Catalogue 2025

Watch with the Weary Ones is a short documentary that looks at the American urban landscape while the filmmaker quietly drifts back to memories of Iran. It places the surfaces of U.S. cities next to the feelings of someone living far from home, caught between two places. The film reflects on the sorrow carried by those who left Iran searching for another life, and those who stayed and continue to fight for theirs. It’s about holding two worlds at once, the one in front of you and the one that never leaves you, and trying to make sense of that weight

Sina Khani (aka Sina Ahmadkhani) is a Tehran-born, Los Angeles–based filmmaker, writer, and editor. His feature debut won Best International Experimental Feature at the Portoviejo Film Festival and earned awards, nominations, and selections at Regina IFF, Toronto International Nollywood FF, New York City Indie FF, and many other international festivals. He recently completed his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and continues to create bold, character-driven stories.

Do you believe in Superstitions? Commonality of Beliefs [Co:beliefs], is an interactive digital installation that delves into the intriguing world of superstitions through immersive real-world experiences; exploring their role in fostering cultural cohesion, and examining the persistence and relevance of superstitious thinking in modern society. This digital immersion offers an opportunity for meaningful interaction among individuals and communities with similar beliefs and presents a fresh perspective on how superstitions are formed; expounding on the emotions people harbour in the digital realm, especially those related to uncertain futures. Our journey began with a simple question: "Why do people still believe in superstitions?" This question piqued our curiosity and led us to delve into the narratives of superstitious thinking that exist today. The research has been brought together in a VR experience and a 360 film produced in a narrative game environment, that visually and artistically express the anxieties and fears of modern people through three realms. By rendering these complex emotions experienced in an uncertain world through digital media, we make them more palpable.

Junghyun Kim (Zoey Kim) is a Visual Designer and Creative Editor based in London. She specializes in digital media and creates immersive, interactive experiences that blend technology and humanity. Through tools like game engines and real-time content, she explores new ways of storytelling that engage audiences and spark social dialogue. Zoey’s work invites active audience participation, using digital interaction to offer fresh perspectives on contemporary life. Drawing inspiration from everyday rituals and evocative objects, she crafts narratives that reflect both personal and collective experiences in innovative visual forms.

Concept Drift is an interactive game and video artwork which visualizes the enmeshment between knowledge production, colonial exploitation, and technological power in South Africa. The title refers to the machine-learning term "Drift" which describes how the performance of a machine-learning model, trained with historical data, becomes outdated in real-world contexts. In classic computation, the data comes in and the algorithmically-modeled rule calculates the output, but to compress/model a complex system without reducing its complexity is impossible. The work makes use of AI-generated 3d models and images combined with handmade collages and stop-motion, game-engine built environments, archival imagery, sculptural costumes and performances to create an archive of the infrastructures and material networks of algorithms as they apply to South African land and life: visualizing an anti-model of South Africa’s connections to the broader computational world order. Moving through time and territory from heavily-surveilled mining compounds to factory floors and suburban neighbourhoods, the game-world visualizes how algorithmic logic and practice has infiltrated all spheres of life from physical infrastructures to bodies and land. In the game, players can interact with archival matter - taxonomical illustrations, maps and models - from the route taken on a 1685 expedition by Dutch colonialists to prospect for copper. Reinterpreting and remixing historical images with current-day climate data, the artists retrace this route to map the collateral landscapes of the now-disused mines, drawing a line from the Dutch East India Company – the world’s first multinational trade corporation - to the newly-established presence of Amazon in Cape Town. In building a complex web of the country’s algorithmic metabolisms, spanning mines, maps, and matter, the work questions the model’s attempts to compress and recursively enfold chaotic indeterminacies into its logic.

The Lo-Def Film Factory is a participatory community art-making initiative created by Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. Based in South Africa, their work involves archival research, dramaturgy and visual strategies associated with video art, collage, sculptural installation, virtual reality and emerging media. Employing an experimental praxis which emphasizes co-creation and mistake-making, it aims to create space for video and new media storytelling. The initiative places value on the transmission of ideas and experience over high production value.

Within the haunting cycle of coffin mass production, human labor contrasts with the never-ending factory stock of coffins. In light of computer-aided manufacturing and the excessive overexploitation of natural resources, Unsold Copies longs for a moment of rest from the assembly line, while mankind continually buries itself in the remnants of a material world.

Stefan Koutzev is a Bulgarian filmmaker working and living in Cologne. His work focuses on narrative storytelling born between screenwriting and documentary practices, as well as the production of experimental films and sound design. His short films including RESTBESTAND (2025), HAUSPAUSEN (2024) or SCHWÄRMEN (2020), have been screened at DOK Leipzig, Odense International Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Stockholm International Film Festival or Rencontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin. In 2026, he's about to present the world premier of his feature debut WHY HASN’T EVERYTHING DISAPPEARED YET, a hybrid, multilingual exploration of belonging, origin and migration.

"Scent" is a cinematic game installation in which the player, as a dog, roams a war-torn city, gathering souls from the dead. As you walk, run, and hide amid unfolding atrocities, the game draws you into a raw, sensory experience of fear, darkness, and fleeting moments of hope. Stripped of specific historical or geographic markers, "Scent" explores what it means to witness without power.

Working at the intersection of cinema and videogames, artist Alan Kwan creates immersive experiences that evoke feelings of heartbreak, fear, and the sublime. ? In June 2025, he premiered his latest videogame, “Scent”, at Tribeca Festival in New York and Animafest Zagreb. An earlier iteration of the project received an Honorary Mention Award at Prix Ars Electronica. In 2022–2024, he initiated and led the development of “The Eyes”, a VR cinematic experience created in collaboration with Kachi Chan, which was showcased at SXSW Sydney. ? His other projects have been exhibited internationally at venues including Ars Electronica Center (Austria), ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany), International Bauhaus Colloquium (Germany), Forum des images (France), Science Gallery Dublin (Ireland), Nam June Paik Art Museum (Korea), Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (China), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), and Pearl Lam Galleries (Hong Kong), among others. His work has been featured in media outlets such as the Discovery Channel, Popular Science, and The Boston Globe. ? Originally from Hong Kong, Kwan earned his master’s degree at MIT and is currently based in Chicago, where he is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gold and Ashes is erected upon internal and external — ontological-epistemological — scaling dualities reflected in the characters but also in the time and space where the action is set or in the world they inhabit. It is structured around a concrete plane and an abstract plane as a reference to, human subjectivity. The project features two female actresses. The concrete plane plot is set in filming locations that provide a backdrop for the narrative with direct dialogues and action — mother-and-daughter, placed in the present time. It conveys a social sphere outlined by complex communication models and conventions — such as kinship and existential quests while underlining the artificiality of a constructed reality — an inhabited drawing. The abstract plane plot is set in a film studio that provides a backdrop for the para-philosophical narrative with monologues and no action — two disconnected entities (not sure if aware, of each other), placed in an unknown time. It conveys a mental labyrinth outlined by relational power dynamics and conflicting human emotions — such as humanity’s history and its relation to planet Earth while underlining the speculation of symbolic and imaginary articulations damaged by the loss of the social, political, and spiritual. Overall, the project unfolds around cognitive systems, societal models, and civilizational paradigms, and uses an approach that acknowledges human evolution, simultaneously outlining human limitations to follow the poetics and relational politics of two grand narratives — [a]naturalism, [anti]eco/[geo] constructivism — which usher the mythology of the human impact on Earth (Anthropocene); compelled by two timeless perspectives: progress and apocalypse — questioning our ability to rebuild and pilot the Earth away from the socio-ecological disasters and showing what it means to appreciate the Earth (but also humanity) as an irreplaceable becoming — a trajectory that cannot be replicated, remade or mastered. Gold and Ashes is a powerful exploration of the human condition in the face of devastation, reflecting Lamas’s ongoing commitment to addressing difficult and urgent themes through innovative techniques that often disrupt traditional narrative structures, creating films that are non-linear, fragmented, or that deliberately withhold key information. This technique enhances the parafictional quality of her work, as it mirrors the complexity and uncertainty of real-life events, where truth is often elusive. In the project she explores the idea of subjective memory and how personal and collective histories are constructed. By using parafiction, she highlights the fluidity of memory and the ways in which stories are shaped by the storyteller’s perspective, as well as by political and social contexts. Gold and Ashes symbolizes the duality of destruction and resilience—the “ashes” represent the remnants of war and loss, while the “gold” signifies the hope and strength that survivors cling to in their efforts to rebuild their lives. Lamas uses her distinctive style to blur the lines between reality and fiction, creating a layered and immersive experience that challenges viewers to question their understanding of truth and memory and its impact in both the private and public spheres.

Salomé Lamas has produced over thirty projects, which have been installed and screened internationally, both in cinema auditoriums and contemporary art galleries, and museums. Each of them gives way to a different social reality, usually characterized by its geographical and political inaccessibility. The artist’s interest in impenetrable, politically ambiguous contexts is guided by concerns and the need to problematize reality that otherwise would not be possible. The web of relations making up the socio-political fabric of her projects is made visible through representational strategies, for which she adopted the term parafiction. Rather than complying with a shapeless meaning of parafiction — for which there is no established terminology — she proposes its expansion and resignification. In her artistic practice, parafiction can be read in the light of its prefix “para-”, in which we encounter various disruptive effects that are vital for its comprehension. Derived from the Latin, “para-” indicates “alongside, adjacent to, beyond or distinct from, but analogous to”; in certain word combinations, it can also mean “wrong, irregular,” pointing towards an “alteration” or “modification”; further, “para-” implies “separate, defective, irregular, disordered, improper, incorrect, perversion or simulation.” In this way, parafiction would be something in which fiction has been perverted, altered, modified, or pushed beyond its point of reference, as opposed to remaining within the boundaries of the category of fiction. It can also be understood as a “simulation” of fiction, pointing to a distortion of the border around what is considered fiction, thus reaching what is on the other side of that border: that is, the world of non-fiction or seeking the “real” world. Thus, instead of fiction being used to blur the border with non-fiction, it is used as a way of expanding and transcending those boundaries. Salomé Lamas departs from the principle that we do not have access to a stable reality. Instead, we have an excess of meanings, interpretations, explanations, manipulations, (de)constructions, and evaluations that go into narratives and systems that sustain and occupy us. Consequently, the need for appropriating the idea of parafiction stems from the questioning of how human subjectivity is formed, drawing on psychoanalysis, with the aim of clarifying and expanding concepts such as real (something that is out of reach), reality, symbolic, and imaginary. Thus, she is led to operate at the border between fiction and non-fiction, employing representation and hypothesis generation through certain meditative criteria and a deontological code relative to what is plausible, assuming consciously the “task of the translator” —comparable to illusionism — and pushing its boundaries. In this context, she draws on distinct non-fictional strategies that include ethnographic research, as well as thought experiments, reflexivity, restaging and performativity, among others, to explore the limits of fiction. This is visible in the development of her working methodology, where we find various manifestations of parafiction, such as scenarios where characters and fictional stories intersect with the world as we are experiencing it. The combination of these strategies, to the detriment of other speculative aspects, forms a sort of hypothesis that maintains a level of accuracy with reality but also questions its authority. Through parafiction it is possible to take a convention and deconstruct it, distort it, expose the impossibility of providing evidence for the truth, to the point where doubts are raised about its validity, yet still producing reasons for understanding it as plausible. Salomé Lamas problematizes both sides of the border between historical and imaginary worlds, and records how they have changed over time, by understanding parafiction as a fundamental translation tool for defining identity, language and culture. Intensifying, exaggerating and speculating on how the world is made sensible, by triggering moments that reveal their fabrication, in a post-truth context heightened by the technological and globalized nature of our times. To reveal this transformation is a continuous and thorough undertaking, but also spiritual, having the ability to relate the individual sphere (private) with the social sphere (public) and so introducing new information and perspectives on our past, present and future. Thus, although conscious of its limits and apparent contradictions, parafiction helps give form to the chaos of life and endow it with significance, in a compromise between reality and its fictionalization.

Through a hypnotic single-shot sequence, we are transported to the heart of a house, where negative black and white unveil an indefinite space between memory and bewilderment. Fluctuating beneath the social veneer, the gaze undergoes a metamorphosis as the house reveals its secrets; the walls themselves seem to whisper forgotten tales and unspeakable truths.

Claire Lance (born in 1987, France) is an artist who uses mediums closely related to human optics. Her projects explore cognition and the persistence of cultural images in perception through video, installation, and photography. Evolving over time, Lance's works often operate in a manner reminiscent of Rorschach tests, revealing what is generally invisible or described as intangible or non-objective. The global city, where scales and dimensions intersect in successive layers, creates virtual, intangible spaces accessible only to the eye. These indeterminate yet familiar places invoke the metaphor and persistence of images that we individually and culturally carry within us as viewers. Her works have been exhibited at the Ofr gallery in Paris, at the 39th FIFA in Montreal, Kurzfilmvoche Regesnburg, Germany, and have been featured multiple times in the British magazine Carpark. In 2023, she was invited by the CIRM (Centre International de Recherche Mathématiques) for a workshop titled 'Maths and Art: Common Creation'. She holds a master's degree in Practice and Theory of Contemporary Art from the Université Paris 8 Sorbonne. She has collaborated with various film directors as cinematographer on set, and commissioned works with press titles such as L’Obs, Trax, Technikart.

"Toward Entropy 360" is an immersive 360° film experience that invites audiences to step into a 360° world where land art’s monumental gestures meet the quiet persistence of nature. This work reimagines historically significant earthworks, not as static monuments, but as evolving, fragile ecologies shaped by time, weather, and memory. Plants reclaim the ground, water rises, and familiar forms dissolve, questioning the permanence of human ambition. At once poetic and critical, the project examines how culture and environment intersect—how art inscribes itself on the land, and how the land, in turn, writes back. By reframing entropy not as loss but as a generative process, the 360 video opens a space for reflection on art, history, and environmental ethics in a world increasingly defined by change.

Jaewook Lee is a new media artist working across 3D/CGI animation, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), video games, and interactive installations. His practice explores speculative histories and immersive ecologies, creating environments that question cultural, ecological, and social paradigms while foregrounding nature’s agency through advanced digital technologies. Lee’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2024), the Museo de Antofagasta at SACO9 Contemporary Art Festival in Chile (2020), and the SVA-NYC Art Platform in Shanghai (2017, 2019). His projects have been featured internationally at events such as the Currents Art + Technology Festival (2025), the Athens Digital Arts Festival (2024), the ARKO Art & Tech Festival (2021), and Mindful Joint at Art Sonje Center (2017). His films have screened at Canadian Screen Awards–qualifying festivals, including the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival (2024) and the Montreal International Animation Film Festival (2023). Lee holds a BFA from Korea National University of Arts and MFAs from Carnegie Mellon University and the School of Visual Arts. He has taught at the University of Chicago, SVA, and SUNY Old Westbury. He is currently Associate Professor of New Media Art at Northern Arizona University, where he directs the Authorized Unreal Engine Academic Partner program.

‘Tra' is an ode to Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. ‘Tra' synthesizes the narrative of his film ‘Teorema' (1968) by highlighting its interstitial moments. The act of running that appears throughout the film is isolated and deployed to expose the film’s subtextual currents.

John Di Stefano is an artist/filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work reconciles the personal with the social, the everyday with history through hybrid forms of documentary practices and the essayistic form. His work often deals with his immigrant past seen through a queer lens, including the feature-length 'You Are Here' (2009) which premiered at the Festival International du Documentaire (Marseille). His award-winning work has also been featured at the Videonale (Bonn), Whitechapel Gallery, Tensta Konsthall, Barcelona Museum of Modern Art, Para/Site (Hong Kong), and Anthology Film Archives. His critical writings appear in various international publications. He teaches at Concordia University (Montreal). Cathy Lee Crane is an experimental filmmaker whose work mines the historical archive to produce lyrical films of speculative history. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2015 her work enjoyed its first survey at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC). Crane’s award-winning films –including 'Pasolini’s Last Words' (2012)– have screened at Viennale, Cinematheque Francais, BFI, and Arsenal/Berlin. Her interest in borders saw the release of 'Crossing Columbus' (2020) about the border town of Columbus, New Mexico which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. She teaches at Ithaca College (New York).

To Ashes explores the thresholds between reality and machinic hallucination, questioning contemporary image-generation technologies — particularly artificial intelligence — and their influence on our perception of the real. Created through a hybrid process combining 3D modeling and AI-based generation tools, the video unfolds as a continuous tracking shot through a brutalist megastructure in constant transformation. Architectural forms disintegrate and transform, while ash-like particles rise into the air. This disintegration is accompanied by an experimental soundscape, where analog synthesizers and transformed voices evoke a latent collapse. Gradually, the architecture gives way to unstable crystalline structures. Reality wavers. In the end, something gives way, shifts, disappears. Everything must burn.

Thomas Léon develops his practice by merging cinema, graphic arts and images from new technologies. He creates films, immersive video and sound installations, as well as large-format drawings. His work explores the interconnections between memory, sensuality, intimate experiences, and the imaginary, drawing on fictions, whether they be social, urban, climatic, etc. He is notably influenced by science fiction and utopian literature and frequently develops his projects using contemporary image creation tools (3D modeling, AI, etc.). He regularly participates in screenings or exhibitions in France and abroad: 'Listening to Transparency' at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai (China, 2017), 'Cruces Sonoros: Mundos Posibles' at the MAC in Santiago de Chile (Chile, 2016), 'Rendez-vous 11' at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne (France, 2011), and at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town (South Africa, 2012). He notably took part in residencies : Drawing Factory organized by CNAP (National Center for Visual Arts) and the Drawing Lab (Paris) in 2021 ; a residency in Taiwan, organized by Grame, the National Center for Musical Creation (Lyon), and the Digital Art Center (Taipei) in 2011. His works can be found in the collections of CNAP (National Center for Visual Arts) and the Louis Vuitton Foundation. Thomas Léon lives and works in Montreuil.

'Another Woman - film adaptation' is a three channel film presenting intimate scenes of three characters, two women and a man, in the course of a breakup. The film explores a world of fiction and performance in a cinematographic and spatially designed narrative where three images are presented simultaneously. The visual style focusses both on the performing bodies and their surroundings. Subcutaneous emotions surface through tactile interaction, as the characters touch and feel their place amidst the physical properties of the space. Walls, ceiling, floor, curtains and furniture form obstacles, boundaries and voids that confront the protagonists with the situation and state of mind in which they find themselves. The interiors become mirrors for their inner worlds, surreal and intuitively recognisable at the same time. 'Another Woman - film adaptation', 2025, is a re-staging of the spatial installation 'Another Woman', 2022. We show an exerpt of 13 min 6 sec. of the final film that will have an estimated duration of 70 minutes.

Leopold Emmen is a collaboration between filmmaker Nanouk Leopold and visual artist Daan Emmen. In our work, we experiment with film as a spatial, cinematographic experience in which the visitor plays an active role. Through the characteristics of a place and the behaviour of our protagonists, we want to make tangible how a presence influences life and relationships with the other. An open invitation to explore the physical and mental world of the characters themselves. Creating awareness of the way in which space, sound and moving image can come together in a deepening, embodied experience, we want to stir up our conditioned gaze. Reflecting on how we see the world, how we see ourselves in that world and how we see each other.

We Marry You, O Sea engages with Venice and its lagoon “from below,” with the aim of focusing attention on the city’s submerged, life-giving, and altered bio-geomorphological processes rather than on its often-recounted political and military histories. Underwater filmmaking opens new ways of knowing the materialities of the Venice Lagoon and exposes a fractured and troubled environment that complicates mainstream historical narratives that start above the water’s surface. By attuning to the ebb and flood of the lagoon, we start sensing the interplay between land and water, life and decay, and the intimate processes shaping this environment. Noticing the kinds of life made possible in this damaged watery space compels us to delve into the ways it has been profoundly transformed. We Marry You O Sea as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion takes its title from the words uttered during the Venetian ritual The Marriage of the Sea, which was held annually on Ascension Day between the eleventh and eighteenth century. During the event, the Doge, the patriarch of the Venetian Republic, would wed the lagoon by casting a golden ring into the water, declaring dominance over the sea. The artist reframes Venice’s enduring relationship with its permeating waters by reflecting on this ongoing legacy of quests for mastery over watery environments. How, this work asks, might we imagine different futures for Venice if we begin to experience the lagoon as a lively place populated by manifold ways of living and dying? In the lagoon, a space requiring continuous modifications for human settlement, wetlands and infrastructures have long been intertwined. Venice’s consolidation as a trading hub and epicenter of naval advancement during the Middle Ages prompted major hydrological engineering to maintain the lagoon’s shallow depths for defense purposes. However, in the twentieth century, harrowing modernization transformed parts of the wetland into petroleum refineries and one of Italy’s largest container terminals as part of an effort to turn the lagoon into an industrial frontier. Urban anthropologist Clara Zanardi has described how these transformations spatialized class divisions in a new way, while also causing irreversible ecological degradation that has profoundly altered the lagoon’s lifeways. The film presents these histories of modernization by interweaving rare historical photographs from Venice’s Giacomelli Photographic Archive with submerged perspectives of the present conditions of the lagoon. The historical significance of these photographs is emphasized by the negative black-and-white reversal of the submerged perspectives, connecting past and present and unfolding futures within the lagoon’s contaminated waters. An original score, created by a chorus of human voices and underwater sound recordings, further emphasizes the links between submerged spaces and human domains. The composition captures the lagoon’s pulses and the impact of industries—from aquatic sounds drowned out by boat noises to the rhythmic poundings of industrial activity amid surging tides—as it gestures toward the profound interplay between human activities and the lagoon’s shallows.

Sonia Levy is an artist filmmaker with a Berber-Polish background. Her work, marked by site-specific and interdisciplinary inquiries, delves into the implications of Western expansionist and extractive logics, exploring how these forces manifest in the transformation and governance of hydrosocial worlds. Her practice aims to probe the thresholds that have shaped and influenced the conditions necessary for life to flourish.

Intruders explores the boundary between science fiction and reality, investigating themes of reverse colonization, ecology and human environmental impact. The film offers an introspective reflection on the Western fascination and fear of extraterrestrial entities. In an elongated pan, mountain landscapes and misty images of animals are presented in an ethereal, ghostly way. Locus does not use conventional film footage, but found footage online hunting videos and black and white photographs of UFO observations from the 1950s and 60s. Although these images reveal their origins through their grainy texture, Locus removed the UFOs from these photos to seamlessly merge the remaining landscapes. The phenomenon of unforeseen animal death, often reported in UFO sightings, serves as a metaphor for human influence on nature. Locus intertwines photography with video to create a complex narrative that emphasises the ambiguity of reality and fiction. The film reflects on ‘intruders’ in nature, inspired by dystopian visions of the future and challenges the viewer to consider the complex and often disturbing relationships between humans, technology and nature.

Spanning the mediums of film, photography, and sound, his work often addresses landscape as a tool for the creation of national and social identities, focusing on environments altered by extraction and industrialization. In his latest work, he explores the tension between found footage, still photography, and the moving image, emphasizing the ambiguity of our perception of reality and fiction. His films have been presented at numerous international festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Le FIFA – International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal), Kasseler Dokfest, Asolo Art Film Festival, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, CROSSROADS Film Festival (San Francisco), ANTIMATTER Media Art (Victoria), Festival ECRÃ (Rio de Janeiro), PROYECTOR Plataforma de Videoarte (Madrid), SPLIT Film Festival, ONION CITY Experimental Film Festival (Chicago), BISFF Beijing International Short Film Festival, and Flight / Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova among others. Locus lives and works in Brussels.

« We do not have to know each other in advance » is a hybrid video work that alternates moments of dance performance with archive footage and textual quotations. Gabriela Löffel draws on the political aspect of public space to construct her thinking, developing a visual essay that stages the ‘performativity of bodies in this zone of political action’. Drawing on the written work of Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist who has worked on the question of the body and its normalised representativeness in contemporary society, Löffel gives corporeality to the issues raised by the author. Quotations from Butler's work are shown alongside the danced and archival elements of the video. The almost fixed camera allows us to examine in detail the slow, precise movements of the dancers. The camera's movements are almost imperceptible, so subtle are they. The artist and choreographer Cédric Gagneur worked closely together to define the various movements that make up the choreography: they propose an abstraction of gestures of resistance or revolt, drawn from archive images from the collection of the Archives contestataires de Genève. The piece is inhabited by slowness and silence, giving the body enough space to unfold individually or collectively. The work offers a dialectic of the potential for protest in the public space. Co-produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain and the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève for the Mire program.

Gabriela Löffel mainly works with time-based media and focuses on the zones of political and finance structures, and infrastructures. Shifting and translating from the documented immediate to the fields of interpretation and mise-en-scène are strategies she uses in her work process. A method that often results in long-term projects and enables her to create spaces for questions and to propose disruptions to linear narratives. She is interested in the obliquity of the subject and his context. It’s in this gap, brought about by her way of addressing subjects, that her work opens onto reflections on the sense of how we understand a world when we become conscious of the fragmentation of our knowledge. Her work has been presented at institutions and galleries including MAST Bologna, Aargauer Kunsthaus, EMAF Osnabrück, Galería Metropolitana Santiago, Dazibao Montreal, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale among others. Gabriela Löffel is a recipient of the Swiss Art Award, the Lewis Baltz Research Fund, the Landis+Gyr Grant, as well as others.

Lion’s Court is a cinematic short opera in which the Binnenhof—the seat of Dutch Parliament in The Hague—is reimagined as a virtual stage where history dissolves into myth. Inspired by the discovery of 14th-century lion bones at the site and by stranded whales as omens, Lukács & Broersen collaborated with composer and political scientist Bram Kortekaas to reinterpret Goethe’s Faust’s vision of redemption. At its center stands the lion Faust, sung by baritone Michael Wilmering—a despot in pursuit of a freedom that consumes itself, a mirror of imperial ambition on the verge of collapse. The artists also drew on the 1650 writings of Johan de Witt, the republican Grand Pensionary, whose words are voiced by the whale (alto-mezzo Carina Vinke), rising from beneath the flooded foundations of the Binnenhof. De Witt believed that a true republic is not ruled by the whims of a single individual, but rooted in the principles of freedom and equality—the very foundations of democracy. In Lion’s Court, a digital hortus conclusus unfolds: a fluid, enclosed world where power, morality, and prophecy converge, and where the myths of the past reverberate through the politics of the present.

Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen are an Amsterdam-based artist duo exploring the entanglements between nature, culture, and technology. Their work includes films, digital animations, and spatial installations that investigate how media shapes our perception of the natural world. Graduates of Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, they completed their MFA at the Sandberg Institute and were artists-in-residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Broersen & Lukács’ practice is rooted in media theory, art history, and mythology. Drawing from cinematic, scientific, and historical sources, they reimagine landscapes and natural phenomena through digitally layered environments. Their work often reflects on the politics of representation and the appropriation of nature, reconfiguring dominant narratives through fragmented, multi-perspective storytelling. Their installations and films have been widely shown internationally, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Centre Pompidou (FR), FOAM (NL), MUHKA (BE), Centraal Museum (NL), MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA), WRO Biennale (PL), Biennale of Sydney (AU), Rencontres Internationales (HKW Berlin, Louvre/Grand Palais/CWBP, Paris), and Wuzhen Biennale (CN). In 2024, they represented the Netherlands at the Gwangju Biennale. Their film I Wan’na Be Like You was nominated for the Tiger Award/IFFR 2024.

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.

Almost four years ago, the Wiphala Collective climbed the statue of Christopher Columbus in La Paz, Bolivia, and shattered its nose with a single blow. That same year, my sister underwent cosmetic surgery to change the nose she inherited from our father, but when she left the operating room, she no longer recognized herself in the mirror. In El Alto, Bolivia, a growing trend toward rhinoplasty seeks to alter what many call the “condor nose,” driven by clinics offering discounts and by an urban landscape saturated with billboards, mannequins, and advertisements displaying white faces, light hair, and upturned noses. The statue of Christopher Columbus comes to life after its nose is struck. Disoriented, it wanders through the streets of El Alto, revisiting its past and confronting the contrast between its colonial memory and the presence of the Indigenous bodies that inhabit the city. Throughout its journey, it explores its own fractured identity and that of the city, until it finds itself face to face with the bust of an Aymara man, bearer of a chola aesthetic and imaginary. This encounter symbolizes resistance to hegemonic beauty standards and the possibility of rewriting history from a decolonial perspective. The experience unfolds in virtual reality, allowing the viewer to accompany the statue’s transformation and the reconciliation with our own noses.

Viviana Mamani Cori is an Aymara, migrant, brown-skinned artist born in El Alto, Bolivia. Her practice emerges from a non-academic formation shaped by migration, the streets, and the popular aesthetics of the Andean plateau, where chola architecture and bootleg DVDs, molded her early sensibility toward glitch, noise, and clandestine images. She later pursued studies in architecture and cinematography, expanding her work into experimental film, photography, performance, and new media. Her practice intertwines intimate archives, territorial memory, and embodied gestures that confront colonial narratives around beauty, identity, and Indigenous representation. She has created works that have circulated in streets, community spaces, galleries, and festivals across Latin America and Europe. She was selected for Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires 2022 and took part in the DIP artistic residency in 2024, where she received creative guidance from prominent Latin American filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel and Maite Alberdi. Her project Cristóbal Condori: Una nariz de ficción received multiple recognitions in photography, contemporary art, and experimental cinema. In 2025, she received the Prince Claus Seed Award for a trajectory that explores identity, migration, memory, and the body as a political territory of resistance. She currently lives and develops her artistic practice from El Alto, Bolivia.

Filmed in a decommissioned telecommunications tower, which used to house secret military equipment, this work returns to my ongoing investigation of mountains and their architectures as spaces of human-nature entanglements. It also returns more specifically to the alpine village of Engelberg, where I have been making work since 2010. In Line of Sight the camera investigates a deserted structure, a space left behind. As if everyone had vacated in mid-action, the environments bear traces of past life, long gone. Both inside and out, the camera observes this perplexing architecture in long panning and tracking shots, culminating in a moment of flight that reveals the structure – as if floating in space. When it was in operation, the tower fulfilled a host of functions, amongst them serving as a space of refuge and shelter during storms. A room full of old mattresses bears witness to such moments of danger. The title ‘Line of Sight’ refers to these towers standing atop mountain peaks with sight of each other, facilitating older forms of communication. With the advances of technology, these towers are now dinosaurs, standing solitary and defunct and as such become symbols of endurance, resistance and older forms of exchange. In 2025, this tower is being reshaped into a space for “mountain entertainment” – acerbating the dichotomy of mountain industries continually expanding footfall onto summits and glacier, hence contributing to the speed of climate change.

London-based visual artist and filmmaker Melanie Manchot employs photography, film, video and sound to form sustained enquiries into our individual and collective identities. The work interrogates and employs acts of care, resistance and communality to engage in discourses on social and political urgencies of our societies. Her films investigate innovative forms of storytelling with an acute understanding of the power of filmmaking to speak to urgent issues and have profound impact. Location-based research informs all her films and mountainous landscapes are a recurrent theme to address fragile environments in our care. Manchot’s artwork has featured in museum and gallery exhibitions internationally and she is currently working towards a large solo show in the UK in early 2026. Her first feature film, STEPHEN, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, addresses gambling, substance misuse, recovery and mental health through both narrative fiction and documentary. It had its cinematic release through Modern Film in 2024 and continues to be shown in exhibitions as a multi-channel installation. Manchot is currently working towards her second film, Self Storage, with another feature, a fiction/doc hybrid, called One Day As A Tiger, in development.

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 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.

L’esprit de l’escalier, is the third in a trilogy of films surrounding Pálás, a cinema in Galway, Ireland, designed by Tom dePaor. Opening in 2018, the cinema closed to the public in February 2025, and I attended one of the last screenings at Pálás – Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, itself a film about the closing of a cinema. I returned the following morning with thoughts of this in my head as I filmed the staircases throughout the building. These spaces are untempered, part indoor, part outdoor, while the cinemas with their plush red interiors are optimised for sound, temperature, and light. The title of my film refers to the expression (to think of the perfect reply too late) but moreover to the spirit of the staircase. Just like Goodbye Dragon Inn, so much life goes on in these spaces, where people, weather, light, and sound, intersect with, and even possess the movement or the stillness of the camera, the place itself becoming a film.

Peter Maybury is an Irish multidisciplinary artist. His practice-based research encompasses works as an artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, publisher, writer, editor, curator, musician, and educator. He is a graduate of Central Saint Martins, London, and a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research, TU Dublin. He has collaborated extensively with artists and institutions, editors and curators, on more than 200 art and architecture publications. Peter is a longstanding collaborator with Tom dePaor, making books, films, and works for exhibition. His film work includes On being there (2022/23, screened at Rencontre Internationale Paris/Berlin 2023/24), Landfall (2020), an hour-long dual-screen film installation, and with dePaor the Gall films Drape (2018), and A Study (2015) which was made for exhibition at ETH Zurich. Peter is author of Make Ready (2015), and co-author with dePaor of Reservoir (2010) and Of (2012).