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M+M steht für die künstlerische Zusammenarbeit von Marc Weis, geb. 1965, und Martin De Mattia, geb. 1963. Das deutsch-luxembourgische Künstlerduo überschreitet in seinen Arbeiten die klassischen Gattungsgrenzen zwischen Film und Rauminstallation. Sie erhielten u.a. den Villa Massimo Preis Rom, das Stipendium Villa Aurora L.A oder den ADC Award. Einzelausstellungen fanden in den letzten Jahren statt u.a. im Museum für Fotografie, Berlin, im MAMBo - Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, im Casino - Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg, in der Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck oder im Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal/Canada. Zudem waren sie in zahlreichen Gruppenausstellungen vertreten: u.a. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Biennale Venedig, Emscherkunst, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Neue Galerie, Graz, Haus der Kunst, München, Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Das VR-Projekt Olympic Vertigo läßt uns in eine Parallelwelt eintauchen, welche der realen Situation im Münchener Olympiapark nachempfunden ist, diese aber musikalisch wie narrativ erweitert. Die Besucher:innen werden überrascht von einer eigentümlichen Atmosphäre und bizarren virtuellen Gästen, menschengroße Gottesanbeterinnen. Der User hat durch seine Bewegungen die Möglichkeit dieses belebte Panorama und dabei fünf musikalische Zeitphasen der letzten 5 Jahrzehnte ausgiebig zu erforschen. Olympic Vertigo trägt gleichermaßen Züge einer halluzinatorischen Erinnerung und einer Zukunftsvision. Innerhalb ihrer musikalischen Ebenen, aber auch in einer unerklärlichen Bedrohung schwingt die Geschichte des Olympiaparks mit. Dieser Ort ist durch Ausgelassenheit bei Sportereignissen und Konzerten geprägt, aber auch durch eine unterschwellige Angst vor einer Zäsur der Gewalt, wie sie sich durch das terroristische Attentat von 1972 in unser kollektives Gedächtnis eingeschrieben hat.

M+M steht für die film-künstlerische Zusammenarbeit von Marc Weis und Martin De Mattia seit 1994. Das Duo lebt und arbeitet in München, Deutschland. Der künstlerische Schwerpunkt von M+M liegt auf narrativen Mehrkanal-Filminstallationen, die durch die Aufhebung linearer Erzählung ein komplett neues Zeitgefühl entstehen lassen. Diese Installationen wurden in einer Vielzahl internationaler Ausstellungen gezeigt. Aktuell arbeiten die Künstler an einer Makro-3D-Trilogie, in denen die Protagonistinnen von Gottesanbeterinnen und Stabheuschrecken dargestellt werden. Teilweise stößt das deutsch-luxemburgische Duo auch kooperative Prozesse an und lädt KünstlerInnen ein, auf aktuelle Fragestellungen zu reagieren. So entstand mit dem kollektiven Filmprojekt „The Scorpion’s Sting“ eine Neuinterpretation des politisch motivierten Buñuel Films „L’Âge d’Or“ (1930).

Loitering Theatre uses customized ipad controlled drones to fly beyond the normal street view to access and film previously inaccessible and unseen views of Dublin city. Some of the most prevalent alternative vantage points on our streets are the security cameras, police helicopters, traffic camera monitoring systems and high-rise boardroom views controlled by governmental authorities and corporations. These different and unusual viewing points are rarely accessible to the individual citizen or in our control. Loitering Theatre focuses on the democratisation of surveillance that drone flight affords. It instigates a simple but radical change of the view that arises from the detachment of the vantage point from the physical apparatus of the body. Loitering Theatre tries to imagine a more playful and poetic form of urban surveillance that might instead serve to critique the city`s structures and established systems from on high. Along the way we look statues of forgotten statesmen in the eye; discover an old lady`s house behind hoardings - her own island of resistance to Dublin?s property developers; and, in a reversal of fortune, peer in the European Headquarters of the data gathering Google and Facebook HQ?s.

Loitering Theatre is a collaboration between visual artist Nina McGowan and filmmaker Caroline Campbell, both of whom live and work in Dublin city Nina McGowan is an Irish artist based in Dublin. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Practices from DLIADT (MAVIS) and a H/Dip in Landscape Architecture (UCD). Architectural humanities, design and the hunt for a ?condensed contemporary visual currency? inform her position. Caroline Campbell works as part of the collective of filmmakers associated with the Irish based Still Films. She holds post-graduate qualifications in Contemporary Art Theory (NCAD) and Film Theory (TCD). Her work has screened both in gallery installation and in film festivals internationally.

An unseen narrator tells his experience of wrongful imprisonment in an unnamed country and his random release. Based on a letter sent to Amnesty International, by the filmmaker’s father, and a surreal interview given about it. ‘Prison with Songbirds’ is a documentary and fiction hybrid in which dream-nightmare and digital-celluloid collide.

Ewan Macbeth (born 1992, UK) is a Scottish artist filmmaker based in Rotterdam. After studying Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art he did an MA in Lens-Based Media at The Piet Zwart Institute. His work has been seen in International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, EYE Filmmusuem Amsterdam, EMAF Osnabrück, CCA Glasgow, RSA Edinburgh; amongst others. He is currently a member of Time Window collective and developing his first feature film.

A group of skaters take refuge in a shopping mall, making it their playground. As they spend time skating the empty hallways the stillness creeps in. It's a dead end.

Mário Macedo is graduated in 2010 in Sound and Image by the Portuguese Catholic University of Porto (UCP). In 2011 finished the film course at the European Film College in Denmark. Two of his short documentaries, ’Tio Rui’ (2011) and ‘Maria Sem Pecado’ (2016), premiered at DocLisboa Festival, having the latter won the National Grand Prix at FEST 2017 and consequentially shown at RTP, the Portuguese public television. Both films were also part of the New Visions of the Portuguese Cinema at the Portuguese Cinematheque in 2017. His first fiction short film ‘Terceiro Turno (Skin River)’ premiered in 2021 at Curtas Vila do Conde IFF in the National Competition and it won the award for Best Director. It also made its international premiere at Cairo Film Festival 2021. Has two new short films to release, 'Cul-de-sac' and 'Takvog Te Volim', co-productions between Croatia and Portugal. Right now, he's developing a new short film together with Dornaz Hajiha, part of Factory and will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023. Also, he's preparing a feature film in Berlin, 'Purple Milkweed', together with Christian Tranberg, and finishing writing his first solo feature film 'The Robbery'. Will soon release his first photobook 'Running Away Into You' by the publisher Lebop. At the moment, he divides his time between Copenhagen, Zagreb, Berlin and Portugal. Vanja is a Croatian director with a BFA in Film and Television at Savannah College of Art and Design (USA). He directed several short films: Insomniac (2002, Cannes Film Festival/ Director's Fortnight), Wayking (2003), Carver is Dead (2012, Zagreb Film Festival) and Lora Wears Black (2019, Zagreb Film Festival). Vanja is experienced in directing TV commercials for leading brands such as T-Mobile, Vodafone, as well as for international clients such as Sony Asia Pacific. He participated in Berlinale Talent Campus and Sarajevo Talent Campus. He is developing his first feature film, Blok 62 (Ekran+, Connecting Cottbus).

Quote: "While I was watching you, exotic words drifted across the mirror of my mind as summer clouds drift across the sky". Unquote.

Sandro Aguilar (1974) studied film at the ESTC. In 1998 he founded the production company O Som e a Fúria. His films have won awards at festivals such as La Biennale di Venezia, Locarno FF, Gijón, Oberhausen,Vila do Conde, Indielisboa FF and shown in the most relevant festivals worldwide. Two times nominated for the EFA – Best european short film. Retrospectives of his work have been programmed at Rotterdam IFF, BAFICI, New York Film Festival, Arsenal-Berlin and Oberhausen FF.

The film was shot on location in Kilamba Kiaxi, a new underpopulated city outside Luanda, Angola built by Chinese construction company CITIC and financed by Hong Kong-based China International Fund. The film follows a young municipal worker who lives by night in the old city centre of Luanda and works by day as a groundskeeper at the new city of Kilamba Kiaxi far away.

Michael MacGarry is a multi-award winning visual artist and filmmaker, having exhibited internationally for ten years including TATE Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, 19th VideoBrasil, 62nd Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Les Rencontres Internationales. He holds an MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand (2004). MacGarry has been researching narratives and histories of socio-economics, politics, forms and objects within the context of contemporary Africa for over a decade. Frequently focused on marking key registers of modernism – MacGarry creates sculptures, films, installations and photographs which look at the contextual specifics of things and their place; how they are simultaneously distributed both as ideas and as objects in the world. His sculptural work is formed through processes of grafting and mutation, to produce fictional hybrids principally designed to question systemic paradigms: sovereign nationality; logics of making and meaning; power relations; notions of value, equity and progress as well as the relationship between industrial technology and African resources. In his filmmaking and photographic work these macro concerns often take the form of micro narratives, personal memory and subtle identity politics in spaces where contemporary life is in a state of invention and flux.

LOGLINE
A poetic re-imagining of Death in Venice, featuring a West African immigrant to Italy who embarks on a journey from the Alpine mountains to the seaside and ultimately, on a doomed voyage home. SYNOPSIS
The form of the film is one of a fable, that grafts Thomas Mann’s 1925 novella, Death in Venice, to the contemporary issue of African refugees and immigrants in Italy. The film takes Mann’s book as a nexus point and expands upon a number of themes inherent in it. In Sea of Ash, Mann’s character Tadzio is an immigrant to Italy from West Africa (Senegal) who has survived the treacherous and often fatal journey by sea. While the lead character of the original – von Aschenbach – is embodied in the unseen filmmaker himself. The narrative of the film follows Tadzio on a short journey from the remarkable Brion Cemetery at San Vito in the mountains of Northern Italy to the coastal area of the Venetian lagoon. On Lido Island he visits the famous Hotel dés Bains as featured in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film version of Death in Venice. The film concludes on the dés Baines beach, with Tadzio embarking on a doomed attempt to return home.

Michael MacGarry is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand. MacGarry is a fellow of the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) at the University of Cape Town and recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2010 (Visual Art). As a filmmaker he has written and directed five narrative short films, and five feature-length video artworks, and is a recipient of an El Ray Award - Excellence in Narrative Short Filmmaking, Barcelona Film Festival 2015 as well as a nominee for the Huysmans Young African Filmmaker Award 2015. As a visual artist Michael has exhibited internationally for more than ten years including TATE Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, Kiasma Museum - and has published four monographs on his work.

"3 Months Toronto/New York" is the first in an ongoing series of works that uses GPS (Global Positioning System) information. For a 3 month period in both New York and Toronto the artist recorded everywhere he went using a GPS. On the left hand side of the screen is the accumulation of 3 months in New York, on the right hand side is Toronto. Everywhere he went each day is drawn and then somewhat fades to allow that day to be seen on its own and then as part of an accumulation. The artist's movements, dictated by each city?s streets, determine the pattern - with the repetitions and changes of each day. The resulting video condenses 3 months of activity in New York and Toronto to a 3 minute animated drawing.

Gwen MacGregor is a Toronto based artist working in installation and video. Her work reflects her close observation of time and how its passage shapes small dramas or uncannily familiar situations. In 1998 her work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and in 2001 her work was presented in the Present Tense Project series at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. MacGregor's work has also been shown in many group exhibitions across Canada and in Mexico City, London, Prague, Venice, Shanghai, and Los Angeles. In 2003 MacGregor was the recipient of the Friends of the Visual Arts Award, Toronto. In 2004 she received the Canada Council New York Studio award. MacGregor is represented by Jessica Bradley Art and Projects in Toronto.

Dallas plays with the eponymous nature of this TV series, broadcast in many countries, it became a short hand for both American glamour and corruption, repelling and seduced audiences in its relentless drama of power play and cliché. Macrae deconstructs this fantasy by remixing the Dallas television series broadcast in the year 1980. By synchronising together the main titles sequence, the translucent images are layered and mixed using techniques more generally associated with DJ?s. The notorious events are referenced and lines delivered in a collage of images, creating a haunting quality of disjuncture. It is a culture that is at once familiar and disorientating, Dallas appears to be a dreamscape of different order, more nightmare than escapist.

Canadian born Sheena Macrae excels in the exploration of compression, speed and nostalgia. Originally studying in Vancouver, Canada, Sheena Macrae graduated with a BFA in film. As she continued making films, she worked in post-production for studios such as Warner Bros. Twentieth Century Fox, Disney and Cartoon Network. She moved to London to study at Goldsmiths College, graduating with a Masters in Fine Art in 2002. She has exhibited and given talks across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. This summer her films have shown at the Moscow International Film Festival and Imaginaria Internazionale di Cinema Libero, Conversaro in Italy where her entry won Best Video Art Prize. She is currently working towards a solo and group shows in the London, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Brisbane.

Exploiting the techniques of mainstream films, this work is a cinematic landscape inferring a narrative. As a never-ending series of establishing shots, the footage richly illuminates the green glow of a billiard tables and deep black shadows as a saturated surface of gloss. The long tracking shots are mesmerising, drifting among the players. The scenes appear as over-articulated set ups, but are in fact real life unfolding, giving an unusually naturalistic but compelling ease to the inhabitants of this twilight enclosure and their hermetically sealed cinematic world.

Macrae graduated from Emily Carr Institute with a BFA in 1999 and Goldsmiths College, MA in 2002. She has exhibited and won awards internationally. She has recently had monograph exhibition at Musée d`Art Contemporain Val-de-Marne, Paris, shown at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Fieldgate Gallery, London and has been the artist-in-residence at Monash University in Melbourne. She is currently working on a book project and will be presenting work at Cyperpipe?s HAIP Festival, Ljubljana and The Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.

In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force. This film is a lyrical portrait of this furious wind, woven from the stories passed down by local villagers.

Martí Madaula is an artist and filmmaker based in Madrid. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, a Master of Visual Arts from the LUCA School of Arts of Ghent (Belgium) and a Master of Fine Arts in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2019, he received the Extraordinary Prize of Fine Arts (University of Barcelona). In 2021, he was awarded a prestigious “la Caixa” Foundation fellowship to pursue his studies in the United States. Madaula’s latest film, “Tramuntana,” had its World Premiere at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, as part of Doc Fortnight 2025, MoMA’s prestigious Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media. His first film, “The Living Wardrobe,” had its World Premiere at the Opening Scenes section at Visions du Réel 2024, one of the most important documentary and nonfiction film festivals in the world. Madaula has participated in art residencies at prestigious institutions like Centre Pompidou in Paris or Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. He has exhibited his work in international solo and group shows.

Inspired by and adapted from the novel of Marguerite Duras, "la maladie de la mort" examines the process of a man in his attempt to love. He finds a woman: in a hotel, in a street, in a bar, in a train. She would come. Perhaps for several days, perhaps for several weeks. She would be young, beautiful. She could be any woman. And it is her who will discover he is taken by an incurable illness, the malady of death.

ASA MADER (USA, 1975) graduated from Brown University where he created an independent degree of studies in Visual and Digital Media. In 1997, he co-founded a New York-based design studio specializing in digital and interactive media. Since 2002, Mader has been working independently as a filmmaker, sharing his time between New York and Paris. One of his early film works was awarded a Roberta Joslin Award for Excellence in Art. In September 2004, Mader directed Anna Mouglalis in his theatrical directing debut : «Heroine» based on the texts of Ovid («Les Heroides») and Marguerite Yourcenar («Feux»). Having premiered at the Festival of Ortigia, Siracusa in the Castello Maniace, the performance includes original film and video of Mader along with original music by Emmanuel Deruty. Stage and lighting design by A.J. Weissbard. In 2005, Mader directed a 52-minute docu-fiction for French television «Little Italy : Wiseguys, Bullets, Backrooms» on the disappearing mythic New York neighborhood, which led to a command for Paris-Premiere, also a 52-minute docu-fiction, this time on the neighborhood of Pigalle. ?La maladie de la mort? (2003) was his first narrative film which was presented at the Venice Film Festival. Mader is currently preparing his first feature film, to be shot in 2006.

Shot in an arid landscape of extremes on the outskirts of Cairo, My Father Looks For An Honest City is a film about cynicism and a persistent search for a seemingly essential unknown. In a reenactment of Diogenes of Sinope?s philosophical statement of carrying a lamp in daytime, Magdy filmed his own father while walking through what seems like a no man?s land where human existence seems seldom, other players like petrified wood, doves, fake palm trees, stray dogs, abandoned glass buildings and a flashlight evolve as protagonists. Diogenese, a contemporary of Plato, was one of the founders of the Philosophy of Cynicism. Although considered by many as one of the greatest Greek philosophers, none of his writings were found. Only his philosophical stunt of carrying a lamp in daylight remains as evidence to his beliefs. When asked why he did that, he explained that ?he was looking for an honest man?.

Born in Assiut, Egypt in 1977, currently lives and works in Basel and Cairo. Magdy works with different media including drawing, painting, film, video, animation, installation, sculpture, sound and printed matter to investigate the broad space between fiction and reality in the construction, distribution and assimilation of media-based knowledge and global culture. His work appeared recently in solo and group shows at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel; Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York; Argos Art Center, Brussels; Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon; Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCa), North Adams; Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt; 1st D-O ARK Underground Biennial, Konjic/Sarajevo; 2nd Ateliers de Rennes Biennale d?art contemporain, Rennes; Neue Kunst Halle St. Gallen, St. Gallen; DEPO, Istanbul, MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León; MARCO - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Vigo, Spain; ACAF ? Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Alexandria; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; SAW Gallery, Ottawa; Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo and Art in General, New York among others.

In his famous text titled "On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain", Palestinian writer Edward Saïd explores how the late style of certain composers, writers and artists constitutes a space of creative freedom unmoored from the conventions of their epoch that opens onto new horizons of artistic expression. Inspired by these thoughts, “Late Gestures” is a journey through scenes taken from the later, often neglected films of a number of great filmmakers that in their prophetic untimeliness look towards new possibilities for cinema and the moving image. Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson invite us to explore the hauntology of images through a shape-shifting montage of these “late cinematographic gestures”.

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson are filmmakers and artists whose works explore the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, cinema and installation, theory and practice. Their production includes the creation of films (both features and shorts), mixed-media installations, sound works, performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. The artists often make use of cinema to reactivate lost, forgotten, silenced or neglected archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. In constant dialogue with literature, philosophy, music, science and the history of cinema their projects are research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary. Their work has been presented at film festivals, in museums and independent art spaces worldwide.

Refusing to pay for the debt, two Athenians decide to leave their city. Guided by mysterious crow calls, they wander through a desolate urban landscape until they reach a zone of passage and are spirited to an ancient forest, the Realm of the Birds. Here they meet the Hoopoe, half-bird half-woman, who tells them how the birds live by sharing their resources amid the magical forces of the forest. However, one of the men has other plans for the birds. Though far from easy, the inter-species encounter will be illuminating for all. Some 2,500 years after it was written, an experimental adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Birds. Between a contemporary Athens marked by crisis and the surviving Laurisilva Forest of La Gomera, Ancient Greek and Silbo (an endangered whistled language that forms part of a long tradition of resistance), comes a tale of flight, loss and reenchantment in a space of refuge where new alliances can emerge between different species, temporalities and languages.

Silvia MAGLIONI and GRAEME THOMSON are filmmakers and artists whose work explores the porous boundaries between fiction and documentary, cinema and the visual arts. Their work has been screened in festivals around the world, including FID-Marseille, IFF Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Thessaloniki IFF, Berlin Critics Week, Bafici, Jihlava, Festival Hors-Pistes, Docs Kingdom.

"Underwritten by Shadows Still" is a film composed of subtitled photograms drawn from a wide range of films and accompanied by an electronic soundtrack containing sound samples that originate from spaces between voices. As the succession of subtitled stills passes before our eyes, a soundless voice begins to speak through the words printed on the images, forming a discourse that links them together, while gathering the characters into a dispersed community of ghostly apparitions. The narrative that traverses them soon begins to bifurcate into other lines, other voices which are no more than underwritten shadows yet which speak to us and to each other of their imprisonment, their desire to live, their dreams of escape. 

: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni are filmmakers and artists based in Paris. Their practice interrogates potential forms and fictions emerging from the ruins of the moving image and includes the creation of short and feature films, exhibitions, sound works, film-performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. Their work often makes use of cinema in expanded form to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. Their work has been presented, screened and installed worldwide at international film festivals, museums, art spaces and alternative venues (including FID-Marseille, Bafici International Film Festival, Jihlava Film Festival, Festival Hors-Pistes, Doc`s Kinkdom, Il Vento del Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, European Media Art Festival, Eye Film Museum, Tate Britain, Serralves Museum, Centre Pompidou, MACBA, REDCAT, Ludwig Museum, The Showroom, KHOJ New Delhi, Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia, Castello di Rivoli, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Whitechapel Gallery, Van Abbe Museum, CA2M). They are currently working on a new film, “Common Birds”.

In his famous text titled "On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain", Palestinian writer Edward Saïd explores how the late style of certain composers, writers and artists constitutes a space of creative freedom unmoored from the conventions of their epoch that opens onto new horizons of artistic expression. Inspired by these thoughts, “Late Gestures” is a journey through scenes taken from the later, often neglected films of a number of great filmmakers that in their prophetic untimeliness look towards new possibilities for cinema and the moving image. Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson invite us to explore the hauntology of images through a shape-shifting montage of these “late cinematographic gestures”.

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson are filmmakers and artists whose works explore the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, cinema and installation, theory and practice. Their production includes the creation of films (both features and shorts), mixed-media installations, sound works, performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. The artists often make use of cinema to reactivate lost, forgotten, silenced or neglected archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. In constant dialogue with literature, philosophy, music, science and the history of cinema their projects are research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary. Their work has been presented at film festivals, in museums and independent art spaces worldwide.

Refusing to pay for the debt, two Athenians decide to leave their city. Guided by mysterious crow calls, they wander through a desolate urban landscape until they reach a zone of passage and are spirited to an ancient forest, the Realm of the Birds. Here they meet the Hoopoe, half-bird half-woman, who tells them how the birds live by sharing their resources amid the magical forces of the forest. However, one of the men has other plans for the birds. Though far from easy, the inter-species encounter will be illuminating for all. Some 2,500 years after it was written, an experimental adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Birds. Between a contemporary Athens marked by crisis and the surviving Laurisilva Forest of La Gomera, Ancient Greek and Silbo (an endangered whistled language that forms part of a long tradition of resistance), comes a tale of flight, loss and reenchantment in a space of refuge where new alliances can emerge between different species, temporalities and languages.

Silvia MAGLIONI and GRAEME THOMSON are filmmakers and artists whose work explores the porous boundaries between fiction and documentary, cinema and the visual arts. Their work has been screened in festivals around the world, including FID-Marseille, IFF Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Thessaloniki IFF, Berlin Critics Week, Bafici, Jihlava, Festival Hors-Pistes, Docs Kingdom.

"Underwritten by Shadows Still" is a film composed of subtitled photograms drawn from a wide range of films and accompanied by an electronic soundtrack containing sound samples that originate from spaces between voices. As the succession of subtitled stills passes before our eyes, a soundless voice begins to speak through the words printed on the images, forming a discourse that links them together, while gathering the characters into a dispersed community of ghostly apparitions. The narrative that traverses them soon begins to bifurcate into other lines, other voices which are no more than underwritten shadows yet which speak to us and to each other of their imprisonment, their desire to live, their dreams of escape. 

: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni are filmmakers and artists based in Paris. Their practice interrogates potential forms and fictions emerging from the ruins of the moving image and includes the creation of short and feature films, exhibitions, sound works, film-performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. Their work often makes use of cinema in expanded form to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. Their work has been presented, screened and installed worldwide at international film festivals, museums, art spaces and alternative venues (including FID-Marseille, Bafici International Film Festival, Jihlava Film Festival, Festival Hors-Pistes, Doc`s Kinkdom, Il Vento del Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, European Media Art Festival, Eye Film Museum, Tate Britain, Serralves Museum, Centre Pompidou, MACBA, REDCAT, Ludwig Museum, The Showroom, KHOJ New Delhi, Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia, Castello di Rivoli, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Whitechapel Gallery, Van Abbe Museum, CA2M). They are currently working on a new film, “Common Birds”.

WEndless Wall is a virtual visual field constructed in VRML. In can be exhibited simultaneously both as an instillation in an exhibition space and as a piece of net art. Upon entering into this world, one finds oneself on a vast surface that is contained by a wall extending into the distance as far as the eye can see. Above the wall, a soft and beautiful light emanates from the sky, reaching out toward the horizon. The wall is insurmountable, and one can walk along its base without ever finding a crack or a means of getting past it. We are (and we have always been) a divided society. For millennia we have constructed walls and divisions that have segmented the world population into those who ?have? and those who ?have not.? From land and wealth, to technology and liberty, we have socially generated imbalances among nations, families and individuals. Today, while technology has given us an enormous potential in our lives (in both the physical and the virtual, emerging worlds), these selfsame technologies are used, in a sort of overthrowing, for restraint and containment. With the Berlin Wall or the DEC firewalls (in 1988 the engineers of the Digital Equipment Corporation [DEC] developed the first filtering system, known as a ?packet filter firewall?), governments and corporations have surrounded us with insurmountable walls, presented to us as protections, or security devices.

Michael Takeo Magruder was born in 1974 in the USA. He studied biology at the University of Virginia. He now lives and works in London. He works in the domain of new media and technological media. He is also a researcher at King?s College, London, in the new department of technologies and visualization, where he works on movement capture, immersive spaces and virtual environments. His artistic work has already been shown in more than 175 exhibitions, in 30 countries, including the Courtauld Institute of Art, in Londres, the EAST International 2005 at the centre Georges Pompidou, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau. His work is also shown in international new media festivals, such as Cybersonica, CYNETart, FILE, Filmwinter, SeNef, Siggraph at Split, or VAD and WRO in Poland. He has been supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Arts Council England, the National Endowment for the Arts, USA, and by many public museums in the UK and abroad. He is also known for the creation of online pieces, projects ordered by portals dedicated to net art such as Turbulence.org and Soundtoys.net. He currently works on simultaneous use and the analysis of new technologies, as a means of exploring formal structures and conceptual paradigms in numeric fields. He is seeking to create works of art in which there are no more divisions between technologies, aesthetics, and concepts.

?A message to the sea? was developed during my stay in the old fishermen?s area near by the sea. Men on the land have always been dependent on the sea for fishing and trade. The intention behind the piece was to create a dialog between men and the sea, by sending a message back to the sea. The ship in the work is not a subject but an object, which holds a message.

Basir Mahmood (b 1985, Lahore) graduated in 2010 from Beaconhouse National University with a distinction. His interest in short films has won him various awards in the category of Best Director and Writer. ?Gheera Chaasma?, a short film, was nominated at the Zabist Film Festival in Karachi which was written, directed and produced by Mahmood. His one minute short film ?Dot in the line? was short listed in the Filminute Film Festival in 2011. Mahmood is the recipient of Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship for the year 2011-2012 in Stuttgart, Germany and ARCUS Project, Japan. He will represent Pakistan at the Asia Pacific Triennial 2012 (APT 7) at Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia and showing his video at the launch of Broad Museum launch at Michigan State University in April 2012. Mahmood is a part of III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, 2012. Besides being part of various private collections, Mahmood?s video works were recently acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery Collection in Brisbane, Australia.

Blinded by Centuries navigates the evolution of consciousness in a speculative ??post-human landscape. A generation adrift, existing between earthly and mythical realms, traces history to imagine a future before transformation. Inspired by short-format contemporary music videos, it is an auto-fictional retelling of the Buddhist folktale rooted in Southeast Asia called “Phra Ros Meri” (‘Twelve Sisters.’)

Parinda Mai, like many of her generation in Thailand, grew up with the story Twelve Sisters, communicated across platforms, from oral history to soap operas and cartoon animations. The project 12 Kalpas Tales is the artist’s personal search and reinterpretation of the moral of this story and its implications for the interconnected humanity. Blinded by Centuries emerges from this project, and is intended to capture the core energy of this myth that involves invading, exploiting, and destroying something, then leaving it behind to later try to rescue it with one’s ethics. In Blinded by Centuries an esoteric folktale is played out globally in contemporary terms. Project website: https://the12kalpastale.online/

Arise (Zona) has as starting point the feature film A Zona, by Sandro Aguilar and emerges up from all the cinematic dirtiness inherent to the film material. These images in the wasted film, doomed to emptiness and total forgetting, lead us to the ambiguity and indetermination between life and death, in which narrative and temporal logic are suspended.

Born in 1983. Graduated in Audiovisual Comunication at the Instituto Politécnico do Porto. Works as a freelance professional in cinema, multimedia and audiovisual. Videoart Course at Fundação Caloute Gulbenkian. Since 2004 he has been exploring the concepts of live cinema and live manipulation of images and its relation with sound.

WAR ZONE explore les tensions entre les technologies et leur héritage militaire. La majorité des ruptures technologiques profondes étant issues de la recherche militaire, leur diffusion dans le domaine public n`est-elle pas une propagation des valeurs idéologiques dans lesquelles elles ont été produites? "Il n’est pas superflu de rappeler [...] le lien originel entre technologies militaires et technologies du réseau (l’arpanet, ancêtre d’internet, a été développé par la DARPA, l’agence américaine chargée des projets en recherche avancée pour la Défense). [...] L’artiste reconstitue en vision subjective trois trajectoires de missiles dans le logiciel Google Earth, à partir des coordonnées réelles. Celle d’un missile V2, développé par les nazis, tiré de la Hollande vers l’Angleterre en 1945 (dont l’impact est encore visible dans les images satellites actuelles), un Scud tiré du Koweït vers l’Arabie Saoudite pendant la guerre du golfe et, enfin, un missile air sol tiré d’Israël vers Gaza en 2014. «C’est grâce à la fusée V2 équipée d’une caméra qu’on a pu voir la première image de la Terre vue de l’espace et l’incurvation de la planète». Le résultat est hypnotique, générant un sentiment mitigé de fascination et d’effroi. En train de chevaucher notre missile à la manière d’un Docteur Folamour, on observe pensif l’évolution de ces instruments de mort, de la précision médiocre des V2 aux frappes chirurgicales d’Israël, la nation qui compte le plus grand nombre de start-up, notamment dans la cyberdéfense, et où l’armée est le principal creuset de l’innovation." Marie Lechner