Catalogue 2024

Following Jaran Ditapichai, a Thai political refugee living in Paris, in his metaphorical journey to his hometown, we un-map a political territory. Through the archives of the National Library of France, a sum of fragile human gestures is exposed, the past is released against the backdrop of an indifferent present made of guitar players, ruins, and an ever-flowing river. Forgotten faces left underwater reappears as we wonder what they have seen, what have they witnessed during the process of border-making of Thailand.

Domenico Singha Pedroli (1994) is an architect, artist and filmmaker based in Lugano (CH), Paris (FR) and Bangkok (TH). Through a multicultural approach, and driven by extended observation and curious research, his works articulate complex narratives, exploring the nature of traces, places and identities in all their mutability. Having studied architecture at the Accademia d’Architettura di Mendrisio (CH) and visual arts at Le Fresnoy – Studio national (FR), he has developed sensitivity in photography, cinema, video art, and virtual reality (VR).

Léo is fed up with the reproaches of his friend Kaspar, who pushes him to join social networks to make their love story public. Their breakup marks Leo's departure for Berlin, a city in which he hopes to be reborn through contact with an alternative milieu. But the city's real estate speculation pushes Leo to the margins. Years later, Kaspar's biological daughter, raised by a couple of women, recalls this love story on a theater stage.

Christophe Pellet was born in Toulon in 1963, he is graduated from FEMIS. His texts, published by l’Arche Editeur, were staged by Jacques Lasalle, Mathieu Roy, Anne Théron, Stanislas Nordey, Renaud Marie Leblanc, Olivier Martinaud, Michael Delaunoy, Madeleine Louarn, Jacques David, Jean-Louis Thamin,Carlos Manuel, Jean-Pierre Miquel, Mary Peate. They were translated into English, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish. He made two short films and one medium-length film: – Soixante trios regards, with Mireille Perrier, Dominique Reymond, Françoise Lebrun, Katarzyna Krotki in 2011 (Bathysphère production, 50 mn). – Plus dure sera la chute, in 2010 (Sedna film, 10 mn). – Le garçon avec les cheveux dans les yeux, with Edith Scob, in 2008 (20 mn). He was Villa Medicis Hors les murs laureate) in 2004, and scholarship holder from CNL.

It's a question of taking this title literally, as a literal statement: seven filmic forms of very short film, whose sum of titles ironically renders their vanity, their impossibility: war, magic, murder, love, death, trance, resurrection; all in less than thirty-eight minutes. In terms of images, this is an exclusively montage film, with material taken from sequences or rushes from the history of world cinema. The music, meanwhile, is entirely composed to induce a magnetic field of force and tension between them. The literary fragments are used in two forms: as reading cards, or embodied by voices and interwoven with the musical composition. The idea is to organize a constellation of signs, to weave poetic correspondences, to make affects as intelligent as they are enigmatic. How to move things in time through feelings, crystallize them in forms, so that these feelings move inner mountains.

Eric Pellet is a director, composer and artist. He creates experimental forms of fiction, documentary, essay and poem, interacting with dance, contemporary literature and poetry, sound creation and cinema. He works in a variety of complementary media, including film, photography, installation, radio, sound and music. He has made some thirty personal films, including Le désastre ne figure pas dans l'image, Livre des morts, Admosh, Noir-écran, Le premier jour, Né un peu étonné, Passion(s), Je ne suis personne. He has taken part in some twenty group exhibitions in France and abroad. His films are shown at dozens of film festivals.

Parental aging and an existential wave collide together in funny ways. Hey Sweet Pea borrows scenes from the 1984 children’s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story to process our collective grief.

Alee Peoples maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen- printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Currently living in Los Angeles, she has taught youth classes at Echo Park Film Center and shown her sculpture and film work at GAIT, 4th Wall and elephant. Peoples has shown her films at numerous festivals including Edinburgh, Images (Toronto) and New York Film Festival, and at museums and spaces including SFMoMA, Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Pompidou Center, Dirt Palace (Providence) and The Nightingale (Chicago). Started in 2022, Arroyo Seco Cine Club is a thematically programmed film series she co-curates with Mike Stoltz. She is inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-made.

An afternoon at the end of summer in a Calais suburb, in the northernmost part of France. Children and teenagers kill time at the foot of towerblocks. Their faces are often silent, already sometimes drawn or worried. Around them, large areas of sky and wild grass.

Clément Pérot is an artist and filmmaker, graduated of the Ensad and the Beaux- Arts de Paris (2022). Through hybrid forms interacting between image, literary writing and film installation, his work is centered on places on the margins of society and marked by the history of the working classes. A storm inside is his first documentary film. He is currently writing a feature film.

À la fin du Moyen Âge, à Florence en Italie, une révolte des plus pauvres travailleurs,  les Ciompi, bouleverse la ville et parvient à renverser le gouvernement.  À Florence, je filme sur leurs traces, pour faire surgir les fantômes de cette révolte  oubliée dans les images d’aujourd’hui. Dans les banlieues industrielles, j’en découvre les  échos au présent.  À Paris, je dialogue avec le chercheur militant qui a remis en lumière cette révolte.  Nous questionnons ensemble l’enjeu politique de l’écriture de l’Histoire dans la  construction d’une mémoire collective féconde.

Née à Paris, Agnès Perrais commence par réaliser des documentaires de création (Tant que nous sommes à bord, 2014, Magari !, 2019), en menant en parallèle une thèse de doctorat portant sur les liens entre lyrisme et politique en cinéma. Puis elle rencontre la pratique du cinéma argentique grâce aux laboratoires partagés l’Etna et l’Abominable (Navire Argo). Au sein d’une recherche plastique diverse (collages, rayogrammes...), elle poursuit actuellement son travail cinématographique en pellicule, autour de l’articulation entre politique et imaginaire, en travaillant à la fois des formes documentaires (Ciompi, 2023) et des formes courtes poétiques plus expérimentales (Marin miroir, 2021, Navire, en co-réalisation avec Lysa Heurtier Manzanares, 2017) . Elle est engagée activement dans plusieurs collectifs (L’Etna, La Poudrière, Le Navire Argo) et est membre fondateur de l’association la Surface de dernière diffusion.

A farmer tells of a series of misfortunes that affect all aspects of his farm and which he attributes to an invisible phenomenon. His words reveal that he sees his body, his family, his cattle and his electrical machinery as forming a “single surface” that is likely to be affected by such events.

After completing scientific studies in ecology, Jean-Baptiste Perret worked for several years in environmental protection. Graduating in 2018 from the Fine Art School of Lyon, France, he pursued his interest in the rural environment through a cinematographic practice composed of films and video installations. His approach is based on documentary inquiry and uses methods from anthropology that question the criteria of objectivity. Distancing himself from official narratives, he focuses on indi-viduals and their own visions of the world. Jean-Baptiste Perret films people he meets in everyday situations; he is interested in the shape of their daily lives, their environments, habits, and skills. Through various degrees of staging that willingly allow room for improvisation, subjective narratives and fictional processes intertwine. Perret’s work has notably been presented at the IAC Villeurbanne, the MAC Lyon, the Fondation Ricard, the FIDMarseille, the Festival Hors-Pistes Centre-Pompidou, the États généraux du documen-taire de Lussas and most recently at the Salon de Montrouge. Jean-Baptiste Perret is represented by Salle Principale Gallery, Paris.

At night three men are roaming through the center of a foreign city. In the darkness, they wander the streets unnoticed. The memories of their stories lead them on uncertain paths that sometimes seem to intersect. FORASTERO tells the story of people on the margins of society and traces estrangement and uncertainty between past and future.

Thales Pessoa (1991) is a brazilian photographer and filmmaker based in Argentina. He directed the short films Dancing to the war (2018) and Silver Firefly (2020), exhibited and awarded in different latin american festivals.

Julia is a teenager about to finish school struggling to stay afloat in a sea of expectations and confusion.

Guillermina Pico is a film director and writer. Her work as a director has been exhibited and awarded in national and international film festivals such as BAFICI (Best Short Film and Audience Award), DOCUMENTA Madrid, L'Alternativa, Festifreak, Kinoforum Sao Pablo (Special Mention), Cinemateca Uruguaya, Lima Film Festival, Chile, Quito, Cali, Galicia, TFF Torino, DiBa Festival (Best Short Film) and art venues such as Palais de Glace Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta and Bienal Buenos Aires (Talent Campus Award) among others. Her first feature film "Borrá todo lo que dije del amor porque no sabía bien quién era" was premiered at Torino International Film Festival and was awarded in the audiovisual contest of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Among the institutions that supported her work are the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Talent Campus Buenos Aires, Fundación Proa Cine, Fondo Metropolitano de las Ciencias y las Artes, NOVOS CINEMAS#LAB, Galicia. She is currently developing the documentary Las Galaxias (INCAA) and the fiction Todo Nuevo. She combines her artistic work with teaching and online consulting. Born and raised in Santa Rosa, La Pampa, she lives and works in Buenos Aires.

A full life, I suppose is a filmic portrait of the time shared between the filmmaker and his mother, Androulla, combining new 16mm material shot during his recurring visits to Cyprus with Super 8mm footage shot by his father in the 1970s to chronicle the evolution of bodies and the desires that mark a life. Attempting to balance between observation and construction, the film captures dailiness and domesticity while transfiguring Androulla’s body and inhabited space through close-ups, double exposures and time-lapses. As fragments of conversations between filmmaker and mother about her life wander mostly sync-free over the images, encounters with light and darkness in the nooks and furnishings of her otherwise ordinary dwelling arouse a sense of unreality.

Born in 1982 in Limassol, Cyprus, Alexandros Pissourios lives and works London and Cyprus. Pissourios explores the possibilities inherent with 16mm film and cameras, blending ethnographic approaches with experimental cinema. Many of his films make use of people and places that are in his proximity, weaving a a body of work that explores the complexities of relating to the world around him. Selected screenings/exhibitions of his films include London Short Film Festival (2024), FilmDairy NYC (2024), Annual Copenhagen Film Festival (2024), Lemesos International Documentary Festival (2023/2020), Cubitt Gallery London (2023), Queerwave festival (2023), Supernormal Festival (2017), International Ankara Film Festival (2016) ICA/Lux Moving image Biennial (2012), Fringe! Film Festival (2012), London Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (2011)

Toppling statues and symbols, constructing new memories, framing the destroyed landscape, writing letters to the future, reversing power dynamics: BIG BANG HENDA is a documentary-poetry-manifesto about the work of Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda. He takes us on a journey through his creations and reflections, which are at the forefront of anti-colonial thinking, urging us to consider how generations that grew up during or in the aftermath of the war reinterpret this event.

Fernanda is a screenwriter and director, living between Brazil and Portugal. She has been working in the intersections between Brazil, Portugual and the African Portuguese speaking countries and former colonies of Portugal for decades. Her first feature as a writer, Mosquito, was the opening film at the Rotterdam FF (2020) and won the Critics Prize at the São Paulo International FF (2020) besides touring dozens of festivals. Her second feature, The Last Summer, is currently in production after being selected for the Script Station at Berlinale 2023 and RACCONTI. She has been developing, writing, and directing for TV, streaming and cinema, and some of her works have received awards and nominations at the Brazilian Cinema Academy, New York TV&Film Festival, Hollywood Woman’s FF, among others. She is part of the Torino Film Lab 2023. She is a co-founder of MUTIM, a woman in film association in Portugal.

The young Swiss economist Hans travels to Thailand with his mum to visit his grandmother in “Vita Bona”, a care home for European seniors. The facility has changed its name and is hard to find at first. When they finally arrive, it is completely different from what they expected: a perfectly styled wellness retreat for young people. While Hans indulges in the beauty of the place, Daniela wanders through the labyrinthine complex in search of her mother and observes strange occurrences. Where are the senior citizens? What is the manager Mrs. Vasall hiding behind her charming smile? This conceptual VR film is a dystopian parable about the outsourcing of care work, as produced by our neo-colonialist globalized economic system. “Vivo Vision” refers to a way of seeing that Ms. Vasall, the manager of the resort, has invented. Wellness retreat and retirement home are present in the same place, but without interfering with each other. While the young people practice yoga poses by the pool, the seniors and workers have been relocated to another, invisible level. “Vivo Vision” is a view of the world in which everything that is considered unproductive in a capitalist logic has become invisible.

MARLIES POESCHL is an artist, filmmaker, curator and educator. She is currently based in Vienna (AT), where she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but has previously worked in France, Iran, Thailand and China. Shifting between artistic, curatorial and educational approaches, Pöschl is interested in art as a form of knowledge production. She understands filmmaking as social practice and often collaborates with actors from outside the art world in search for polyphonic narrations and open-ended dramaturgies. Since 2018 Pöschl has focused on ways in which societies of the global north respond to the ‘care crisis’. Pöschl has received various prizes for her work: in 2022 she was granted the state scholarship for media art, in 2021 the Young Artist’s Award (City of Vienna). Her films and installations have been shown in several solo presentations, a.o. Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, DE (2022), Salzburger Kunstverein, AT (2021), CAC Brétigny, (2018) and MUSA, Vienna, AT (2016). She has participated in biennales and film festivals such as the Vienna Biennale for Change (AT), Antimatter media art festival (CA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (GB), Cinema Verité (IR), Diagonale (AT) and others. Her work is distributed by VTape and The Golden Pixel Cooperative.

Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, Afro-Caribbean, East Asian and British histories, and the built environment are all mainstays. He is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the 2023 IFFR Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards; the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal . Over the past fourteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available here. From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based, broadcast radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. The post-broadcast archive of over 100 interviews can be found here, and includes in depth conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Jean Fisher, Andrea Fraser, Kathleen Daniel and Billy Woodberry.

SUNSTROKES is a method-driven and improvisation based film project produced and directed by Julian Rabus. Twenty-year-old Rachel moves from New York to Los Angeles in order to reinvent herself. Still attached to classical role models at first, she increasingly comes into conflict with them in her new environment and, in conversations with her new friends, begins to redefine her expectations of life and discover other sides to herself. This film was created in close collaboration between the director and the actors over a period of two years and a total of 32 days of shooting in Los Angeles and the surrounding area. The work consists of several chapters, of which this one focuses on the relationship between Rachel and Kevin.

Julian Rabus, born and raised in Berlin, Germany, was an assistant cameraman and assistant director in film and television before beginning a degree in fine arts / media art under Prof. Julian Rosefeldt at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, which he received with honours in 2021. Since then he has been studying at the Berlin University of the Arts in Prof. Thomas Arslan’s class on narrative film. In between, he also attended the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design under Prof. Serpil Turhan and the California Institute of Arts under Prof. James Benning.

"Civilians. Invasion", created in 2023. The film documents the experiences of Ukrainians during the Russian aggression against Ukraine. This invasion led to extensive documentation by civilians, soldiers, and journalists, resulting in a wealth of photo and video materials that made their way onto social media platforms. While some of this content went viral through Telegram channels and other social networks, many photos and videos remained relatively unknown with minimal views. The film is structured around a specific storyline, starting from the initial days of the invasion and unfolding the events related to how people navigate a new reality: how to live and survive, the risks faced by civilians during the conflict, episodes of housing destruction, and stories of those who have lost their loved ones. In 2024 "Civilians. Invasion" represents Ukraine at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi are the Kharkiv (Ukraine) artists who are fusing different formats of artistic practices (installations, reenactment, video, archives), researching the contexts and landscapes of the industrial regions of Ukraine. They graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Art with a degree in graphic design. Nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022, the winners of the 2020 PinchukArtCentre Prize Audience Award for the project “Hooligans.” Allegro Prize 2022 winners. In 2024, Andrii Rachinskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi represent Ukraine at the 60th Venice Biennale. https://revkovskyirachynskyi.com

In an urban march, around fifty people trace a symbolic route, supporting banners that carry the power of words. The walk ends on the Square of the Brotherhood, which is transformed into a place for listening and artistic occupation. Seventeen women's voices consider the word "brotherhood" in a polyphony of emancipated testimonies: they open up as many plural, interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives. The voices are superimposed on a multiplicity of faces, projecting the possibilities of fluid portraits. Letters and words thrown onto the « Place de la Fraternité » interlock, pierce the concrete and give birth to new, forward-looking visions.

Catherine Radosa works at the intersection of places and images, words and situations, whether she encounters them or provokes them, often in public space, notably through video-projection on the scale of architecture, performance, installation. Her works, often contextual and participative, question individual and collective representations on the subject of borders, memory, identity, environment and gender. Between investigation and reverie, through the montage of images, voices, contexts and moments, she constructs figures of collective witnesses who touch the spirit of the place (Prague, Paris, Lima and many other residencies and invitations) and the moment with a distance that is her own, sensitive without effusion, direct, delicate, sometimes grating. Depending on the piece, she borrows and crosses several languages. Her processual works consist of participative situations and performances on the scale of landscape and architecture, but also films for screening in theatres, for diffusion on screens, for installation, images for printing and publishing, sound pieces for installation or radio broadcasting. Text by Christophe Domino, art critique

During her incarceration, Gauche described her daily life in pages that she slammed in the prison yard. On these occasions, she also invited her fellow inmates to sit in a circle and share their stories, which she noted in her notebook. Six months later, she performs these documents on the film set, testifying for the institutional control over bodies and sexualities, the violence of imposed medical treatments, and the absolute strenght of sorority as a condition for survival.

Jules Ramage (1987, France) is an intersex visual artist and researcher. Associated with the CERILAC laboratory at the University of Paris, he is also a member of the Cité du Genre, interdisciplinary research institute in gender studies. He explores the complex relationships of power at play in disciplinary and institutional structures. Since 2013, he has conducted in-depth fieldwork in the prison space, where he implements collaborative protocols with inmates. Their work has been exhibited in France, the United States, Argentina, England, Spain, and Germany.

The game follows ideas such as design by subtraction. A world devoid of time and space where the great dichotomies of human thought no longer cast a shadow. A post-anthropocentric world with a non-hierarchical structure. Here we cannot orient ourselves, which defies our understanding in a refreshing way and makes us forget - at least for a few moments - who we are; where we come from; and that we believe we are of particular importance. Forced Amnesia follows a simple instruction pattern: explore and you will find. As it is devoid of language all we have to do is follow our instinct. What we learned in games that we played before. The idea for Forced Amnesia started 2023 as an art exhibition, which led to the development of a video game. Forced Amnesia is a game with focus on quiet moments, inspired by the concept of design by subtraction, philosophy introduced by Fumito Ueda. The game gives the player lots of space to navigate through. Forced Amnesia’s aesthetics moves through a stage of comforting uncertainty, the player does not know if they are above or under water, swinging or flying. This state, fused with a calm soothing musical score creates a space for relaxation and calm. Places that nowadays are getting increasingly harder to find. Forced Amnesia aims at an older generation of gamers. Gen X and Gen Y will be the first generation to grow old playing video games. As we slowly age, our lifestyle and perception changes, Forced Amnesia is there to accompany us.

Mary-Audrey Ramirez studied under Thomas Zipp at the University of the Arts in Berlin Germany from 2010 to 2016. In 2019 she was the recipient of the prestigious Edward Steichen Award in Luxembourg for her textile-based sculptural and pictorial works. Early 2025 Ramirez’s Qrst percent for art work will be Qnalized in Berlin Spandau. Her works have been shown in both solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Casino Luxembourg, forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg; Kunsthalle Gießen, Gießen; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund; TRAUMA BAR UND KINO, Berlin; Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, D sseldorf; Haus Mödrath, Kerpen; Margot Samel Gallery, New York City; Polansky Gallery, Prague and MARTINETZ, Cologne. She was also part of Esch2022+ARS ELECTRONICA, Luxembourg/Linz. “Ramirez creates a dense image of a world with her figurative representations in pictures, objects and games, It is a world devoid of time and space where the great dichotomies of human thought no longer play a role. A post-anthropocentric world that is not organised hierarchically. A world in which we cannot orientate ourselves, which defies our understanding in a refreshing way and makes us forget, at least for a few moments, who we are, where we come from and that we believe we are of particular importance” - (Annekathrin Kohout)

A man with no memory walks through the hall of honor of the former national congress of Chile, a place that was closed during the military dictatorship and that has become an important place again during the writing of the two new failed constitutions in Chile. In front of him is the famous painting of Pedro Subercaseaux that represents the discovery of Chile, this man without memory tries to remember our national anthem. Through this effort is built this film that seeks to make us travel inside an imaginary landscape in the heart of the History and architecture of the main hall of governmental power in Chile, where all presidents promised a fairer and better country ... this landscape is Chile : an experiment of neoliberalism that, despite everything, continues to breathe on our sky and dream

Enrique Ramírez was born in 1979 in Santiago de Chile. Since 2007, he lives and works between Paris (France) and Santiago (Chile). He studied popular music and cinema in Chile before joining the postgraduate master in contemporary art and new media of Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France). In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104), France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ; Museo de la memoria, Santiago ; Parque de la memoria en Argentina, Buenos Aires). In 2017, he is invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel, Ramírez is nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2020

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. "A Stone’s Throw" trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.

Razan is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal.

Babel is a drone shot centered on the Ziggurat of Borsippa, which was long considered to be the remains of the Tower of Babel before a more likely location for the edifice was found. Our imaginations have been nourished by the story of Genesis, which popularized this construction as excessive as the pride of the people who built it. It marked mankind’s inability to reach the heavens, despite its efforts to build a monument of unprecedented elevation. And the contemporary situation of Babylon, the cosmopolitan capital of an empire that then covered the entire Near East, was a good illustration of the diversity of languages that was the consequence of the failure of the attempt. In the soundtrack, a composition by Romain Poirier and excerpts from Genesis are translated and read by two artificial intelligence programs (DeepL and ElevenLabs), redefining the permanent link between humanity’s attempts to rebuild – this time virtually – the Tower of Babel through artificial intelligence and transhumanism, and humanity’s constantly renewed errors.

The Middle East, countries that are not internationally recognized, radioactive or forbidden zones considered as “involuntary natural parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has traveled or inhabited. The artist, born in Paris in 1981, uses video and photography to present a silent, sometimes mystical image of these areas marked by past violence or agitated by major conflicts. These moving pictures composed of fixed shots, often long and devoid of human presence, tell of the impossibility of capturing these abandoned and transformed spaces, impregnated with beliefs and strewn with stigmata.