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Sara Bartman who is more commonly known as Venus Hottentot was a South African Khoisan woman who was brought to England to be exhibited in 1810. Her genitals and buttocks where far beyond the understanding of what most Europeans at that time considered a human body in that sense connecting humanity with their race solely, she was considered almost like an animal and was exposed like an object. After her death her genitals and her brain were kept, as well as a wax model of her body and her skeleton have being exposed in the Musée de l`Homme in France.This performance is the result of an investigation into the black performing body, and how blackness has become an act in itself, wearing her body as a skin was a solution to disguise myself and at the same time become myself through the other.The reason why Sara Bartman has become this icon for the African people in Africa and in the diaspora as well as for European people, is a reaction to the registered and legitimate scientific and voyeuristic rape of her body. The verticality of the sculptures and monuments that glorify the heroic acts of man is now simply the body of an African woman, silent, erect, awake.

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 9 April 1982, currently living in Amsterdam and making a Master in Fine Arts at the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede, The Netherlands. Graduated in 2007 from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands at the Fine Arts department where I developed my last works, all of which are performances Hommage à Sara Bartman 2007, Throne of Gold 2007, Trujillo`s Island 2007, Trujillo 2006.

The experimental film Zone of Silence (Scream Machine) explores the interplay between light, fog, and resonance to depict inner isolation and psychological disorientation. The city is enveloped in a dense atmosphere, while reflections of light and muffled sounds create a “zone of silence” in which orientation and communication begin to dissolve. Inspired by historical maritime navigation problems—where foghorns became inaudible under certain weather conditions—the film translates this phenomenon into the realm of the human unconscious. Theodor Reik’s psychoanalytic concept of the “zone of silence” serves as a central motif for repressed emotions and the difficulty of breaking through them. The closing sequence shows the fading inscription “EUROPA,” a bleak reflection on the continent’s political future. Through its dense atmosphere, a composition blending field recordings and synthesized sound, and the use of visual metaphors, the film offers a profound exploration of inner emptiness and the search for orientation.

Michael Dietrich (*1985, Vienna, Austria)studied social design at the HfbK Hamburg and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His work explores the impact of human intervention on nature, often unfolding unsettling scenarios through video and acousmatic.

One Buenos Aires afternoon in the dominican hairdresser saloon, in which characters from different origins reunite around the musical feeling of the place. From dancers to performers and actors, clients and reggaeton singers.

MA in Documentary Cinema and Profesor Assistant at Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires. PhD Candidate at University NOVA, Lisboa. Currently working on my first feature film. I'm interested in the notions of displacement, ritual and longing. In color, rhythm, body and mixing genres in a surrealist way.

When Oum Kalthoum meets Serge Gainsbourg meets Billie Holliday meets Aisha Al Marta meets Sabah meets Taxi Girl meets Esther Phillips meets Yasmine Hamdan meets Souad Abdallah meets Jeanne Moreau meets Dina Washington meets PJ Harvey meets Marylin Monroe meets Astrud Gilberto meets Sara Vaughan meets Catherine Deneuve meets Mohamad Mounir meets Madonna meets Delphine Seyrig meets Soapkills meets Ahmad Adawiya meets Eartha Kitt meets Mirwais meets Bandali Family meets Feyrouz meets Asmahan meets Cheikh Imam meets Marguerite Duras meets Nina Simone meets Cole Porter meets Omar Zeini meets Fleetwood Mac meets Tarab meets Kitsch meets Choubi meets you.

Actor (notably directed by Christian Merlhiot, Jocelyne Saab, Georges Hachem, Roy Samaha, Omar Fakhoury and Jad Youssef…) and journalist, Nasri has also been a DJ for over 8 years in Beirut, and Berlin where he is currently based. With an eclectic mix of uninhibited pop with borderless genres and tastes - good or bad - Nasri creates the musical encounter with the great names of the Arab world`s classical repertoire alongside those of Western pop, music of the Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon, and beyond with stars and starlets of French cinema and literature. A fanatic of Jazz divas, Nasri links Asmahan and Delphine Seyrig, Grace Jones and Jeanne Moreau, as well as the most kitsch of Arabic sounds with acoustic dialogues by Bette Davis, among other great actresses of International cinema.

The work is based on fragments from interviews taken from Romanian immigrants living in Paris in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Shot in Nogent sur Vernisson. Loiret, on December 28th, 2013. 2013 had a warm autumn and an even warmer winter debut. "I think that this is one of the reasons why the birds that live along the Loire chose to rest longer. Some rested even until late December. I filmed this material when they started preparing to fly away. ”Birds” presents 7 minutes of French sunset, on continuous shooting, with the migratory birds preparing to leave. It presents the sunset of the West, with governments taking measures belonging to the right. I chose to draw a paralel between this story and statements that I had previously recorded in Paris, belonging to Romanian immigrants."

Daniel Djamo (b.1987, lives and works in Bucharest) is a young Romanian artist and film director, being interested in personal and group histories. He combines film with video art and installation with photography in order to evoke the past and to underline “the now.” Winner of the ESSL award, Henkel Art.Award. Young artist prize CEE, Startpoint Prize Romania and the Grand Prize of the National University of Fine Arts from Bucharest. Daniel benefited from residencies in Paris, Kassel, Chemnitz, Bruxelles, Vienna and Liege. He exhibited at the Museum of Moscow, Kunsthaus Dresden, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) and the ESSL museum from Vienna, while also presenting his works in Germany, Italy, Canada, Netherlands, USA, Russia, Portugal, Czech Republic, Estonia etc. His video artworks have been screened in numerous video art and film festivals. He is a PhD candidate at the National University of Fine Arts from Bucharest.

The backstory for The Golden Wish is that the danish left government`s suggestion that the police could be able to seize jewelry and valuables from asylum seeker as they arrive in to the country. The jewelry and the valuables would finance board and lodging for the newcomers. In connection with this project I have been to Iraq and visited two large refugee camps outside of Suleimaniah. The refugee camps are Arbar and Barika and they are located 29 km southeast of the city Suleimaniah. In all their are 32 000 refugees in both camps together. I was on the lookout in their local markets and contacted jewelry dealers and private persons in the area. I then buyed their gold jewelry, melted and casted it to a text based installation, formed to the sentence: “Everything will be ok”.

I am a artist that works within drawing, painting, installation, video and film. Thematically in several of my work I have worked with my own experiences as a Kurdish refugee, but my experiences can provide knowledge of universal issues that can be linked to being a human being on the run. I am originally from Iraqi Kurdistan, I completed a five-year art education before fleeing due to persecution in 1997. After a challenging escape through 11 countries, I came to Norway in December 1999 and completed art education here as well.

A slow dance of classical cinema to the music of Zelany Rashoho. The work deals with well-known films: 'Sun Valley Serenade', 'Casablanca', 'Some Like It Hot', 'In the Waterfront', 'Citizen Kane'. The footage of these films is transformed in order to coincide with the new music made by Zelany Rashoho which is a mixture of jazz, electronics and dub.

AV are two video artists from St.-Petersburg, Russia. AV = Alexei and Sergei Dmitriev, 21 and 19 years old visual artists from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. We do experimental film and live video. Perform with a band called Zelany Rashoho.

"DENSITY 1" is a sensory video about displacement, time, and space. It attempts to capture the essence of temporal spaces that we so often dismiss frivolously.The relationship between audio and video is intensified by its complimentary, subconscious transmission of its fundamental characteristics. Overall, this pieces comments on the ephemeral nature of long term memory, and how its representations are distorted through a person`s environment, experience, and temperament.

Patrick Doan currently resides in Montreal, Canada, and is currently studying design at Concordia University. Specializing in digital animation, his work is characterized by the investigation of the relationship that exists within digital information, space, and the urban landscape. Having worked extensively in graphic design, his work layers cinematic composition and typographic treatment. Since 2001, he has been producing work under DEFASTEN, a creative outlet and reservoir of client work.

Blackface in a film about a secret war Experimental SA documentary challenges hidden memories of a faraway and forgotten fight Blackface and South Africa’s secret border war are exposed and explored in a poignant and troubling new film by Christo Doherty and Aryan Kaganof, which was shown in Cape Town and Joburg (South Africa) for the first time in June 2016. For 23 years from 1967 to 1989, young white men were conscripted to kill and die for apartheid during a long deadly war on the border of Namibia and Angola. In 2011, Doherty presented his ground-breaking BOS exhibition of constructed miniature models and blackfaced conscript portraits based on the rare photographs leaked from the conflict zone, often at great risk to the photographers at the time. Described by its directors as an ‘experimental psychic documentary’, Lamentation is a filmic response to Doherty`s BOS exhibition of physical suffering,traumatic memory and the border war. Doherty and Kaganof’s 18-minute film is a formal meditation on the traumatic memory of an illegal war in which tens of thousands of young white South African men were forced to participate and uncounted numbers of black Namibians were killed or injured. It is a contemporary attempt to explore one of the unexamined aspects of apartheid’s military misadventures, a conflict which killed and injured unknown numbers of civilians and well as soldiers and left a generation of men and women traumatised on both sides of the conflict. The film makers are not afraid to challenge and to shock. And they stress that the film is about memories and understanding for all participants and victims of the border war, not only SA soldiers. Lamentation’s delicate musical score, by leading South African composer Michael Blake, accompanies the camera’s slow movement up the uniformed chest of a solemn white model with painted black face, cutting to scan a miniature scene showing the mutilated corpse of a black Namibian civilian alongside an armoured SA military vehicle. Throughout the film, the disconcerting and shocking imagery is presented through an insistently choreographed interplay of cinematography and sound design. “We know this is difficult material, but interpreted and constructed images in art are an important way to reflect on a war which we don’t think South Africa has fully dealt with,” Doherty says. “Many white men, including myself, firmly shut the door on their army days, yet the SADF was a dark formative experience which we need to expose and understand.” White soldiers: black faces The filmmakers’ portrayal of white men in brown army uniform with black faces sparked controversy in South Africa, but the use of this make-up was a survival mechanism in the war. The blackface device in the film and in BOS is based on the combat body paint used as camouflage in the Angolan bush by apartheid’s soldiers, ironically known to the white troops as ‘black is beautiful’. “White faces painted black are currently taboo, but were very much part of a conscripted white soldier’s experience during South Africa’s war in Namibia and Angola,” Doherty says. The photographs in BOS, and now Lamentation, use re-enacted representations of this wartime practice, together with miniature reconstructions of scenes of battle and violence, to probe the psychological and ethical transformation of young men who joined in an involuntary battle against a hidden enemy. Beautiful music: origins of a difficult film The film emerged through Doherty and film-maker Aryan Kaganof`s mutual involvement with the hauntingly beautiful music by South African composer Michael Blake, Tombeau de Mosoeu Moerane(2011) for soprano birbyne and 5-track (or 2-track) tape. Written in homage to the little-known South African black composer Mosoeu Moerane, the film score features Lithuanian clarinet virtuoso Darius Klysis playing the birbyne, a simple keyless wooden wind instrument. The conclusion to the film is underscored by an extract from another composition by Michael Blake, his String Quartet No 1, performed by The Fitzwilliam String Quartet. Cinematographer Eran Tahor’s beautifully choreographed and achingly-slow camera movements match the cadences of Blake`s music and provide a powerful visual sense of the isolated and estranging experience of South Africa’s war on a distant and dangerous border. The editing and sound design by Aryan Kaganof bring together the music and the cinematography with strands of found audio, including a voice softly singing fragments of "Die Stem van Suid Afrika", the old National Anthem.

Christo Doherty Christo is Associate Professor of Digital Arts in the Wits School of Arts at Wits University. He is a photographer and artist with a keen interest in the visual representation of conflict and trauma. He was conscripted into the apartheid army at the age of 17. Aryan Kaganof Aryan Kaganof is a South African film maker, novelist, poet and fine artist. His extensive filmography includes Threnody for the Victims of Marikana, Decolonising Wits, Western 4.33, and Nicola’s First Orgasm. Aryan left SA aged 19 to avoid conscription into the apartheid army.

AM-Fm, 2 bands of communication, 2 characters dissolving into each other. I felt the sound like a growing tree.

Julio Dolbeth, lives and works in Porto, Portugal. Teaches Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto. Degree in Graphic Design. MFA in Multimedia-Art untitled ?Artificial Skin?. Works as Graphic Designer, Illustrator and Video Artist. Regular collaborator with DifMagazine (Portugal).

In the 21st century, you returned to the archipelagos Saint Louis of Sénégal, and Saint Louis of Paris to unearth vestiges of signares—women once at the centre of Occidental French West African commerce and society. Through the night, through the whispers of your aunts and nieces, through the institutions that house present-day French “patrimoine (cultural heritage),” you fell into a spiral between colonial presents and the past.

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye is a pluridisciplinary researcher and educator from T?maki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Her matrilineal ancestry traces to Senegal and France, while her patrilineal lineage is of Polish and Czech descent. Through iterative and ritualistic processes, Yana’s practice is a poetic inquiry into the material and immaterial conditions of belonging, approaching artistic practice as archaeological gesture, unearthing the spectral, often erased presence of intercultural identities embedded in sites marked by colonial history and personal heritage. At present, Yana is at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, participating as one of ten internationally selected artists in the In Situ program, which will conclude March 2026.

?Søen i spejlet? is the re-enactment of a former boarding school tradition in Denmark. Once a year the students of Sorø Academy held a ritual out in the woods, burning effigies of their teachers on a bonfire. The narrative of the film evolves around the character of a former student that revisits the place of his school days meeting with a group of young students. What first seems to be the fictionalization of the former student´s memory, becomes more and more the documentation of the staging of the ritual ? the alumni himself being the director. But as soon as the ritual sets off, all turns to a different state of realness, as the anger and emotion of the young students boil up to an uncanny level of authenticity.

After studying Fine Art at the Muthesius Academy for Art and Design in Kiel, Johanna Domke went on to graduate studies at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, where she got her MA in 2004. She received the ZKM International Media Art Award, Audience Prize, for her single-channel piece ?Let the wind blow? and the Brockmann Prize from the Stadtgalerie Kiel. 2004 she got the Edstranska Grant for Graduating Students. Since then Domke has broadly exhibited her work in renowned art institutions, such as Casino Luxembourg, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Berlinische Galerie and international film festivals such as Film Festival Oberhausen, Locarno Film Festival, Videonale at the Bonner Kunstmuseum and the Kunstfilmbiennale.

Stultifera Garden deals with an overlapping structure of the public and the private. The film is set in a park ? a place were city dwellers recover from busy urban life. At the same time it is a place implementing the ?elsewhere? - an un-ruled territory for individuals who are in conflict with society or the human milieu in which they live. It is also a place for individuals whose behaviour is deviant with the respect to the mean or the required norm. As in earlier works, Domke uses a travelling camera to approach the parks diverse character, emphasizing polarities as observing and being watched, high and low culture, control and non-control. The incessant pan evolves from a classic park scenario towards a dystopic, mazy structure of trails. The camera experiences different milieus of the park not directly examining them but portraying them with an inexplicit openness. She accesses milieus that formed architectonical structures in the shrubs, such as cruising areas and drug trafficking points. She discovers places that became functionalised entities - for teens as a get-away, for elderly as a meeting point - each and everyone with their own character and history. Without stating explicit action or narrative Stultifera Garden is more interested to explain that a park is a place for the other, where all these milieus and facets function along side. Intruding as an omniscient eye, Domke is constructing the real to establish the fictitious.

After studying art at the Muthesius Academy for Art and Design in Kiel, Johanna Domke went on to graduate studies at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, where she got her MA in 2004. In 2003 she received the ZKM International Media Art Award, Audience Prize, for her single-channel piece ?Let the wind blow? and the Brockmann Prize from the Stadtgalerie Kiel. 2004 she got the Edstranska Grant for Graduating Students. Since then Domke has broadly exhibited her work in renowned art institutions, such as Casino Luxembourg, Berlinische Galerie, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and international film festivals such as Film festival Oberhausen, Locarno Film Festival, Videonale at the Bonner Kunstmuseum and Kunstfilmbiennale, Köln.

Johanna Domke?s film Cuers is inspired by Franz Kafka?s The Trial and the filmic universe of Orson Welles. The audience is taken on a fleeting and meandering journey through different sites in public space, where people are exposed to long waiting. The individual is presented as a singular being, confronting structures of public space. The particular situations are represented in an inspirational manner shifting in and out of each other. Time and space is dissolved in kaleidoscopic pictures, which emphasizes how we physically as well as mentally have trouble adjusting to our anonymous environment. ? Cuers? seeks to create a mental space through abstraction and subversion of the familiar.

After studying art at the Muthesius Academy for Art and Design in Kiel, Johanna Domke went on to graduate studies at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, where she got her MA in 2004. In 2003 she received the ZKM International Media Art Award, Audience Prize, for her single-channel piece ?Let the wind blow? and the Brockmann Prize from the Stadtgalerie Kiel. 2004 she got the Edstranska Grant for Graduating Students. Since then Domke has broadly exhibited her work in renowned art institutions, such as Casino Luxembourg, Göteborg Konstmuseum, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and international film festivals such as Film festival Oberhausen, Locarno Film Festival, Videonale at the Bonner Kunstmuseum and VIPER, Basel.

?Crossing fields,? emphasizes upon the private use of commercial space and documents reading people in a bookstore. The video was filmed in a bookshop in Beijing, as this phenomenon is broadly common in mayor cities in China. Due to obsolete libraries, bookstores function as an open source of knowledge, which attracts crowds of people to spend their free time in the sometimes gigantic bookstore complexes. But instead of buying the books people spend entire days, sitting and reading thronged together, spread around the store. As the management approves this, the reading people?s private use of space is becoming prevalent to the commercial activity in the store. 

 Johanna Domke is interested in this kind of anarchic use of space and the depiction of stasis evolving within the situation. Winding its way through the statue-like readers the camera captures with close and intimate images the ambiguity of their presence. Being physically present they sojourn at the same time in the fictive sphere of their reading. The immobile appearance of the readers leaves the impression that the camera is moving within a frozen moment of time.

After studying art at the Muthesius Academy for Art and Design in Kiel, Johanna Domke went on to graduate studies at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, where she got her MA in 2004. In 2003 she received the ZKM International Media Art Award, Audience Prize, for her single-channel piece ?Let the wind blow? and the Brockmann Prize from the Stadtgalerie Kiel. 2004 she got the Edstranska Grant for Graduating Students. Since then Domke has broadly exhibited her work in renowned art institutions, such as Casino Luxembourg, Göteborg Konstmuseum, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and international film festivals such as Film festival Oberhausen, Locarno Film Festival, Videonale at the Bonner Kunstmuseum and VIPER, Basel.

?Sleepers? takes place at Stansted Airport in London in the very late night and portrays sleeping people with slowly panning camera moves. The slow takes emphasise with the passenger?s tiresome waiting for an early morning flight. Within this physical location Domke grips a real, temporal situation that shows the airport as a form of standstill. The video follows a sequence of sleeping people in a transit situation. But even if they are in transit they undergo a present standstill that deludes oneself into a void, where one is not quite sure how the situation will progress. With the interest of this kind of void Johanna Domke evolves her artistic praxis within the time-based media of film and the photographic still image, which on a conceptual level can be seen as a distortion of time and movement. A hybridisation, that opens up for other relations and references.

Johanna Domke was born in 1978 in Kiel. After studying Fine Arts at the Muthesius Academy for Art and Design in Kiel, Domke went on to study at Malmö Art Academy, Sweden and the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copen­hagen, where she received her MA in 2006. In 2003 Domke received the Audience Prize at the ZKM International Media Art Award for her work Let the wind blow, as well as the Brookmann Prize from Stadtgalerie Kiel. In 2004 Johanna Domke was awarded the Edstranska Stiftelsen?s Grant for Students in Sweden. Since then, her work has been shown in major instituti­ons in Europe and elsewhere, including the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg; Göteborg Konstmuseum, Gothenburg; KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg and Bonner Kunstmuseum, Bonn. Furthermore, her works have been screened at film festivals such as European Media Art Festival 2003/2008 Osnabrück; Locarno Film festival 2006, Locarno; Oberhausen Film Festival 2007, Oberhausen and Rencon­tres Internationales 2005/2007, Berlin and Paris. Domke lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

On top of a windy hill, two motionless human figures overlook a valley with a teeming big city. One is standing up, the other sits on the ground, the distance between them too large to evoke a sense of togetherness. The clouds race across the sky, the night falls like a brick and thousands of lights gleam at once in the valley before dawn breaks, the sun flies up and a new day begins. All the while, the two figures remain absolutely still before the unfolding scenery. Only the wind blows in their clothes and their hair.

Johanna Domke, born 1978 in Kiel, Germany, lives and works in Copenhagen, DK and Berlin,D. She is a german artist based in Copenhagen and Berlin. After studying Fine Art at the Muthesius Academy for Art and Design in Kiel, Johanna Domke went on to graduate studies at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, where she got her MA in 2004. In 2003 she received the ZKM International Media Art Award, Audience Prize, for her single-channel piece ?Let the wind blow? and the Brockmann Prize from the Stadtgalerie Kiel. 2004 she got the Edstranska Grant for Graduating Students and the Assistent Grant from the Swedish Arts Council. Johanna Domke`s work has been broadly shown in exhibitions, video festivals and art fairs in Europe and the US. She is represented by Gallery Art Agents in Hamburg.

During three days, in the mountains of Corsica, men slaughter and process the pig.

Arnaud Dommerc was born in 1971. He has been teaching cinema at the Paris 8 Universty since 2001. He has worked since 2007 as assistant with Jean-Marie Straub (Le genou d?Artémide, Itinéraire de Jean Bricard, Le Streghe, O Somma Luce, Joachim Gatti, L?Inconsolable, L?Héritier). His last film We?ll nerver go to Buti was selected in competition at the FID 2008 and at the Rencontres Paris / Berlin / Madrid 2009.

L'epoca geniale (The Age of Genius) is a film that enters a place where form is mixed with lyricism and the magic of body movements and gazes. The eyes are filled with wonder and reveal themselves as a metaphor for a society that wishes to become children again. The protagonists' exercises have nothing of realistic, but lean towards theatricality and imagination. The walls of this universal space thus become silent witnesses of these complicated gestures, of these endlessly repeated attempts to finally reach maturity.

Tommaso Donati (Lugano, 1988). His work combines a narrative approach with documentary cinema and is structured around the theme of marginality. His films have been presented at various national and international festivals. He currently lives and works in Lugano

Until the beginning of the 20th century in France, the game of hide and seek was called "cligne-musette". In a winter landscape, the film follows five kids and a young man who wanders alone between the desolate buildings of the Valibout neighbourhood, located in the province town of Plaisir. They will not cross paths but seem destined to meet the same fate, that of being abandoned to themselves; to hide and not to be found.

Born in 1988, Tommaso Donati lives and works in Lugano, Switzerland. His work combines a narrative approach with documentary cinema and is structured around the theme of marginality.

Patrice is an inmate in the french prison Bois d’Arcy. As an actor and at the same time a silent spectator he hides his drama through a routine of daily gestures and ambiguous postures.

Tommaso Donati (1988, Switzerland) lives and works in Lugano. His work explores the meeting point of documentary, experimental fiction and photography in telling stories of marginalisation and relations between people and the and the nature-space in which they live.

Monte Amiata is a residential complex in the Gallaratese neighbourhood in Milan, designed by architects Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi at the end of the 1960s. It was created with the intention of representing a parallel microcosm, a sort of alternative city of the future. In referring to its unusual colour and shape, its inhabitants call it the red dinosaur.

Tommaso Donati (1988) lives and works between Paris and Lugano. I His output to date has been split between documentary, experimental cinema and photography. Recurrent themes in his work are the relations between humans and the nature-space in which they live. In the last three years he participates with his short films at Locarno Festival.

A Somali migrant seeks refuge in the underground of a building near the Swiss-Italian border. A popular song from his country awakens in him the desire to leave.

Tommaso Donati,(1988 ), lives and works in Lugano. In 2013, he gains a diploma from the école internationale de création audiovisuelle et de réalisation (EICAR) in Paris. His output to date has been split between documentary, experimental cinema and photography. Recurrent themes in his work are the relations between humans, animals and the nature-space in which they live.

A man and a woman living on the margins of society move and meet between urban and natural spaces, seeking a forgotten freedom and trying to stay awake.

Tommaso Donati, born in 1988, lives and works in Lugano. In 2013, he gains a diploma from the École internationale de création audiovisuelle et de réalisation (EICAR) in Paris. His output to date has been split between documentary, experimental cinema and photography. Recurrent themes in his work are the relations between humans, animals and the nature-space in which they live.

An homeless woman shares her life in a highway station with her dog. After his missing, she starts to wander around the station and the woods searching for him; in the meantime the gestures of a mysterious man that works in a prehistorical museum in the middle of the forest take place like every day. Linked by the same basic human need the woman, the man and the animal will move and cross each other looking for something more elevated.

A man performs the same ritual every day: he cleans his shoes, dresses up in his shiny blue suit, wears his white gloves and grey hat, and spends his time walking around Brazzaville. His presence generates an absurd apparition in the urban chaos of the city, which reflects the imaginary produced by one of the up-most icons of pop culture.

Wojtek Doroszuk (b. 1980 in Poland) is a video artist based in Krakow, Poland and Rouen, France. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland, Faculty of Painting, in 2006. His works have been shown in numerous solo and group shows in, among others, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Location One (New York), Marina Abramovic Institute (San Francisco), The Stenersen Museum (Oslo), Joseph Tang Gallery (Paris) etc.

?even odd even? is the artistic interpretation of a time- and space-based analysis of video feedback and delivers an insight into a fascinating world of spatial complexity and dynamic behavior. ?The vision is drawn in a highly suggestive way to a pulsating pattern of black and white lines. By the rhythmic movements of these bar codes, permeated by a thick carpet of sound, the vision glides at times as in picture puzzles into a new spatial dimension ... ? (Gunnar Landsgesell) It concerns the focused center of video feedback (1:18 min), with very fast moving image content. To be able to experience not only the fascinating flow of information, but also the content and correlation in more detail, the video feedback is decomposed into its essential parts ? the alternate successive odd and even fields, each lasting 1/50 second. Separated from each other, newly ordered and their speed manipulated, various sequences are created which are placed in relationship to the original video feedback. The apparently hidden becomes visible in a process of aesthetic experience.

Born in 1961 in Innsbruck, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Studied art history at the University of Innsbruck, Doctorate in 1989. Since 1994 freelance artist (media/video and fine arts). Artistic domain: video feedback ? processed in experimental videos, video/media installations, prints and paintings (video stills). Exhibitions/events in Austria and abroad, numerous videos presented in more than 30 countries at international festivals for film, video and new media. Cooperation in international media art projects. www.sunpendulum.at/barbaradoser

A stage unfolds and a love song is sung displaced from it’s owner. INSERT SONG is video-essay meditating on music and semiotics in relation to love, and how love declarations are falling victim to the image.

Kamil Dossar (b. 1988) is a Danish artist currently based in Copenhagen. Dossar’s practice is rooted in an interest in themes concerning identity and how we relate to images in contemporary society. Central to his work is the relationship between identity and the loss of it, and exploring the image in relation to the imageless, as a son to political refugees. By investigating visual identity and semiotics he renegotiates the status of the image by rearranging it into new modes of associations.

The video work The Clearing reveals a fascination for exploring the indescribable and the ambiguous, a space in which certainty falls away and one can experience moments of thoughtlessness, perhaps even timelessness. This concept of an indefinable space is a recurring theme in Marco Douma and Roel Meelkop's audiovisual works.

Since the 1990s, both makers have been active in art in their own fields. Roel Meelkop developed from visual art to sound artist and Marco Douma developed from painting to multimedia artist. They made the acquired expertises their own and are in that sense self-taught in their current fields. At the same time, their visual academic background still plays a major role in the creation process. Perhaps this common denominator, which they recognise in each other's work, makes their collaboration so natural and complete. The collaboration began in 2011 and since then they have created video installations, performances and video works.

Peter Downsbrough (1940, New Brunswick, N.J.) studied architecture and art. Around the mid-1960’s, after several years of work and exploring materials, including cardboard, wood, steel, lead, neon tubing, an evolution took place which resulted, in 1970, in the work with the ‘Two Pipes’ (outside), ‘Two Dowels’ (inside) and ‘Two Lines’ (on paper). At the same time, he also started taking photographs to document these pieces. By taking photographs from different angles and distances, he gradually started taking photographs of ‘cuts’ that already existed in the urban landscape. Some of these photographs were used in books, some appeared in magazines, but it wasn’t until 1980 that they showed up in exhibitions. From 1977 on, Downsbrough realized several videos as well as audiotapes. A record was made in 1978 and released in 1982. Looking to expand the vocabulary, he developed a series of works using dice. In 1980, on the Spectacolor Board on Times Square, New York, he realized a piece, a 30 seconds spot shown once every hour for four days, and documented it in a short film, ‘7 come 11’. Around 1980, he also started using regular postcards, initially by applying two lines, later to be followed by the use of words. The work with models as a means of exploring space and structure started around 1983. The first commissioned public work was a wall piece realized in Rennes, France, 1990. The film ‘Occupied’was produced in 2000, ten years after it was conceived. Since then, several films, shot with a digital camera, have been published as dvd’s. Today, all these disciplines occupy the field of his activities. Downsbrough’s interest for industrial architecture takes many forms. More often than not, ‘preservation’ means survival in the form of a film or photo series. His films and photos always capture an industrial or (sub)urban reality that will sooner or later vanish or be subject to redevelopment ‘ be it late Seventies Manhattan or the industrial zones around Kent, UK.

We don`t know where we are. We`re in a car, looking at other cars, roads, structures, tunnels – wasteland. Position? The Global Positioning System informs us, with its horde of satellites, orbiting Earth. Guiding us with its synthesised voice, transporting us, `translating` us. Telling us what to do. `After 250 meters, keep to the right on the Brudermühlstraße, then keep to the left.` (And so on, and so forth.)

Brussels-based Peter Downsbrough (born New Jersey, USA, 1940) has developed a highly distinctive, strongly cohesive body of work that includes sculpture, drawings, photographs, films, videos, books, wall pieces and room pieces, architectural maquettes, and sculptural interventions in public space. Frequently heightening his famously sparse visual vocabulary with an equally sparse linguistic component—often just a single word—Downsbrough calls attention to a vast landscape of structures both physical and social, cultural and political—that shape modern life.

The silent, ultra-short black-and-white video IN [ TO is shorter than a video clip: it clocks in at 2 minutes, 47 seconds. It was made with material shot exclusively for the film, plus footage filmed `on the occasion`, while Downsbrough was working on other projects. One sees images from (South) Chicago, Brussels and Kent respectively, but since everything is filmed at night, only viewers who are familiar with the location will easily identify the spots. Here, the purpose is not to be specific about a site, to identify a place, or to document a certain location. Rather, Downsbrough gives an overall feeling of some quasi-archetypical `city at night`. The city is shot both as cityscape, from a distance, e.g. from outside the window of a Brussels apartment private building, or from nearer-by: a zoom-in from inside of the same building. IN [ TO contains many elements that define former Downsbrough films, both content-wise ? urbanism, cars, freeways and ring roads ? and formally: clean, `structural` framing, abstraction, the use of graphically inserted words. Here, as before, a phrase or a word game, almost hidden, can be discerned ? it might or might not be a key to the film. First, there?s the title of course, IN [ TO. Only at the very end, when the image is fading, the word TIME lights up, shortly. It seems like an indication of what time does: fading out light. Into time, the light fades out. A stream of cars passes by, only their head lights are visible. Everything else is dark, except for the horizon, with the outlines of distant buildings and hundreds of lights flickering: lit windows, neon publicity, street lights. At the film`s very end, a point of view shot from inside a car shows a road at night: Kent ? but it might be any city, or in between cities. To the left, trees; to the right, light posts; in front, the beam of the headlights, some other cars` rear lights. Then the image fades. TIME. The image`s gone. IN ] TO, with reversed bracket. Credits. - Steven Tallon -

Peter Downsbrough (1940, New Brunswick, N.J.; lives in Brussels) initially studied architecture but decided early on to work as a sculptor. Taking photographs of his trademark Two Pipes lead to taking photographs of ?cuts? that already existed in the urban landscape. Initially used in his books, they were shown in exhibitions from 1980 on. After having realized a few videos around 1978, Downsbrough took up filming again when he got a digital camera in 2002. In 1980, on the Spectacolor Board on Times Square, New York, he realized a 30-second spot shown once every hour for four days, and documented it in a short film, ?7 come 11.? His ongoing research of time, space and structure is further articulated through lines and letters in maquettes, wall and room pieces, and public commissions. Exhibitions include POSITION, 2003, curated by M.-T. Champesme, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (B), Espace de l?Art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux (F) and Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (PL); Mamco, Genève (CH); FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (F); SMAK, Ghent (B) and PETER DOWNSBROUGH: THE BOOK(S), curated by M. Küng, deSingel, Antwerp (B) which will have a second venue at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona (E) in the beginning of 2013.

ET[- opens with a silent black-and-white close-up of a vertical rod shuttling back and forth across a mechanical loom. The short sequence could be mistaken for footage from an early 20th-century propaganda film. Cut sharply to the next scene, also in black and white and taken from a fixed position but unmistakably contemporary. Reflected in a polished, slightly distorting surface, cars are seen entering a gated parking lot. That image is overlaid on the lower left by the film's title, printed in black, and is accompanied by a burst of ambient sound: the dull rumble of traffic. Cut abruptly to a silent close-up in color -- a kind of industrial interior still-life-- then cut again to black and white: a steel door opens vertically onto a cavernous corridor where mini-forklifts scurry about. The rest of the film, which zig-zags between exterior and interior views, is in black and white. Two more jarring spurts of ambient sound are heard and a second word, LA, appears, in white and preceded by a closed bracket, just before the final fade-out and credits. The reflected scene over which ]LA is superimposed is much like the one seen in the film's title image. ET[- has all the characteristics of a signature piece by Peter Downsbrough. The mostly silent, almost entirely black-and-white film is a visual exploration of constructed form, in this case, a modern factory building, a sprawling reflective box situated next to a busy road in a semi-rural setting. The blind facade of pleated, polished stainless-steel mirrors the constant flux of its surroundings and seems to dissolve into them. Inside is a different story: a universe of crisp, hard-edged geometries, gleaming surfaces and clinical precision. Giant spools, looms and bolts of material are stacked, aligned and otherwise arranged in perfect order. Fully automated machines revolve, throb, swivel and tick, each in its own rhythm and speed in the film's eerie silence. Eerie too is the absence of humans. Except for the two forklift operators, whose tiny vehicles occasionally career by like wind-up toys in a madcap adventure, there isn't a soul in sight. The camera surveys the factory's outside features and inner workings with slow pans, and it fixes on details with a steady gaze, shifting its focus constantly from interior to exterior, and its pacing from smooth, stately pans to rapidly cut fixed shots -- a visual interweaving that mimics the manufacturing processes taking place in the factory itself. If the final product is shown wrapped up and ready to go, we don't necessarily recognize it as such. However, we do witness its departure in trailer trucks as they pull out from the factory's loading docks, bound for the highway. That part of the drama, too, is seen reflected in the building's skin. - Sarah McFadden -

A]PART is the first publication in the brand new CKA _ EDITIONS series, run by Christian Kieckens. It constitutes the third collaboration between Brussels-based American artist Peter Downsbrough and Brussels architect Christian Kieckens. Sharing the same sensibilty for both industrial architectural heritage and public space in general, former joint-ventures involved the industrial `Amylum` site in the centre of Aalst (culminating in the 1996 exhibition and photo/text publication Densities) and Brussels? city centre, where Kieckens took on the technical and logistical side of the public commissioned work AND /MAAR, OP AND /POUR, ET (2000-03). Downsbrough?s passion for industrial architecture takes many forms. More often than not, ?preservation? means survival in the form of a film or photo series. His films and photos always capture an industrial or (sub)urban reality that will sooner or later vanish or be subject to redevelopment ? be it late Seventies Manhattan or the industrial zones around Kent, UK. For now, and for the foreseeable future, this seems not to be the fate of Citroën`s impressive, prototypical modernist interbellum garage at Place d?Yser in Brussels ? the subject of Downsbrough`s latest film. The building, once threatened with demolition, will hopefully be there for some time to come, and Downsbrough pays homage to the building and its architects, Belgians Alexis Dumont and Marcel Van Goethem, who cooperated with French architect Maurice Ravazé. By publishing this work, architect Kieckens pays tribute to them as well. The black-and-white film underscores the building`s basic logic and rhythm. The garage consists of two parts, garage and showroom, and Peter Downsbrough films both in a playful yet formally precise way. This includes trade-mark Downsbrough idiosyncrasies, like suddenly letting in short diegetic environmental sounds, or superimposing words, e.g. IN TIME, at the beginning of the film. Typical `car movements` are alternated with proper cinematic movements like pannings; sometimes, an image freezes, and film becomes film still, photo. Shot from the passenger seat of a car driving down the distended corkscrew ramp, the film shows the garage?s interior and views through its windows onto the urban setting below. Downsbrough In a way, the building is filmically taken apart by Downsbrough: from top to bottom (including close-ups of the stained garage floor) it is visually analysed and scrutinised. Yet the physicality of the building also imposes its framing rules on the film; `rules` the artist evidently plays with ? as before. Towards the end of the film, we witness a gay, somewhat absurd dance of cars at the roundabout in front of the building, a picture reminiscent of the famous last scene of Jacques Tati`s fillm Trafic. Still, A]PART ? elegant, heedful and spare ? has a darker side too: it is both ode and elegy. A part. In time. Apart in time. In paying attention to all the minute details of the space and its immediate surroundings, the work symbolically preserves the Citroën building-as-film. However, it also shows how space itself (every space, not just a filmed one) is formed as well by an `attention`. Created by circumstances of history, society and perception, it will in the end always be subjected to the workings of time. (Steven Tallon)

Peter Downsbrough (1940, New Brunswick, N.J.) studied architecture and art. Around the mid-1960?s, after several years of work and exploring materials, including cardboard, wood, steel, lead, neon tubing, an evolution took place which resulted, in 1970, in the work with the Two Pipes (outside), Two Dowels (inside) and Two Lines (on paper). At the same time, he also started taking photographs to document these pieces. By taking photographs from different angles and distances, he gradually started taking photographs of ?cuts? that already existed in the urban landscape. Some of these photographs were used in books, some appeared in magazines, but it wasn?t until 1980 that they showed up in exhibitions. From 1977 on, Downsbrough realized several videos as well as audiotapes. A record was made in 1978 and released in 1982. Looking to expand the vocabulary, he developed a series of works using dice. In 1980, on the Spectacolor Board on Times Square, New York, he realized a piece, a 30 second spot shown once every hour for four days, and documented it in a short film, ?7 come 11?. Around 1980, he also started using regular postcards, initially by applying two lines, later to be followed by the use of words. The work with maquettes as a means of exploring space and structure started around 1983. The first commissioned public work was a wall piece realized in Rennes, France, 1990. The film ?Occupied? was produced in 2000, ten years after it was conceived. Since then, several films, shot with a digital camera, have been published as dvd?s. Today, all these disciplines occupy the field of his activities. An overview exhibition, curated by Marie-Thérèse Champesme, opened on June 24, 2003, at the Paleis van Schone Kunsten, Brussels. It was accompanied by an extensive catalogue and traveled to two other venues.

AND [BACK ?plays? a complex ?game? with the words AND and BACK, where the word BACK sometimes functions as indicator, sometimes as trigger, sometimes as a comment on what is happening on-screen. It?s especially the left/right and right/left (?back? also meaning ?backwards?) movement of represented things ? mostly vehicles ? but of that of cinematic interventions as well, that is of importance. This BACK movement is sometimes repeated in the typography; finally it penetrates and in a sense organises the film in its entirety: as a ?story? that unfolds, as a ?structure? with its symmetries and morphologic qualities. The very first image is black. Then, like a shutter (or some puppet theatre) the image opens itself, a black strip moving from right to left, gradually showing an archetypical American bungalow park: one white bungalow after the other, some slightly weaving trees, a dark sky, a somewhat cracked road; a very symmetrical image. After ten seconds, at the lower part of the image (more or less in the middle) a part of the title is shown, while the ?curtain? still opens and half of the image is exposed: [BACK. It?s unsure ? as always with Downsbrough, where things are often noticed afterwards, on second view? when exactly the viewer actually sees the [BACK; perhaps only after eighteen seconds, when the title is suddenly visible in its totality: AND [BACK. Then there?s a shot of another setting, somewhere in the USA as well, no bungalows this time but a road lined with commercial-looking buildings and palm trees, and cars and trucks passing. Followed by a view from inside a car, driving on the motorway, and low-screen in the right corner, the word AS, mirrored right to left. The little words, seemingly coming from other Downsbrough films (from AS] IN? or from AS] THEN?) gradually invade the screen. A truck driving by on the left suddenly ?wears? the AND from the title, more or less at the spot where we expect a number plate. It stays there, becoming smaller as the vehicle moves away from the viewer. When it fully disappears, the mirrored AS becomes a BACK, and as if on command (?Back!?) we?re back at the preceding image, with the palm trees, the passing vehicles, the commercial facilities. Next, another image is shown, symmetrical as well, presenting a similar road (the same?), not filmed from the side this time, but with the camera placed more or less in the middle of it. At the same spot as where the first word block ([BACK) appeared, the word THERE is shown. After it has faded out, there are new shots from inside a car, showing a similar motorway. For some seconds, the word CONTAIN appears, in the right corner of the screen, tilted to the right at a 90° angle. And in the blink of an eye it communicates with ?Welsh Cargo? ? a container company ? not inserted there by Downsbrough, but part of the industrial landscape the car is driving through. During a split second, typography in the represented space and ?presented?, inserted (stitched-on) typography intersect: both worlds are interchangeable. AS appears again on regular, graphic white walls, the camera panning, still filming from inside a car. The image fades to black, AND appearing again, like CONTAIN before, in the upper right corner and tilted 90°. We?re back to where the film began: the symmetrical bungalow view with the weaving trees. The shutter closes now, from left to right. There?s AND in the middle, where [BACK was before, then just the [ , finally the image is black again. B(L)ACK. (Steve Tallon)

° 1940, New Brunswick, N.J. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium In Downsbrough?s oeuvre, the relationship between work (sculpture, photo, videos, books, or some combination) ?exhibition? space (including its specific architecture, which can be the city as a whole) and viewer (in front of the work and inside exhibition space or town) is central. ?Inside? the work, this triangle is often doubled or mirrored, by underscoring the link and the tension that exists between image and language. In doing so, many spaces ? many places ? are being created, where the viewer can lodge him/herself mentally. There?s the architectural space itself, the space created between the work and the exhibition space, the space (or spatial relations) within the work, and finally a purely mental space, produced by the game between word and image (?mind sculptures?). The viewer positions himself before the works and inside the space ? POSITION was the title for a recent exhibition at BOZAR, Brussels ? but is at the same time positioned by both work and space (and its continuum: the interstice between work and space). Sometimes these spaces may become genuine places: cuts in time/space where the visitor can dwell. Inversely, s/he may get lost in the labyrinth, even ? or especially ? with those works that include somehow ironic ?indications?: spatial or linguistic ?pointers?. Because of his interest in language, and in incorporating written language in his work (both as signifier and as plastic form), Downsbrough is often seen as a ?conceptual? artist. But his work is very personal and rather idiosyncratic, while at the same time being open to the world as it exists outside the ?art games?. The world as social construct in particular is a recurring theme: the urban, and the organisation of urban space, are a permanent source of inspiration. Among other things, he shows us how thinking about space and giving form to (social) space is culturally relative, and how space co-defines the social. Inversely, some of his maquettes were actually executed, witnessing a thinking-in-practise.

The interior of an empty office building in Zaventem?s Corporate Village, next to Brussels Airport. Human presence is only to be found outside, through the windows, in the passing cars or close-by office buildings. Using fluid camera movements, travellings as well as panoramics, Downsbrough scrutinizes the environment, exploring the possible relations that may rise from it: inside and outside, empty and inhabited, horizontal and vertical, light and dark surfaces. The geometry of the space, emphasized by Downsbrough?s use of black and white images, determines that of the screen as well. In Downsbrough?s work, the way of looking at space, and at a space in particular, is deeply political. His videos and films point out the limits, the order and the regulations that the social system imposes upon us and our ways of appropriating the space, reminding us that all ?placement? is at the same time an ?ordering?.

The work of Peter Downsbrough (US, 1940) ? sculpture, graphics, photography, video, film, books ? began with an interest in architecture and articulates a complex relationship between architecture, language and typography. Only the bare essentials remain: form is reduced to lines, colours are mostly barred. In his videos, movement and language are explored in relation to time and space: they both represent and deconstruct modern urban and industrial architecture. At the same time, a linguistic twist takes place: by inserting and interposing word blocks like AND, AS or IN, Downsbrough tilts the videos to a kind of ?phrase?, which simultaneously functions as a ?place? for the viewer to lodge in. Downsbrough has exhibited at the Reina Sofi a (Madrid), the SMAK (Ghent), the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten/Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels) and the Muzeum Sztuki (Lodz).

] AND HERE is a video project filmed in North Kent?s urban and industrial environment. It captures images from Kentish town centres to the container transport hub on the Isle of Grain, to the Isle of Sheppey?s caravans, etc. It was commissioned by the Faversham Society in response to the rapid changes brought about by The Thames Gateway North Kent Development, a major regeneration programme extending from Dartford to Teynham in the south of the region. The Faversham Society is a voluntary organisation established in 1962 to protect and promote the heritage of the market town of Faversham and its surrounding area in Kent. Somewhat different from other Downsbrough films, here the represented space is fully identified. This makes it theoretically possible (if one would have this want) to trace down on a/the map the places Downsbrough visited with his camera. But above all it underlines an aspect of Downsbrough?s work (current in other films as well) that consists of documenting lived material history: places still there ? still ?on the go? ? but going, disappearing as well. Another difference lies in the mentioning of ?B/W? ànd ?colour? in the technical specifications above. Indeed, contrary to most Downsbrough?s films, this one also features colour (A]S and THRU does too), albeit in a somewhat ironic and rather teasing way: the concentrated viewer may at some moment discern two full seconds of colour image! Finally, with its 24 minutes running time this is also the longest film since the 1979 The Other Side (25?). In general the viewer is confronted with comparable Downsbrough ?worlds? as the ones preceding this film. As before, the film is made up of space ? a represented space as well as a mentally-induced place ? and typography and word blocks: the title?s ]AND HERE itself of course or words like AS, seemingly migrating from other Downsbrough films. The film alternates between fixed camera shots, travelling and images filmed from the inside of a car, and one could easily ?prolong? some car-shot scenes from for example AND [BACK into this film, or vice versa. Still, not only industrial sites are visited: there are also images from Kent?s cities and villages. With their typical use of bricks, the presence of pubs etc., these places and habitations ? contrary to the formally and geo-economically unifying, ?de-placing? force of industrial space ? are thus identifiable, clearly indicating to the southeast of England and more in particular, to the county of Kent. But the most important difference with former projects, perhaps indicating a new road taken by Downsbrough, can be discerned, not so much in the use of text and images (or ?textual images?) but in that of sound. For ] AND HERE Downsbrough uses especially commissioned improvised music, executed by Xavier Garcia Bardon and Benjamin Franklin, both members of the Brussels-based jam/shoegaze/trance band Buffle. Music was already used in the very first videos ? with (pop) bands like The Spinners or Talking Heads ? and some recent films feature music as well, but here the purpose is not only to create a certain atmosphere, but to use the music as a structural and structuring element as well. As is the case with the filmed images, the music is often interrupted quite suddenly ? the longest continuous piece of music being only about one minute ? than continued. There is a (minimal) musical theme, as is the case in most narrative cinema, but there is also a confrontation and dialogue between sound/music and image/typography. Similar to the ?structuralist? images of Downsbrough?s cinema, the music ? positioning itself somewhere between 90s shoegaze, post-rock and improvisation ? has a strong emphasis on texture, especially through the use of guitar pedal effects and digital signal processing. At the same time, there?s an industrial side to it, reflecting and reinforcing the industrial landscapes filmed by Downsbrough. Interestingly, the glitch-like noise returning throughout the performance is actually not a real glitch ? an electronic slip or short-lived fault in a system, used purposely and creatively in contemporary electronic music ? but a pedal-induced loop. In some undercurrent way the creation of sound by using analogue material at times sounding digital (the glitch) reflects the way in which the film?s seeming aloofness ? above all stemming from the use of industrial footage and from the strict formal approach ? is tempered or dialectically refined, both by the word and language games Downsbrough plays, and by the interest he pays, not only to the spookiness of the industrial landscapes ? void of people ? but to the much more individualised and localised (if not less empty) cityscapes as well. If both film and film music possesses a certain ?frozen? quality, then at the same time they are as if betrayed (tempered, complexified) by the very material side of the process of structuring (?ideally?) a space or a soundscape. It?s exactly this material side of Downsbrough?s ?method? ? ?real? matter turned ?film material?, matter that is always historical, ever residual ? which creates a tension in his films, as well as the pleasure of watching them.

The work of Peter Downsbrough (US, 1940) ? sculpture, graphics, photography, video, film, books ? began with an interest in architecture and articulates a complex relationship between architecture, language and typography. Only the bare essentials remain: form is reduced to lines, colours are mostly barred. In his videos, movement and language are explored in relation to time and space: they both represent and deconstruct modern urban and industrial architecture. At the same time, a linguistic twist takes place: by inserting and interposing word blocks like AND, AS or IN, Downsbrough tilts the videos to a kind of ?phrase?, which simultaneously functions as a ?place? for the viewer to lodge in. Downsbrough has exhibited at the Reina Sofi a (Madrid), the SMAK (Ghent), the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten/Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels) and the Muzeum Sztuki (Lodz).