Catalogue > Search

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“ 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The Imperial Valley represents one of California´s most important regions of industrial agriculture. Corporate agricultural production interests have been able to successfully cultivate and exploit this geological part of the Sonora desert through a gigantic irrigation system fed by the Colorado River, as well as the All-American Canal specifically engineered for this purpose and which attained sad notoriety through the Mexican migration movement. The system´s run-off flows through pipes, pumps and canals leading to the Salton Sea, an artificial lake that is approaching ecological as well as economic disaster, just as bordering regions of Mexico. With Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) Lukas Marxt approaches this problem in a very ingenious way. He begins with a bird´s eye view of an irrigation canal coursing through a desert landscape. A drone camera flies the length of the canal, subsequently flying over Imperial Valley landscapes from the same perspective. Initially appearing as nothing more than spectacular documents of agricultural monocultures, the shots become increasingly abstract additionally heightened through the accompaniment of an electronic score. Is this an actual or artificially simulated landscape? This ambiguity is precisely the point: The Imperial Valley is becoming the "Uncanny Valley", a place that is not yet or no longer natural and thereby appears eerie. A landscape post landscape (or its medial representation) is a geometric concept of lines, surfaces, points and color spots, regardless whether of an animate or lifeless nature. Although manmade, it is not a place for people anymore, neither ontologically nor in reality. The post-apocalypse is not a matter of the future, we are already in the thick of it. (Claudia Slanar)

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.

Finding access to the deeper levels and truths of a stretch of land via the surreal, the digitally alienated. Thus is the aim behind Lukas Marxt’s Imperial Irrigation, whereby digital surrealism is anchored in an experimental documentary intent, while text and sound levels snarl the multiple layers of action thus continually decentering the narrative. Starting point for this complex and vibrant territorial study is California’s Salton Sea; close to where Marxt’s Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) already led. The visual approach to this slowly drying up lake and its highly checkered past takes place through various types of images—most of which have been implanted with elaborately placed, willful moments of alienation. As though the intangibility of the scenery offered could not possibly be encountered via veristic means, the shots are digitally chopped, extended by time stops, permeated by undefinable MacGuffins—and tremble erratically owing to air reflections that arise when filming from a great distance. Marxt does not exclude himself from this quasi-colonial inspection of a landscape. His cowboy boots, his snakeskin hat, and his hanging out at slot machines or in the car repeatedly intervene as idiosyncratic presences in the flow of images. The artist Julia Scher emphatically narrates a history of Salton Sea based on a text by William L. Fox recapitulating various discursive anchoring moments. At the same time, subtly woven sound elements, most notably insistent passages by the musician Jung An Tagen, for their part, “alter-medially” outdo the “insane sense” of the events. What emerges is a disturbing portrait of a bit of the Anthropocene, whose ongoing catastrophic course, the film sums up nicely. (Christian Höller)

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.

A small dramatic gesture cancels any possible remains of hope in 2.59 (2014). A dental drill scrapes the grooves of a vinyl record playing John Lennon’s Imagine– whose playing time is actually two minutes and 59 seconds – as the needle ultimately and stridently squeaks, while snowflakes start to fall. Dreams are no longer possible, as our society has completely denied them.

MASBEDO are Nicolò Massazza (1973) and Iacopo Bedogni (1970). They live and work in Milan. The two artists have worked together since 1999. They express themselves through the language of video, in different forms such as performance, theater, installation, photography and recently cinema. In Italy they are recognized among the most important video artists and innovators in the field of contemporary art: thanks to their unique feature of re-union of different arts: the multiplicity of languages becomes a single chorus. In fall 2014 a major solo exhibition will be showed at the Fondazione Merz, anticipated by the presentation of their first film The Lack at the Venice Film Festival. In 2013 the Leopold Museum Wien presented the video-installation “Ash” and they exhibited in Pinacoteca Nazionale Bologna a solo show with videos and a video performance. In 2012 they held video performances in several museums of contemporary art and in particular locations such as the Italian Embassy in Berlin during 7th Art Biennial. With the very special participation of Fanny Ardant they present at Teatro Strehler in Milan and Teatro Palladium in Rome an audio video performance from Le Remède de Fortune of Guillaume de Machaut. They participate with the doc-film Tralalà at the 69th Venice Film Festival and at the Reykjavik International Film Festival. Other very important shows in their career are Art Basel Unlimited, MAXXI and MACRO Museum in Rome and the 53. Venice Biennial Of Art. Other museums such the Center for Contemporary Art Uajzdowsky Castle in Warsaw, the CCCB Centro de Cultura Contemporanea in Barcelona, the DA2 Museum in Salamanca, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’arte contemporanea in Turin, the OK Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz, the Tel Aviv Art Museum and the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria hosted in the past years their artworks. Other Film Festivals in their career: Bellaria, Tremblay en France, Novi Sad, United Nation World Forum in Rio De Janeiro, Locarno, Rome, Istanbul, Lisbon, Athens, Miami and Trieste. They have always participated with video-art projects. They worked with French writer Michelle Houellebecq with which they write The world Is Not A Panorama, a video art movie with the precious collaboration with Oscar Winning actress Juliette Binoche and exhibit the premiere at the Gran Palais, Paris.

The video, Fragile (2016) produced by the Museo Reale Galleria Sabauda in Turin, staged a young man`s visit to the gallery halls in the presence of a peacock. Walking among the masterpieces of antiquity, symbolic objects of archetypal beauty, the presence of the peacock underlines the essential precariousness of the living animal and its impairment that renders it inapt to represent its nature. The image is highly suggestive because it’s made even more dramatic due to the emptiness of the halls, facing the perpetual immobility of the painted characters. The main theme of these works is the concept of "cure": the old animal, object of the care of its master, is a metaphor of the combination of a faded vanity and the eternal journey into beauty, a trip defined by Rainer Maria Rilke as "the tremendous at its beginning." The fragility of art, to which the title of the work refers to, engages the observer`s gaze and warns of the necessity to provide protection of art and cultural heritage. A metaphor that reminds us of the need to preserve and care for our artistic and cultural heritage as a form of resistance to time and carelessness of man. In 2018, when Europe dedicates itself to Cultural Heritage, encouraging public institutions to celebrate their relevance and value for the cultural development of society, the artistic discourse by Masbedo is consistently aligned with this theme, showing how contemporary artists relate themselves with the art of the past and how history of art can be a source of inspiration for new generations.

MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza, 1973, Milan - Iacopo Bedogni, 1970, Sarzana) started their journey in 1999, focusing on the potential of video art and video installation. Developed around the theme of incommunicability in contemporary society, their research has produced both, intimate works and more socio-political and anthropological-cultural productions. Their aesthetic approach presents pictorial aspects and the realization of their videos pursues the goal of involving the viewer in the space created by the moving images through immersive installations. Their work, in fact, is a synthesis of theatre, performance, space, architecture and video / cinema. They have been included in solo shows in important museums and foundations both in Italy and abroad, as well as in various film festivals, and their works are included in relevant private and public collections: MART, Rovereto, Italy; Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy; GAM - Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, Italy; MACRO - Museo di Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy; DA2 - Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Salamanca, Spain; CAAM Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderna, Las Palmas, Spain; CAIRN Centre d’Art, Digne-les-bains, France; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.

Between 9 May and 11 June 1943, the island of Pantelleria was violently bombarded by the Allied troops in the first operation to reconquer Italian soil. Residents recall that, after the surrender, some of the buildings were blown up for the cameras of a propaganda combat film. Pantelleria traces the memories of this event in the local collective consciousness and looks at the contemporary implications of an episode that took place in the shadow of official history. Through a two-years long participatory process with the residents, the film explores the tension between the truth and its ideological distortion, and between the reality of the bombs and their telling through images. The Nervi hangar, a symbol of Mussolini’s militarisation of the island, is now shown empty and inhabited by a magical animal presence. Extracts from the combat film are projected onto the buildings of today’s Pantelleria, while the camera travels through the bunkers dug by the Italian army. The voiceover, written and read by writer Giorgio Vasta, gives expressive form to the island’s stories, while the sound by GUP Alcaro and Davide Tomat distorts the recordings of the local orchestra Spata, finding in dance music a space for the reactivation of the past, and liberation in the present.

MASBEDO is an artistic duo formed by Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni. They have been working together since 1999 and they currently live in Milan and Piacenza (Italy). Different artistic languages such as video, installation, cinema, performance, theater, and sound design coexist in their work. They are interested in emotional and intense narratives that delve into the depths of human relationships and the complex subjectivity of the contemporary individual. They have identified the relationship between cinema and art as a preferred area of investigation, which they approach with an attentive gaze to both socio-anthropological elements and the most intimate and poetic ones. MASBEDO’s works have been exhibited in international institutions such as: Manifesta 15 Barcelona; Centre Pompidou-Metz; CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; Fondazione ICA Milan; MAMM Multimedia Art Museum Moscow; Manifesta12 Palermo; Hong Kong Arts Centre; Fondazione Merz; Leopold Museum Wien; MAXXI Rome; Centre Pompidou/Forum des Images Paris. Among others, their short and feature films have been shown at: Venice International Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; CPH:DOX; FIFA – Festival International du Film sur l’Art Montréal; Villa Medici Film Festival Rome; Sharjah Film Platform; Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; Lo schermo dell’arte, Florence, IFFR-International Film Festival Rotterdam.