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Jenny MARKETOU (Author) Courtesy Anita Becker Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany DE_LETE (2006) /dv/color/2m.10" The border is an artificially constructed place that gets materialized by the crossing of people. We are used to seeing media images of the border that are violent and aggressive in nature, and which are used to manipulate the public opinion about illegal immigration and national security. DE_LETE was filmed along the border line between Tijuana and San Diego, US in the backdrop of the small fishing village Las Playas at the Gulf of Mexico. DE _LETE takes a look at the border from an alternate perspective. It is shot from a combination of formal, documentary and philosophical genres. The camera captures the human activity along the wired fence of the border in anticipation of the crime. To our surprise, the border materializes itself only when people of all ages come from both sides of the border to perform intimate human communication. By so doing, the fence is transformed into a meeting point, and no attempt to cross it is made. As this performance of everyday experience unfolds and repeats itself in slow motion, "the border" vanishes and suddenly becomes an ambivalent place at the fringe of two cultures; a new social space with discreet relationships. It is a remote space, controlled by invisible powers.

Short Biography Jenny Marketou, born in Athens, Greece, is a Brooklyn-based artist who works with video, video installations, internet performance, photography and public dialog. Her work is influenced by a varied amount of music, art, and new media. Her primary inspiration is in relationship with a multitude of readings]which can be viewed in a culture of landscape. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries nationally and internationally and has been awarded numerous grants and artists residencies worldwide. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and she has been teaching as adjunct professor Photography and Interdisciplinary studio art at The Cooper Union School of Art and Science in New York City. She is the author of the book with photographs and interviews? The Great Longing: The Greek Immigrants of Astoria ,Queens. www.jennymarketou.com .

Euro Hamlet is the latest project of theatrical creation directed by Filip Markiewicz in August 2021 in the immense Hall of the Telux site in Weisswasser in Germany, in collaboration with playwright Katrin Michaels, Working from the original text of Hamlet, Shakespeare's most popular and disturbing play, Filip Markiewicz creates a sort of concept with Euro Hamlet. He subverts the established rules of classic theatre and combines them with different artistic forms. The result proves to be a veritable performance, both in terms of the artists appropriating the original text and the visual and audio presentation of its content in space. In this contemporary tableau, Filip Markiewicz reflects certain references from the history of art and uses the concept of the «Play Within the Play» to engage with issues in the social and political realities of today's Europe, It raises the question: how to communicate the truths of everydav life in a context that is subject to codes of appearance? The preparation for the staging of Euro Hamlet included a shooting in July 2021 with the actors Leila Lallali, Marie Jung, Luc Feit and Joran Yonis in the region of East Germany and in Zgorzelec in Poland. A "mise en abyme" of Shakespeare's text in an organic setting that bears witness to European history, where the artist adresses the notion of territory beyond the experimental nature of this reading.

Filip Markiewicz (born in 1980, Esch / Alzette, Luxembourg) is a visual artist who expresses himself through various media such as drawing, painting, music, video and installation. Filip Markiewicz represented Luxembourg at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015 with the Paradiso Lussemburgo project. His long-term project Celebration Factory on contemporary Europe began in 2016 at the NN Contemporary Art Northampton and at the Theater Basel before it was continued in 2018 at the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'Art Contemporain and in 2019 at the Center for Contemporary Art Derry-Londonderry and the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. In 2017 Markiewicz staged his performance Fake Fiction with diary texts by Oskar Schlemmer (publication Hyde Éditions) at Theater Basel for the official Art Basel program. Markiewicz received the Art Prize Bourse Bert-Theis in 2019 for his art music project Ultrasocial Pop. In 2020 Markiewicz shows his monographic exhibition Ultraplastik Rhapsody at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. For the Lausitz Festival 2020, Markiewicz directed, created the scenography and composed the music for the play ANTIGONE NEUROPA (Sophocles) in collaboration with the Staatstheater Cottbus. In february 2021 Filip Markiewicz presented the performance Ultrasocial Pop in the frame of the Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin. In August 2021 Markiewicz directed, created the scenography and composed the music for the installation and theater performance Euro Hamlet at the Lausitz Festival. Filip Markiewicz has been composing music for film, theater and installation under the name RAFTSIDE since 1999, with which he has also appeared in several international festivals.

Ultrasocial Pop is Filip Markiewicz’s latest experimental audio visual project. Creating a performative dialogue between his visual and filmic work and his musical compositions as Raftside. The live performance is always a unique experience that includes a comment on actual social events. The idea is to question the link between pop culture and populism and to create a videographic moving painting. The work in progress of Ultrasocial Pop will lead to the release of a visual book with vinyl Lp (Label Grzegorzki Records) in the frame of his solo show at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (D) in May 2021. Ultrasocial Pop is supported by the Bourse Bert-Theis.

Filip Markiewicz was born in Esch-sur-Alzette (L) in 1980. His solo shows have been hosted by institutions such as the MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (RO), NN Contemporay Art in Northampton (UK), Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Osnabrück (D), CCA Derry -Londonderry (UK) an the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'Art Contemporain (L). He represented Luxembourg at the 56th Biennial in Venice. Markiewicz follows a theatrical and musical performance route, which has led him to create shows at the Staatstheater Cottbus for the Lausitz Festival (D), Theater Basel in Basel (CH) and the Expo in Shanghai (CHN), to his work in the visual arts field. He lives and works in Hamburg (D) and Luxembourg (L)

Fake Fiction is initially a theater play that became a film produced in 2017 by the Theater Basel. Filip Markiewicz wrote the dialogues in reference to the events that happened during the period of time, the terror attacks, the European mirgant crisis and the rise of populist movements and fake news...

Filip Markiewicz (born in 1980) is a multidisciplinary Luxembourg artist of Polish origin, who expresses himself through different mediums, including drawing, video and installation. Always seeking explanations for our daily lives, he explores the omnipresence of images and puts into perspective the message they convey. He submits current issues to a critical and political approach, and thus emphasizes the emptiness of our world submerged by visual overproduction where information becomes reality rather than the opposite. In 2015, Markiewicz represented Luxembourg at the 56th Venice Biennale with Paradiso Lussemburgo.

Celebration Club (2017) is a film made over the course of one week in Northampton following the Brexit referendum.The film captures musicians of different generations and origins talking about the changing society and making music, including punk scholar Roy Wallace, rapper Phundo Art, avant-garde black metal band Denigrata and the Northampton Male Voice Choir performing Robbie William’s Angels in a local church.

Luxembourger of Polish origin, Filip Markiewicz (born in 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist expressing himself through drawing, video, music, theatre and installations thereby creating a visual body of work using diversified media. His work is not intending to be a kind of political activism, but rather to develop an almost surreal language consolidating different expressions. In 2015 Filip Markiewicz represented the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg at the 56th Venice Biennale with his project "Paradiso Lussemburgo". In 2017 he produced his first theater play "Fake Fiction" at the Theater Basel. In 2018, he will present his monographic exhibition "Celebration Factory" at the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d`Art Contemporain.

Like a glass vault that contains traces and gifts from distant countries, the headquarters of Energoprojekt, the former Yugoslavian construction company merges geographically distant places. Walls are pannelled with faded photographs of Energoprojekt’s conscturctions in fellow Non-Aligned countries, from 1960's until late 1980’s. Across Africa, South America, the Middle East and South Asia, the distinctive modernist constructions built by Energoprojekt formed an independent post-colonial architectural identity, beyond the Eastern and Western Bloc polarity. Abundant plants and trees, different species brought from afar 50 years ago, still grow together under the glass roof. The space is gradually revealed in choreographed sequences of the people who take care of the plants, forming an inseparable sense of belonging.

In his films, photography and video works, Ivan Markovi? observes space and the relationship between labour, architecture and ideology. With Linfeng Wu, he co-directed the short film “White Bird”, that had its premiere at Berlinale 2016. His experimental documentary “Centar” had its premiere at Doclisboa in 2018, won the “Best Newcomer” award at Dokufest. “From Tomorrow on, I Will”, a feature he co-directed with Linfeng Wu, had its premiere at Berlinale Forum 2019. The film received the Grand Prize at 2019 Jeonju IFF. It was shown in numerous festivals, including Belfort, Viennale, Zinebi and Mar del Plata. As a cinematographer collaborated on several feature films including “You Have the Night” by Ivan Salatic (Venice Film Festival), “Landscapes of Resistance” by Marta Popivoda (IFF Rotterdam) and “I Was at Home, But...” and “Music” by Angela Schanelec (Berlinale). His work was shown in numerous solo or group exhibitions internationally, in institutions including Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Bethanien in Berlin, Austrian Kulturforum Berlin, Museum of Contemporary arts Belgrade. Since 2020, a member of the European Film Academy.

Jerada is a mining town in Morocco where coal extraction, although officially halted in 2001, continues informally to this day. "L’mina" recreates the current work in informal mining pits using a set design created in collaboration with the town’s residents, who perform in their own roles.

Born in 1987 in Casablanca (Morocco), Randa Maroufi is a visual artist and filmmaker. She graduated from the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, and Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains. In 2018, she became a fellow at the Académie de France à Madrid, Casa de Velázquez and the Villa Médicis in Rome in 2025. Her films Le Park (2015) and Bab Sebta (2019), awarded at several festivals, mark the beginning of a trilogy dedicated to three Moroccan cities. L’mina (2025) is the final chapter of this trilogy.

The camera enters an office. The receptionist answers the telephone, her co-workers drink coffee during their break and talk about their plans. Later, there is a meeting. The stiffness of the situation reveals a hidden story. What exactly took place from June 2015 to September 2016 in the government building in Amsterdam?

Born 1987, Casablanca, works and lives in Paris. As a Fine Arts graduate from the University in Tetouan, Angers and Le Fresnoy, Randa Maroufi belongs to this generation that grew up in an era dominated by images. She collects them with as much eagerness as suspicion, and ceaselessly questions their veracity. The field of her ambiguous fiction and experimentation encompasses the occupation of public space and gender issues in a continuous search to highlight its founding mechanisms. Randa Maroufi's work has been presented at art events and film festivals such as The Marrakech Biennale, the Arab World Institute in Paris, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the MOMA, etc.

go slow, you’ll see better is a journey of contemplation and transitioning between opposing states (of being). Revealing a landscape interspersed with vibrant colours of magenta and pink, this represents a bridge between excitement and calmness, chaos, and order. The shift in saturation mirrors the ever-changing nature of emotions, experiences, and personal narratives. Driving by and shooting out the window, the landscape becomes blurred and unblurred, evoking the sense of in-betweenness, which can prompt the feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity, clarity, and vagueness. go slow, you’ll see better is everywhere and nowhere, collapsing both the temporal and the spatial.

Siyanda Marrengane is a Eswatini-born visual artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kuba semkhatsini is a SiSwati phrase that can be translated as being caught in the middle of conflicting states of being, situations, conditions and more. Siyanda is interested in the notion of the in-between (kuba semkhatsini), a central component in her practice that encompasses personal and collective narratives and experiences. These are subsequently explored as ways of questioning, challenging and falsifying existing hegemonies. Unpacking and translating these through video, sound and installation, to create ambiguous spaces that are both imagined and real.

Plänterwald is filmed on the site of a former GDR amusement park built in 1969 and abandoned after unification. Its rollercoaster and ferris wheel sit motionless at the edge of the city of Berlin. After being closed to the public for almost a decade the rides and fairground structures ? once providing a distraction from everyday realities ? are left to a gradual process of decay and overgrowth. Paradoxically this derelict site is patrolled and protected by security guards who on the one hand attempt to maintain its separation from the public sphere and contemporary life yet at the same time position it in the present social and economic conditions. The video stages a journey in, over and through this bordered off park evoking the exceptional conditions of its persistent existence. Positioning the security guards as the guardians of a ?dead? space, the work plays on the absurdity of the use of force and notion of property in relation to the decay and obsolescence of the site. Plänterwald pursues an exploration of a world held together by an internal logic, and quietly, yet relentlessly - like the defunct rollercoaster - echoes the rumbles of deep social and political fault lines and their explosive potential.

Lynne Marsh is a Canadian artist who divides her time between Montréal, Berlin and London where she teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. Working predominately with video, installation and sound her practice explores the cultural and social concerns that operate at the convergence of performance, choreography, speculative fiction and staged events. Her most recent works, shot respectively in a sports stadium, a TV studio and an abandoned amusement park investigate the inscription of individual bodies in architectural environments built for mass consumption. Her works present conceptual and visual experimentations that create a space for us to speculate on the present concept of the individual and its contemporary exertion of pressure as a political subject. Marsh?s video installations have been exhibited in solo exhibitions including Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, the Musée d`art contemporain de Montréal and Danielle Arnaud contemporary art, London and group exhibitions including Catastrophe, the Québec City Biennial and There is no audience, at Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. A monograph on her works entitled Lynne Marsh, was produced by the Musée d`art contemporain de Montreal and the Musée régional de Rimouski.

A B C A M (or A & B Cam) explores a scene from a TV movie where the angles have been superimposed to reveal filmic conventions. It reveals the narrative, angles as well as the adjustments in performance to observe the process in its rawness and mesmerizing predictability. In conventional cinema we are only allowed to see what is presented and manipulated through the process of editing. This is a process as old as the medium itself. It is the essence of cinema. In the case of A B C A M, that process has been subverted and exposed to allow the audience to experience the conventions simultaneously and in real time. The manufactured certainty of the experience is undermined as we are encouraged to review both sides of the narrative, follow the narrative or perhaps, find a new narrative.

Richard Martin (MFA 2013 University of British Columbia) is a media artist living in Vancouver Canada. His short film work has appeared as official selections in prestigious venues such as Berlin International Film Festival, Oberhausen, Rencontres (Paris), Toronto International, EXiS (Korea), Ann Arbor, Athens (Ohio), and many more. He has also worked as a mainstream film and TV director and in that his work straddles conventional and experimental cinema, blending and upending convention with abstract intention, playfulness and occasionally, personal trauma.

A pixelated sea of televised images blends evangelical Christian rhetoric with the gospel of George W Bush.

Richard Martin is a professional film and television director who lives in Vancouver Canada. Mixed Signals marks his return to experimental cinema... a return with a vengence.

Monograph in Stereo employs documentary and experimental strategies to convey a struggle with congenital and operational hearing loss and tinnitus, a continual ringing in the ear; a phantom auditory perception.

Darrin Martin?s videos and performances have exhibited internationally at festivals and museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the DIA Center for the Arts in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the European Media Art Festival in Germany. His installations have exhibited at venues such as the Kitchen in New York, WRO Media Arts Biennale in Poland, and Pacific Switchboard in Portland, OR. He frequently collaborates with Torsten Zenas Burns. Their collaborations have exhibited at venues including The New York Video Festival, The Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Cinematexas, The Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art, The Paris/Berlin International and Eyebeam in New York. They have also launched a hi-band net art project titled Lesson Stalls: learning nets, http://www.eai.org/lessons, which was commissioned by Electronic Arts Intermix.

L?organisme Champ Libre (fondé en 1992) qui ?uvre maintenant dans les domaines de l?image en mouvement, des arts électroniques, de l?architecture et de l?urbanisme a emprunté son nom à l?histoire récente du Québec. En effet au moment de la fondation de l?organisme en 1992, François Cormier l?un des co-fondateurs, cherchait un nom à donner à ce nouvel espace de réflexion et de diffusion artistique qui émergeait à partir de l?effervescence de rencontres avec d?autres co-fondateurs issus du milieu de l?architecture, des arts visuels, de la philosophie, de la littérature et de l?urbanisme. À cette époque ce collectif définissait son action entre autres par le besoin de regrouper les forces de ses co-fondateurs et proposer de nouvelles façons de voir, d?entendre et de comprendre. C?est au hasard d?une visite dans une librairie de livres usagés du plateau Mont-Royal à Montréal en 1991 que fut découverte une édition ancienne et originale de la revue de cinéma québécoise CHAMP LIBRE ayant existé dans les années soixante-dix le temps de quelques numéros. L?édition no 1 de cette revue clamait en 1971 que : ?il consiste à donner aux colonisés que sont les Québécois les images d?eux-mêmes qui leur manquent, à reconquérir un reflet volé et à proposer des schémas d?analyse et de lutte. Inutile de dire que CHAMP LIBRE participe à ce combat. C?est la force éditoriale de ces propos et le désir, la volonté de faire revivre le nom inspirant de cette revue de cinéma d?auteur qui a fait naître dans sa continuité le nom de l?organisme CHAMP LIBRE que l?on connaît aujourd?hui.

CHAMP LIBRE (fondé en 1992) est un diffuseur et un laboratoire artistique nomade qui présente des événements in situ, s`insérant dans la communauté et mettant en relation les pratiques contemporaines de l`art, de l?architecture, de l?urbanisme et des nouvelles technologies.

From a mirador, Lucas is observing, touching upon a world growing around himself. The time of an escape from his shelter, he navigates between several gangs. This mysterious character reveals his fragility and innocence within his complex and ambiguous relationships. His passive state is an armor against this youth looking for a reality that Lucas doesn’t want to reach.

Born in 1994, Lucia Martinez is a young Swiss director whose films explore the deferments linked to the passage from childhood to adulthood. Using no professional actors, the fictions created stem from her immediate reality. A sibling, a neighbor, friends become performers for the span of a tale. For Lucia, fiction often blends with reality, creating fictions as minimal as they are essential.

HAMACA is a distributor of video art and electronic art. It was established by the initiative of AAVC and is directed by YP. The name HAMACA refers to the operative system under which we aim to work: as a horizontal net joined together at various points. Our main objective is to make works in video format available to the greatest number of individuals and institutions, and in this way promote their circulation and screenings. The distributor is a non-for-profit organisation at the service of both authors and users, whose aim is to promote the circulation of the works and to generate an economic flow for the artists' productions. We hereby continue in the line of the kind of activities led by AAVC throughout the past few years. HAMACA works as an intermediary that promotes and guarantees the presence of contemporary and historical video productions in audiovisual screenings and programs at a national and an international level. In addition, it opens up the market for new communication and information media. The works contained in the catalogue have been previously selected by a selection committee comprising professionals and experts in the field, such as Susana Blas, Eugeni Bonet, Juan Guardiola, Esther Regueira, Fito Rodríguez, Jorge Luis Marzo, Lola Dopico, and Virginia Vilaplana. The catalogue contains a varied selection of works and encompasses all genres, from historical productions and pieces in documentary format, to works of fiction, animation pieces, etc... always including the most current and risk taking pieces being created in video. Their starting point is a selection of artists that have produced most of their work within the Spanish state. It is the group's aim to expand the catalogue on a regular basis in response to different demands and criteria. Once the HAMACA catalogue has been designed and compiled, it is digitalized in order to make it accessible on line, and thus encourage research of its contents, as well as its promotion and circulation. All the works in distribution can be checked at Hamaca's web platform. The distributor is physically located in Barcelona; those interested can visit the premises by appointment and consult the catalogue in person.

“ Every morning when I go out of the door, he is the first one I see. He is the first to tell me good morning. ” “ He is a father. Although he is destroying us, he does not kill us. ” The villages of “ Chã das Caldeiras ” lie inside the caldera of the “ Pico do Fogo ” volcano in Cabo Verde. After losing everything they own on the last eruption, its inhabitants are forced to reconstruct their lives. A subjective visual tale on real loss, a symbiotic relationship and the possibility of the eternal return.

Monica Martins Nunes (1990, Lisbon) is a portuguese visual artist living and working in Berlin. After studying Sculpture in Faculdade de Belas-Artes - Lisbon University, she graduated in Fine Arts from the Universitat der Künste Berlin. In 2016 she became a Meisterschüler in the same institution and was subsequently awarded the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium from the city of Berlin. "The Ashes Remain Warm" is her first moving image work and won the Golden Dove - International Competition Short Documentary at DOK Leipzig 2017.

A dialogue between Mount Ararat and René Daumal's Mount Analogue contemplates the paradox of their visible yet unreachable presence as inland mountains. It reflects on how mountains, serve not only as physical landmarks but also as metaphysical constructs that shape our sense of self. Through this lens, the boundaries between personal biography and geography dissolve, revealing the intricate ways in which our identities are intertwined with the landscapes we inhabit. Mount Ararat, its 5,137-meter volcanic peak visible on the horizon, stands as a poignant symbol—permanently in sight, yet inaccessible due to the intractable forces of geopolitical struggle.

In her filmic practice, Gohar Martirosyan investigates the complex interplay of influences that contribute to the formation of an individual or identity, whether these influences arise from historical events, cultural practices, social ties, or relationships with various forms of life. Through the use of archival footage and technological processes, her video installation facilitates a dialogue between once-inhabited, now inaccessible geographies, which are deeply connected to the artist's own biography. Gohar studied at Le Fresnoy, was born in Gyumri (Armenia), and is currently based in Paris.

The Casa de Campo is one of the largest public parks in the world, a real forest. For centuries it was only for kings and queens, a royal forest. In the images, its 2019: the green of the earth shining anew for us or the remains of trenches as if asleep or the children's unexpected use of bridges and ponds. In the sounds, its 1936, the forest torn in two, the defence of Madrid: "buzzes and explosions, clattering of machine guns, dry crackling of rifles" or the artillery fire that massacred the city from the hills or the words of those who invented a revolution and a taste for good life in the midst of all that turmoil.

Miriam Martín has dedicated her entire adult life and part of the previous one to cinema. First as a spectator, then as a programmer in several institutions. And organizing, from November 2012 to July 2018, the Chantal film club, a weekly aesthetic and political experiment.

The seemingly extraterrestrial camera eye floats upside down through a palm grove planted in a strictly rectilinear manner. Nature is literally upside down and existing in an artificial order as a business game. Only at the crescendo of the strange, vibrantly smoldering soundtrack by Jung an Tagen does the gaze slowly turn clockwise. Then, cut: quietness, open space. At some point the logo “Valley Pride” can be read in the middle of the California desert, on oversized corrugated iron sheets, designating one of the most important commercial areas of US industrial agriculture. It’s an inhospitable place, whose increasingly bizarre unnaturalness is conveyed through Lukas Marxt’s unmistakable approach. Visually stunning, the monocultural agrarian symmetry and its ballet of irrigation testify to man’s self-extinction in the service of constant profit orientation – even if the necessarily anonymous workers return to the picture in this, Marxt’s fourth visual examination of the Imperial Valley. Under the sword of Damocles of unclear residence status and a US immigration policy that ranges from rigid to ignorant, the personal destinies and stories behind them must remain untold. The people are the smallest cog in the wheel of work in the gigantic agricultural machine trimmed for optimization, as it buries ecological and ethical standards under the relentless shoveling and plowing equipment. In front of endless rock formations and dancing mirages caused by the heat, they fertilize, harvest, and pack lettuce in a quasi-automated routine. In near-astonishment, the camera eye observes this hustle and bustle as it occurs in a leafy place where no greenery was intended. This is a place where fertility and death collide mercilessly and the threatening catastrophe – social, economic, ecological – is inscribed in every image, no matter how innocent. Here, beauty meets decay and exploitation as a man-made dystopia. That, too, is Valley Pride – a pride with an expiration date. (Sebastian Höglinger)

Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria) is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.

Nella Fantasia was created in December 2011 on the offshore oil rig Snorre A situated in the middle of the North Sea off the coast of Norway. After successfully passing a number of health tests and safety trainings, Lukas Marxt travelled to the platform and spent around 10 days collecting visual and acoustic impressions amid the loneliness of wind storms and huge waves. The result is a visual description of the oil rig microcosm which does not focus on technical processes and ongoing work on the platform but, instead, attempts to create a location which excludes obvious associations of the surroundings such as corridors, curtains, the horizon, the lapping of waves and a melancholic sigh at the end of a shift. The quiet and long shots of the film form a sort of inner monologue which the viewer can feel and experience - disconnecting people and machine. "Nella Fantasia" lasts roughly 55 minutes and is part documentary and part experimental art film.

The Salton Sea in southern California is a unique ecosystem. In just four years, the water level has fallen by a good half a meter, and with a maximum depth of ten meters you can calculate when it is expected to dry out. And that’s just the global aspect, which has to do with global warming and changes in the local climate. The Salton Sea is also special because the United States tested numerous atomic bombs here in the final phases of World War II and the Cold War – initially in preparation for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, later as training for missions that fortunately never took place. In AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB, Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljani? are particularly interested in this aspect of regional history. The film begins in Utah, where the planes took off and then found their destination in the supposedly secluded area around the Salton Sea. There is a museum in Wendover where you can also see models of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, the only two atomic bombs ever used in war, along with a loading pit where the planes were loaded, to which Marxt dedicated a shorter film in 2019. For many years he has been dealing with the situation in southern California, which can be described as extreme in many respects. Intensive agriculture, which relies radically on monocultures, has cast a spell over everything there. Marxt and Smiljani? find out that an alliance has been formed against this backdrop: illegal harvest workers from Latin America seek refuge in Native American reservations. AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB has local experts explain the landscape and history, and the director is looking for dissenting voices, especially among the tribe of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, who were victims of genocide in the 19th century. Their survivors now recall how many plants that had healing powers and were part of a life with nature once grew around the salty water of the Salton Sea. Now the area belongs to the salt bushes, and beneath the surface ticks the uranium of a Cold War that is about to return. Scary times, someone says. (Bert Rebhandl)

Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria) is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea. Vanja Smiljani? (Belgrade, 1986) is a visual and performance artist living and working between Lisbon and Cologne. She concluded the post-master in Artistic research at A.pass, Brussels (2015), MFA at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), Arnhem (2012), and Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (2019) and got a degree in Fine Arts at the Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa (2009). In her practice she often utilizes the model of performance-lecture as a way to bridge fictitious and experiential universes, comprising technical apparatus, diagrams and sci-fi povera sculptures. Connecting otherwise unparalleled reality systems, Vanja's work attests the foundation of ideologies as alienated regimes, recurring to her own body as a vessel for narration, often shifting between the position of oracle and storyteller.

Landscape is a question of distance. Patterns and formations become recognizable from a distance revealing the landscape as a fabrication, a result of natural and historical movements. Fishing is not done on Tuesdays takes variously distanced, moving and focused looks at a location on the coast of Ghana. The first building block of a grid that threads its way through the entire film is indicated by a rotating bird´s eye view of a densely woven canopy of trees intersected by an uneven wall. The vertigo of this circular motion shifts into a gradual glide along untreated cement pylons. Their verticality intersects with the horizon line visible in the distance, to be ruptured only by the turbulence of approaching waves. Constructed lines produce visual axes and visual slits, dividing and lending rhythm to an apparently wild growth of abundant vegetation. These lines and grids do not divide the interior and exterior but rather create openings and passageways. Over and over again views are seen that refute these clear geometries, vibrating and unstable, brought near by binoculars but at the same time strangely far removed. Fisherman on their boats, at prayer before the workday begins; two boys with toy guns in search of an invisible adversary. Smoke condenses; silhouettes become blurred. Are these everyday scenes or the distant echoes of disturbing memories? There is no fishing on Tuesdays. Loudspeaker systems are the domain of Christian agitators on Sundays. The everyday rhythms of this place are overlaid with the drumming of rotors, the swelling and waning of music and the ocean. Their intersection is marked by this house on stilts, this perch from which an interior grid merges with the exterior as landscape. (Katrin Mundt)

Born in the Steiermark region of Austria in 1983, he studied geography and environmental system sciences in Graz until 2004. He then switched to audiovisual design at the University of Art and Design Linz. From 2007 to 2008 he studied art and multimedia at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2009 he took up a postgraduate degree at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and a masters at the Academy of Fine Arts (HGB) in Leipzig. Following the short film Fishing is not done on Tuesdays, co-directed with Marcel Odenbach, this marks the second outing for their collaborative work in competition in the Berlinale Shorts. He lives and works in Cologne and Vienna.