLab 2015 and won the « Prix des Lycéens » at the 2016 edition of FID Marseille. He is now working on a new project at the Villa Medicis in Rome (Italy).

Asmahan is a visual and cinematic meditation with an avant-garde motif. Based on Asmahan's, (the Syrian/Egyptian singer 1912 - 1944), last film "Gharam Wa Intiqam" (Passion and Revenge, 1944), the film's cinematic form merges her songs with plot and actions to reveal an insight into the relationship between the star's tragic life, colonial Egypt, and the nature of cinema.

Hisham is a filmmaker from Lebanon. He has studied in the US with filmmakers Raoul Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and lectured on filmmaking in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, France, and Japan. Much of his work may be viewed as meditations on the themes of exile and melancholy. These visual meditations are shaped by his personal experience of interceding between the Middle East of his Arab-Muslim upbringing and Anglo/European art and culture. Emerging from this personal context, his work reflects political and social concerns with contemporary Arab politics and culture and aesthetic concerns with painterly values and the poetics of modern life. His work has been shown in the Arab world and internationally, including at the Louvre (France), Cairo Opera House (Egypt), Biennale Des Cinema Arabes (Paris, France), Milan Film Festival (Italy), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), among others.

This is a film poem about love. A Lebanese-American filmmaker photographs a woman in Paris: as a trapeze artist, a model, a lover, and a child. The film attempts to capture that moment between wakefulness and dream. It carries within it melancholy and loneliness, sadness and joy, adulthood and childhood. It evolves out of the metaphor that life is a circular journey whose end is "to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding).

Hisham Bizri is a Lebanese-American filmmaker born in Beirut. He has made several short films and has had retrospectives and screenings at Anthology Film Archives and MOMA in NYC, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Cinémathèque Française (Paris), Cairo Opera House (Egypt), among others. He has worked with Raùl Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and was a jury member at several international film festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival. Hisham has won several awards such as the Guggenheim and the American Academy Rome Prize. He is currently working on his feature "Until Morning" with producer Andrew Fierberg.

"Song for the Deaf Ear" is a film meditation on the insanity of war and violence in my country, Lebanon.

Hisham is a Lebanese filmmaker. He studies in the US with filmmakers Raoul Ruiz and Miklos Jancso and has lectured on film in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, France and in Japan. A big part of his work can be considered a meditation on the themes of exile and melancholy. His work has been shown throughout the Arab world and internationally, most notably at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Arab Film Biennale in Paris, the Milan Film Festival, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Institute of Arab World in Paris, the Harvard Film Archives in Cambridge, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the French Cinematheque in Paris, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Caire Opera amongst others.

Asmahan is the story of a woman who takes revenge on the man she thinks killed her husband, but falls in love with him in the process. During the filming, the actress in the film who sings the two beautiful songs on the soundtrack, dies in a car accident and the ending had to be changed so that her character would die also. Asmahan is a real person who was the quintessential figure of sin and freedom to the women in the Arab world. She left her home and husband in Syria in the 1930?s to pursue fame in Egypt. She was murdered in 1944 and her murder remains a mystery for she was believed to be a double agent, working for the British and Egyptian governments. Asmahan?s life was shrouded in myth and intrigue and several stories about her modern attitude towards life, her smoking and drinking, and her romantic liaisons continue to generate the aura around her even after her death. My film shows her aura through a cinematic language inspired by her music and life.

Hisham is a filmmaker from Lebanon. He has studied in the US with filmmakers Raoul Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and lectured on filmmaking in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, France, and Japan. Much of his work may be viewed as meditations on the themes of exile and melancholy. These visual meditations are shaped by his personal experience of interceding between the Middle East of my Arab-Muslim upbringing and Anglo/European art and culture. Emerging from this personal context, his work reflects political and social concerns with contemporary Arab politics and culture and aesthetic concerns with painterly values and the poetics of modern life. His work has been shown in the Arab world and internationally, including Louvre museum (France), Biennale Des Cinema Arabes (Paris, France), Milan Film Festival (Italy), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), among others.

Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass is an audiovisual collaboration between Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons and Fabian Lanzmaier, focusing on preserved peatlands and their interpretation through various recording and 3D computing technologies. Through the use of photogrammetry, a technology that relates to satellite mapping and archiving of anthropocentric spaces and monuments, the biotope is interpreted bit by bit in an intimate, close-up interaction. The work explores specific peatlands in Finland, Norway and Canada from various perspectives, focusing on the idea of natural landscapes as sources as opposed to resources, and their capability or not to be translated to binary code.

Ingrid Bjørnaali is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oslo who records specific biotopes in various states of their ongoing world-building processes. Her works explore the omnipresence of the digital in our experience of the world as well as the inability of technology to articulate matter’s complexity. Recent exhibitions include Screen City Biennial, Berlin, Fabbrica Del Vapore, Milan, Charles Street Video, Toronto and Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). Fabian Lanzmaier is a musician and sound artist living in Vienna. In his practice he explores perception and ideas of natural / artificial sounds, fluid and ambiguous environments. He works with real-time audio synthesis utilizing digital/analog physical modeling techniques and feedback networks to explore aspects of texture and structure of sound as well as its presence within space. Recent projects include: Artist in Residency at Wave Farm – NY, composition commission through INA - grm - Paris, AV - Performance at Fridman Gallery - NYC and Artist in Residency at EMS – Stockholm. Maria Simmons is a Canadian symbiontic artist who investigates potentialized environments through the creation of hybrid sculptures and installations. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, grows yeast, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself. Recent solo exhibitions include the Visual Art Centre of Clarington, Trinity Square Video, and Centre3.

A journey through the years of counterculture and attempted revolution, through archive footage, guided by the memory of a retired revolutionary, Vittorio Alfieri, former head of the Milanese column of the Red Brigades. From factory initiatives, through armed struggle and half a life in prison, a glimpse of a forgotten history, which we still keep hidden, especially from ourselves.

Mario Blaconà is a cinema programmer at the San Fedele Cultural Center in Milan and is editor of the online magazines Lo Specchio Scuro and Filmidee. In 2018 he directed the documentary short film Which of you was not born here, winner of the Montelupo Fiorentino Film Festival, and in the same year he arrived among the finalists of the Solinas Award for documentary with the project Benq5, with which he won the Front Lab Aosta 2018 and participated in the international laboratory Balkan Documentary Center. In 2021 he directed the medium-length documentary Italia, theories for a home movie, with which he participated in the Milan Filmmaker Festival and in FIDBA at Buenos Aires. In 2022 he partecipated to the artistic residency U Stories with the project Domina. He is currently head programmer of the Bellaria Film Festival, is a member of the Sole Luna Doc pre-selection committee and collaborates with the Locarno Film Festival within the Locarno Filmmakers Academy and L'immagine e la Parola.

The short film UNCERTAINTY is like Ouroboros, has no beginning and no end. The important aspect of the plot is constant change of the perspective between the observer and the observed person. This endless inversion and slow close-ups create the atmosphere of uncanny epidemic. Uncertainty is the effect of being infected by a microbe which forced a victim to intense observation of the surrounding world. The final aim is to not get concentrated on any specific element or quality but to exceed the cognitive habits. The suspended certainty of the existence forces all observers to look through the images of so-called reality. Their behavior may look absurdly, although it’s based on the promise given by our culture: there must be something beyond the visible world.

Born in 1980 in Wroclaw, Poland where he lives and works. Since 2004 studied at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wroclaw. Received MA Degree in Media Arts in 2011. Founder and director at EMDES gallery which existed between 2009 and 2011.

An animated exploration of the popular fast food culture of North America, mixing the absurd with the obsessional and addressing other themes, such as the sensorial overload and the omnipresence of the interactivity in the media.

Trained in cinema and fine arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), Philippe Blanchard worked for a few years in Latin America and the Middle East. He eventually followed a training program in special effects at Seneca College (Toronto). He currently works for the animation studio 'Head Gear Animation' in Toronto.

The project ?The proll thing? comprises an animated video on two screens, and a video recorded with a handy phone. The idea is to distribute the narrative into different media, and see how this information acquires diferent levels in the exhibition space. My starting point was the Kino International restaurant in East Berlin. This building?s current ?image policy? prohibits taking photographs inside of it (although it is open to the public during film screenings). I thought about animation as the medium to depict the inside of the building, since it would be possible to recreate the interior in such a way as to mix reality and fiction. To make this setting, I integrated different elements, some of them real, others imaginary, creating new situations. The drawings for the video?s sets were based on a series of postcards which are sold as souvenirs at the entrance to the cinema. I was interested in the relationship between my own experience (looking in from an outside entrance to the building, from which I could see the tables closest to its picture windows) and the visual information contained in the postcards. Now, what is happening in a city like Berlin is that the recent past maintains a presence through many symbols (the monuments to Russians fallen in World War II, the telecommunications tower, the wide boulevards) I am interest in the moment, right now, when these symbols? usages are changing very quickly. The old Café Moskau, where the communist elite used to pamper itself, is now a gay disco; the old Palace of the Republic, used for skateboard competitions. Although at first, these where spaces created to establish doctrines, today, with the rapid adjustment of these uses and symbols, they are producing new meanings, maintaining their nature as social places, for meeting or exchange.

Vicente Blanco was born in Cee (A Coruña),Spain, and graduated in Fine Arts at the Faculty of Pontevedra (University of Vigo). He has been awarded the following grants, among others, a scholarship to further his training at the CGU in Los Angeles (U.S.A.), a Generation 2000 project grant awarded by Caja Madrid and the Unión Fenosa Grant and Beca Endesa, which allowed him to live in Berlin. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, most notably in Transfer 2000-2001, which, following a spell at the CGAC, toured various Spanish and German cities, Monocanal at the MNCARS, in the year 2003, Enlaces at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, in 2004, as well as in a variety of shows in 2006, such as, Urbanitas in MARCO (Vigo), ¿Viva pintura! In Salzburg (Austria) and 16 x 16, 16 proyectos de arte español, curated by María de Corral for ARCO?06. His main solo exhibitions were held at the CGAC in 2003 (Lo que se espera de nosotros) at the Espacio Uno of the Reina Sofía Museum ?MNCARS? in 2004 (Alguna vez pasa cuando estáis dormidos) and at the Elba benitez Gallery (Otra vez algo nuevo), 2006.

Empire of the Swamp (2023) begins with a figure wandering from the mangrove swamps surrounding the city edges of Singapore to Bukit Brown Cemetery in the heart of the island, overgrown and rich with biodiversity, once the final resting place for 100, 000 people. This green space is slowly being swallowed up, graves exhumed to make way for new roads and eventually new housing. A script, written by playwright Joel Tan, is a fable of nature and the repercussions of colonialism. A tale of a crocodile who comes upon the soul of a English soldier lost in the swamps. Empire of the Swamp was part of Atomic Light, David Blandy’s most ambitious solo project to date at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK. Featuring four newly commissioned films, it builds upon his continued interest in history, the legacy of empire and the climate crisis. The tales interconnect through the story of Blandy’s grandfather, a British soldier interred in Singapore as a Japanese prisoner of war, who believed that the horrific atomic bombing of Hiroshima saved his life. Empire of the Swamp was commissioned by John Hansard Gallery, UK & Supported by Arts Council England

David Blandy (1976, UK, Lives & works in Brighton) makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning multiple forms of archive, from fandoms to the archive of the body, historic texts to academic libraries, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London, UK. His films are distributed by LUX, London, UK.

End of Level is a short animated piece, fusing 2D pixels with 3d animation. The grande battle between an street artist and art director progresses to the soundtrack of beats created with a Nintendo Gameboy. The pixelated men battle for supremacy through reproduction, subversion, adbusting and recuperation. Reconfiguring the city`s system of signs is an epic battle which will never end.

Victor Blanke was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1980. A graduate of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Stockholm Filmschool, his work has been shown at the Stockholm Film Festival, the Subörb Festival and publications such as The Face and Adbusters Magazine. His commercial work includes numerous music videos and adverts for artists such as Paul McCartney, Shelly Poole, Håkan Lidbo and mutagene.

A traditional band plays in an abandoned hotel on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Only in the final credits we understand that this is a political film.

Daniel Blaufuks uses mainly photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations and films. He has a predilection for issues such as the connection between time and space and the intersection between private and public memory.

1560: the beginning of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’. Uncanny celestial events ignite the skies over Germany and Switzerland, leading people to believe the world is ending. ‘Tomorrow, the Burning Heavens’ reconsiders these apocalyptic visions, once captured in hand-colored woodblock prints, and returns to the Alps to observe the industrial production of winter landscapes in a modern-day skiing resort. Here, past and present dreams and nightmares are melted together in a film about the interplay of image-making, technology and faith during times of environmental collapse.

Max Bloching (b. 1994 Germany) is an artist filmmaker and sound recordist based in Berlin. Max´s work is animated by an interest in participatory forms of filmmaking and a curiosity in the ways humans experience and imagine the world through sound and silence. Max`s work has been shown internationally at places such as APT Gallery London, Visions Du Reél and RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film where he received the Willey Blackwell Student Film Prize. Max holds a BA in Social Anthropology from SOAS and an MA in Artists Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths University of London.

Successive Approximations to the Goal (2015), 14 min., 1080p digital Successive Approximations to the Goal is a term that is used in applied behavior analysis. It refers to the series of slight behavioral changes that are reinforced because they are increasingly more similar to the ultimate objective. Driven by the desire to spatially portray the passage of time, I filmed an LA Galaxy/Vancouver Whitecaps soccer game and then composited the images to portray the motion over time of the players, the refs and the ball. As the different pieces emerged, I was struck by the inevitability and futility of what I was seeing, which triggered in me thoughts of rats in cages, endlessly pushing rocks up mountains, video games that you always lose and the paradox of the movement of electrons. The sound interprets, in many different ways, the possible explanations for such strange human behavior.

Beth Block is a media artist who lives in Los Angeles. She worked in the film industry creating visual effects for major Hollywood films including TERMINATOR 2, ALTERED STATES, and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and was among the first generation of artists to transition from cameras to computers to create visual effects. Her recent films exploit the ability of digital technology to be re-photographed multiple times without generational loss, enabling her to more fully explore her fascination with capturing motion depicted over time. In addition to her experimental films she is a freelance documentary director, cinematographer and editor. She currently teaches at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and is also documentarian for the Unusual Suspects Theatre Company and the NewTown Pasadena Foundation. Her films and installations have been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), The Cinematheque, San Francisco, Los Angeles Filmforum, Film in the Cities, Minneapolis, MN, and the Ann Arbor, Sinking Creek, Philadelphia, Athens, and Black Maria Film Festivals. Block was a founding member and former board president of the NewTown Pasadena Foundation, where she is still an active member, and from 1985-1995 was a Los Angeles Filmforum board member and past president.

The installation consists of twelve filmed life-size portraits of actors viewed on six screens, each impersonating their favourite character of the opposite sex, performed in six-minute monologues. In total the installations lasts 72 minutes. The monologues are extracted from, or inspired by lines delivered by iconic characters in drama and literature, both historical and contemporary, criss-crossing time, space and language. During the 72 minute-installation all actors remain visually present, while only one voice speaks at a time. Between silence and the spoken word, the intrinsic tension of male/female border zones is redefined. The result is multidimensional: portraits of our time containing speeches and visions that bring revealing thoughts and insightful conversations about identity, revolution and desire in what feels like a personal confrontation with each actor. We challenge static, mental and cultural conventions by giving back the imagination to the limitations on gender and sexual identity.

Diana Blok is a self-taught visual artist born in Montevideo, Uruguay (1952), she lived in Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia before choosing Amsterdam as a base from which she could function more freely as a female artist. Her nomadic background allows Blok to capture different cultures and identities in her photography and video installations, challenging the structures of the established order as an inspirator, innovator and connector. She investigates subjects as identity, gender, sexual diversity, family structures and culture with poetic and confrontational imagery. In the past 6 years her work evolved into interactive-video installation ’Gender Monologues’, unsettling the gender binary and performing archetypes of femininity and masculinity blurring the disciplines of the moving image, performance and literature. She has had numerous exhibitions worldwide, received the grant for Established Artist from the Mondriaan Foundation in 2020 and will hold a retrospective in the Cobra Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art (NL) in 2024.

A short film based on the story by Robert Walser. He describes his state of mind, which floats somewhere between optimism and hopelessness. Thoughts are read out loud during a walk in the country. Slowly nature turns into inner nature.

Ansuya BLOM (Groningen 1956) studied from 1973-74 at the Royal Academy in The Hague and from 1974-76 at the Ateliers `63 in Haarlem. Her paintings have been put on show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among other museums. She has also taken part in various international group exhibitions.

SPELL is a short video documenting the thoughts of a man who seems to be in a state between sleep and wakefulness. The sounds he hears within the space where he lives seem to invade his thoughts and get amplified. They mix with associative sounds from his past. Meanwhile the reality around him appears to deform at times. In this in-between world he tries to het a grip on his state, contemplating early beginnings but at the same time mocking his own state, the futility of actions and the daily rituals of existence. The images for this film were shot in the Doesburg Foundation in Meudon, during a residency in 2010 - 2011. The house, with it`s historic past bore many traces from history and the people that had stayed there. This absent presence was a motivating factor in making this film. The words of Franz Kafka speak for themselves and it was the strange mix of humour and despair that attracted me.

Biography Ansuya Blom Ansuya Blom works as an artist using the media of drawing and film. Her work focuses on the individual and the relation to the internal as well as the external world. ?The first person singular? is used by way of thinking about the position of the individual. Ansuya Blom is interested in the strategies this individual adopts in dealing with anxieties that are induced by alienation. In her films the world is seen through the protagonists` eyes and heard through their voices. Ansuya Blom`s work has been exhibited extensively in both galleries and museums in the Netherlands as well as abroad. Solo-exhibitions of her work have been held at Camden Art centre, London, Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been among the venues where her films have been screened. She is an advisor at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam.

SYNOPSIS Hither come down on me Ansuya Blom 2007 Hither come down on me is the third and last film in the series ?Cowboys and Indians?. Just as in the two previous parts, Chapter Three and Nervous, anxiety is the main focus. It is through a ?touch by language? that experience is guided in an auditory way. In Chapter Three the view of the ?first person singular? is distorted through the experience of the space, while in Nervous the soothing environment of nature can be seen as a doubble negative, whereby it isboth familiar and the unfamiliar. In Hither come down on me anxiety is evoked through the confrontation with the external world of the city, quite literally what is outside the domestic. The protagonist experiences what he sees and hears as a direct form of communication, speaking directly to him and ordering him. As opposed to previous parts the main character can be seen, if only in a fragmentary way through the reflection of a mirror. He observes himself just as he experiences the outside world. The title of the film comes from an anonymous Native American poem, in which there is a plea for protection and change. In Hither come down on me the main character prepares himself mentally and physically for leaving his room, his controlled zone. His preparations consist of dressing meticulously. Everything is executed in a precise manner: buttoning a shirt, doing his cuffs, his trousers: a kind of mental ?warming up?. When the moment arrives to leave, a ritual is set in place in order to tame the situation. Once outside it is evening and he enters a world which is visually shadowy and auditorally dissociated. Language becomes more abstract, at times incomprehensible. The city becomes the voice speaking to him in a language into which he merges.

Ansuya Blom has been working as an artist since ?77, with drawing and film. In her work her focus is on the individual and his relation to his internal as well as the external world. ?The first person singular? is used by way of thinking about the individual and his relation to the world. In her films the world is seen through the protagonist?s eyes and heard through his voice. In her work Ansuya Blom?s interest lies within the strategies the individual adopts in order to deal with anxiety. Her work has been exhibited extensively in both galleries and museums in the Netherlands as well as abroad. Solo-exhibitions of her work including both drawing and film have held at Camden Art centre, London, Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been among the venues where her films have been screened.