Catalogue 2023-2024

From before the beginning until after the end; evolution and extinction as told from a mineral point of view. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures. Science fiction meets science-fact.

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work around issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. She has made over 40 films and lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Noli Timere is a work about the experience and emotion of fear or anxiety. What is common or private in those feelings and what do they have in common? The work contemplates on the collective fear and its elements. ?

Antti Tanttu was born in Malaga, Spain and currently lives and works in Helsinki. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki between 1984–89. His works often deal with issues such as solitude, absence and longing. Tanttu has participated in solo and group exhibitions since 1986 in e.g. Gallery Heino in Helsinki, Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland and Norrtälje Kunsthalle in Sweden, as well as in festivals and events around the world.

A red jaguar, roams the early morning in the jungle of Panama until his footsteps are disturbed by a metallic sound that opens a gap in the earth. He enters the wound, where machines build a Canal and the metallic music gives life to the yellow mosquitoes. The workers blue tearful voices murmur resilience, longing for a rebirth of the jaguar on the scar.

Panamanian multidisciplinary artist in the fields of film and performance. She was artist in residence at Le Fresnoy. She was chosen as Berlinale Talent 2023. She worked on the restoration of part of the Panamanian film archive at the Filmoteca de Catalunya and on the creation of the "Festival de la Memoria", a series of performative installations in urban spaces with political archive images and sound performance. Panquiaco, his first documentary film, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. His latest short film, A Love Song in Spanish, participated in the official competition at the Berlinale and at the MoMA. Her first virtual reality film Mosquito: A Wound Story premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is preparing his next solo exhibition and performance with Solar Gallery and Batalha Centro de Cinema de Portugal (2023).

En grandissant silencieusement Queer, au sein d’une famille brisée et dysfonctionnelle, Kurtis s’est confronté aux abus, aux traumatismes et à l’addiction. En guise d’échappatoire, il poursuit la Beauté partout durant son éducation à la campagne. Son obsession l’amène alors à créer son alter-ego, Miss Fame, une des super modèles drag les plus iconiques de sa génération. Miss Fame lui ouvrira ainsi les portes d’univers dépassant ses rêves les plus fous. Une session d’hypnose nous emporte dans l’esprit de Kurtis/Miss Fame, sur les traces de sa relation salutaire mais tortueuse, entre Beauté et Souffrance.

Guillaume Thomas I delve into the intimate and the power of representation, exploring the role of images in self-discovery. My creative spectrum encompasses photography, film, video, installation, sculpture, and silkscreen techniques. My work uncovers the creation of icons and myths while revealing the intricate processes behind them. This pursuit was embodied in my debut documentary, "Life Damages the Living," produced by Le Fresnoy in 2021, and showcased at Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin in 2022. The film traces Valerie von Sobel's journey from Nazi Budapest to Hollywood, presenting the wisdom of a liberated woman spanning eight decades. Trained at l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the School of Visual Arts in New York, I am constantly drawn to characters reinventing themselves, as evidenced in my art exploring beauty's future, the Queer community, and body expression. Transformation, the search for the absolute, and our origins captivate me. In collaboration with Le Fresnoy, my digital art installation "Ad Astra" (2022) captures moving light as a dynamic portrait, merging centuries-old techniques with modern tools like 3D scanning and NASA imagery. This hybrid installation juxtaposes human luminance and starlight, prompting contemplation of our cosmic connection. I am driven to portray individuals and phenomena from fresh angles. On September 1, 2022, "Pinned into a Dress," co-directed with Gianluca Matarrese, starring drag artist and supermodel Miss Fame, opened the Venice International Film Critics' Week. This film redefines identity exploration through the lens of a chameleon artist. Cross-pollination of universes, hybridization, and diverse techniques are my artistic lifeblood. ----------------- Gianluca Matarrese (1980) was born in Torino and moved to Paris in 2002 to study cinema and theater. He graduated in History and Critics of North American Cinema at the University of Torino and Paris VIII, also graduating at the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. In 2008 he started working in French television, as a writer and director for a comedy series on OCS networks broadcast until 2012. Then he continued as writer, director and segment producer in entertainment department for moreover than 25 programs and all French networks. In 2019 his documentary “Fuori Tutto” (Rossofuoco Films, Agat Films, France Télévisions) won the award for Best Italian Documentary at the Torino Film Festival. His film “La dernière séance” (“The Last Chapter”) had its world premiere at the last Venice International Film Critics’ Week, winning the Queer Lion Award. The film has been selected at IDFA, Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, and keeps touring in other international festivals. The film has recently been broadcast on SKY Italy networks. He directed, for France Télévisions, the musical documentary on the singer Barbara Pravi, representative of the Eurovision Contest 2020. His film “Fashion Babylon” (Bellota Films & France Télévisions) premiered at CPH:DOX and Hot Docs and more than 20 festivals around the world. It has been broadcast in 10 countries. His film “Il Posto” (“A Steady Job”) (Altara Films, Bocalupo Films & ARTE / NDR), co-directed with Mattia Colombo premiered in Vision du Réel and Hot Docs, and it’s currently touring in several international festivals. In 2023, Gianluca premiered his latest films “Les Beaux Parleurs” at Biografilm Festival & “L’expérience Zola” at Giornate degli Autori of the 8oth Venice International Film Festival.

Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black) follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch's road trip back to Country for spiritual healing, as memories from his childhood return. A journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide, back home to his remote Anangu Community (Aputula) to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal, and physical. It is how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed down for over 60,000+ years from generation to generation.

Matthew Thorne is a South Australian filmmaker and artist whose work explores contemporary 'Australian' identity, spirituality, relationship to land, and masculinity through film, photography, and reenactment. His recent docufiction short film, Marungka Tjalatjunu (2023), made with Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch, won the Silver Bear Jury prize at Berlinale. Matthew also contributed photography to Nick Cave and The Badseed's album Ghosteen (2019), Justin Kurzel's True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), and Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. In 2022, Matthew received the Adelaide Film Festival & Samstag Gallery of Art Commission. - Derik Lynch is an initiated Yankunytjatjara man. He is a performer, filmmaker, and artist who grew up between Alice Springs and remote Communities in the Northern Territory and South Australia. He has worked both nationally and internationally in theatre, film and TV. Marungka Tjalatjunu is Derik’s debut as a writer/director for screen telling part of his own story.

The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices reflecting on topics such as coming of age, sex, aging and death. Visual shifts within nine images spatially strung together, correspond to the voices loosely, reactive to the scenes invoked by the women’s stories, and to the emotive range of the voices’ individual and combined music. The piece includes conversations with women of different ages, backgrounds and circumstances, who reflect on their past and current hopes and anxieties, on their understanding of the concept of love, on a de-centering of self that comes with parenting, on touching and inhabiting an aging body, on their discomfort with an imposed gender label, and more. The protagonists are documented performing distinct activities (e.g. producing art, walking, cooking, playing an instrument, exercising etc.) in locations ranging from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, California and New York, to Egypt and Romania. Additional footage reflecting one of the women’s dreamscape, was shot in an underwater village in Argentina. The video is 55 min. long, and is composed of a concurrent display of short clips that focus on a specific topic, and are each told by a single participant. The clips are threaded to form a web of themes and motifs, both verbal and visual, together generating an ongoing conversation (without beginning or end) on growing up and aging, friendship, love, motherhood and the death of parents.

An experimental documentary maker for over twenty years, Even has produced work which ranges from feature-length documentaries to multi-channel installation and interactive video work, and which, relying on almost imperceptible digital manipulation of slow and extended moments, aims to depict the less overt manifestations of complex, and at times extreme, social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others). Even’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Canada, Israel and Europe, including Doc Fortnight at MoMA, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, RIDM Film Festival, Montreal, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts and Next Level Awards, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Award, Media Arts Award, the Jerome Foundation, Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. Even has been an invited guest at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Open Doc Lab at MIT, SXSW Interactive Conference, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia and others. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France and Video Data Bank (VDB). Even is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.

How do memories actually come about? Isn't it a process that involves both – forgetting and reinventing? This construction process of memories is symbolized in the film using architectural fragments. The camera moves through structures reminiscent of film sets as well as abandoned places. We are reminded of places where we’ve been before, we are guessing. The Australian voice actor, heard from somewhere in the dark, remembers details from his way to school in Melbourne, reports on forays through foreign cities and describes these structures from his memories. His voice is fading, but is remembered by tape machines.

Thadeusz Tischbein is a Germany-based video artist. He is interested in cruel intersections of history and everyday live. In his films he uses often documentary footage along with models and archival material to develop a fictionalized version of a documentary, a forensic speculation. HOW THE WOODEN STRUCTURES SURVIVED IN MY MIND (2023) is using architectural leftovers to investigate the (re)construction of memories. In 2021 a series of nine short films using poems by Joseph Brodsky was produced. The 2017 video essay SNOW WHITE (2K Cinemascope, 19:40 min) is a journey to the dead bodies in mausoleums, churches and museums. THE ATLAS OF THE WOUNDED BUILDINGS (HD, 12:56 min, 2016) is an attempt to examine narrations written in bullets holes. Thadeusz Tischbein studied Visual Arts with Candice Breitz in Braunschweig/Germany and Clemens von Wedemeyer in Leipzig/Germany. His films were invited to many German and international film festivals, among others EMAF Osnabrück, IndieLisboa, Manifesta 12 Palermo (collateral event), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Filmfest Dresden. Most of his films started as multichannel installations and where shown for instance in Teatro Franco Parenti, Milan/Italy or Schaubuehne Lindenfels Leipzig/Germany. He lives and works in Leipzig/Germany.

During a single long shot, we see two people taking turns playing the piano and listening alternately. The piece is the same on both times - Preludi Op. 28 No. 2 by Chopin - but when the performer changes, the interpretation of the song changes along with the perspective from which the song and its performance are viewed. The uninterrupted playing and single shot capture the event in one temporal moment, but as the camera moves and two people change places, time is equally layered. The performer becomes the listener and the listener becomes the performer. In one of the key scenes of Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978), the mother and daughter take turns playing the very same Chopin's Prelude. It is a piece that both are familiar with, so they are able to settle into the position of the other as they listen and watch the other play. A situation like this raises questions about the sense of reciprocity, simultaneity and synaesthesia. Could the roles become mixed from viewer and listener to the object of the gaze and listening? When watching the other playing, can you feel your own hands and fingers on the keys?

Jenni Toikka (b. 1983) is a Helsinki-based visual artist working predominantly with moving images. Toikka graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki in 2012. She has had several solo exhibitions in Helsinki including at Sinne, Forum Box and Kluuvi Gallery. In autumn 2019, her work was shown in the solo exhibition Reel at HAM – Helsinki Art Museum. Jenni Toikka’s video pieces have been seen internationally in group exhibitions and at festivals. Her work is represented in the collections of the Saastamoinen Foundation, Espoo Modern Art museum EMMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.

With no visible human presence, we move through the interior of a house. Like all houses, it contains spaces of darkness and corners hidden from view. That house, that interior, hides its flat background of ephemeral construction. We are inside a set built to the limits of the frame that films it. That house was only a fragment of what it appears to be. “The Uninvited” is a short film not about what there is, but about what there could be. Cinema is an apparatus of power over the representations shown therein and the bonds of continuity of a society. “The Uninvited” shows a house haunted by those absences, its blind spots and the violence of its limits and exclusion that its representations have meant.

Fabiola Torres-Alzaga is a Mexican artist working in contemporary art. She studied photography at “The active school of photography” and visual arts at “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City. She has been investigating focus and nearsightedness present in the act of gazing, and its repercussions in our socio-spatial relationships. I have a keen interest in cinema and its articulations of space and time, as well as stage magic and its defiance of logic. Both disciplines comprise the basis of my research. Through them, I seek to expand the scope of the visible, creating illusionary worlds that intrude into real space, counter-spaces that claim inclusive folds within the rigid limits of patriarchy to generate Other possible relations. Her work has been shows at MUAC (Mexico City, 2021), Lille3000 (France, 2019), the Biennal FEMSA (Zacatecas, 2018), the Anthology Film Archives (New York, 2018), the Biennal of Moving Images (Buenos Aires, 2018), the Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York, 2018), Videoex , Maison des Arts de Malakoff (France, 2016), the Polytechnic Museum of Moscow (Russia, 2015), MARCO (Monterrey, 2015), Museum of El Chopo (Mexico City, 2014), Museum of Modern Art (Mexico City, 2014), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City, 2011), the Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv, 2006) and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (Mexico City, 2004), among others. She has published “Historias de la noche” (Stories of the night, ESPAC, 2019) a book/project in dialogue with cinema curator Mara Fortes, and a solo catalogue “Fabiola Torres-Alzaga: In between acts” (Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2015), she´s currently a member of the Fonca’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

Hardly Working sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.

The pseudo-marxist media guerilla Total Refusal explores and practices strategies for artistic intervention in contemporary video games. It works with tools of appropriation and rededication of game resources. Their films and performances were presented among others at Berlinale ‘20, Locarno 22 and at the MoMA in NYC and they have received more than 46 international and national awards and honorary mentions. The current members of Total Refusal are: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner & Michael Stumpf

« Jalal, la nuit dernière, j’ai rêvé de notre film. » « Quel film ? » « Celui sur lequel nous travaillons ces jours-ci. » « Hong Kong, Chine, Solaris ? » « Oui. » Peut-on faire un rêve dans lequel les souhaits, les plus profonds et inconscients sont exaucés par Solaris ou un équivalent de Solaris, l’océan extraterrestre hyperintelligent et sensible du film Solaris de Tarkovski qui exauce de tels souhaits ? Oui, si notre méta-souhait est de voir nos souhaits inconscients réalisés de la manière dont Solaris le fait plutôt que de la manière dont les rêves le font (par le biais de mécanismes tels que la condensation et le déplacement). Il faut cependant garder à l’esprit que, puisque les rêves sont des exaucements de souhaits, Solaris ou un équivalent de Solaris finirait par nous rendre incapables de rêver, insomniaques, car il rendrait les rêves superflus. En rêvant de Solaris ou d’un équivalent de Solaris, on rêverait d’un endroit où l’on ne peut pas rêver, où il n'y a pas de rêves.

Graziella Rizkallah est une réalisatrice libanaise. Ses vidéos ont été présentées à la 11ème Biennale de Sharjah, au Musée d’art moderne de San Francisco, au MAXXI, à la première Biennale d'Asie et à la 5ème Triennale de Guangzhou, à la 7ème Biennale d’urbanisme et d’architecture de Shenzhen, au Times Art Center de Berlin, à Darat al Funun (Amman) et au Beirut Art Center. Jalal Toufic est un penseur et un mortel à en mourir. Il est né en 1962 à Beyrouth ou à Bagdad et est mort avant de mourir en 1989 à Evanston, dans l’Illinois. Outre l’écriture de plus de dix livres, il a réalisé plus de dix films et vidéos, dont des films-essais et des films conceptuels, des courts métrages (7 minutes, 8 minutes, etc.), des longs métrages (110 minutes, 138 minutes, etc.) et des films « inhumainement » longs (72 heures, 50 heures), des vidéos qui sont des œuvres autonomes et d’autres qui font partie d’œuvres mixtes, des films qu’il a tournés et des films dont toutes les images sont tirées d’œuvres d’autres cinéastes (Hitchcock, Sokourov, Bergman, etc.). Son travail a été présenté aux 6ème, 10ème et 11ème Biennales de Sharjah, à la 9ème Biennale de Shanghai, à la 5ème Triennale de Guangzhou, au MoMA PS1, au Musée d’art moderne de San Francisco, au Centre Pompidou, au ZKM, à la Kunsthalle Fridericianum, au MAXXI, au Witte de With et aux Deichtorhallen de Hambourg.

"Beatings Of The Devil" is based on the concept and weather event called sunshowers, or, as my grandmother would often say when it rained while the sun was shining, “The devil is beating his wife”. This wildly inappropriate, and outdated colloquial phrase, which resonated deeply within me as a child, provides a point of departure and interpretation for this work. Created through a series of shoots spanning over four years, the piece has evolved into a memorial to my mother, and a reckoning for my father, who recently lost his wife of 51 years. The piece premiered at the 2022 Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, and won the Vanguard Award for Best Experimental Short.

Bradly Dever Treadaway is a Brooklyn based artist, educator and curator utilizing lens-based image making, moving images, sound, sculpture, installation and performance to comment on the breakdown of intergenerational communication and broken familial links due to natural disaster, technological evolution, mental health challenges, societal shifts and the continuance of interpersonal detachment occurring within American communities. His work is visualized through archival interventions, recontextualizing the archive to serve as form, medium, subject matter and concept, elevating domestic ephemera and rituals while questioning material significance within the photographic medium. Treadaway creates memorials, monuments and mnemonic devices to illustrate ancestral collisions with contemporary responses. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The International Center of Photography,The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Agora Gallery in Chelsea, NY, The Mobile Museum of Art, The Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, Italy, and the Lishui Museum of Photography in China. His film/video work has been screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, Union Docs, Anthology Film Archives, the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, the Nashville Film Festival, the Coney Island Film Festival, and at the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Scene: Brooklyn. Treadaway’s work has been curated by Vince Aletti, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jon Feinstein and Julian Cox and is part of the permanent collections at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Masur Museum of Art, the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Mobile Museum of Art. Treadaway has recently held residencies at Trestle Art Space and BRIC Media Arts in Brooklyn, Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and the Contemporary Arts Center at Woodside in NY.

Silent Sun of Russia portrays a generation of young Russians between 2018 and 2022. The film follows three young women, Alika, Alyona, and Katya. They are rebels and anarchists and part of a global youth who dream of living a modern life in freedom. A pervasive sense of anxiety and restlessness about the future haunts the lives of the young women. After Russia's invasion in Ukraine, they find themselves in a new reality that requires difficult choices. In their quest for love, friendship, and the dream of escaping Putin's Russia, they live in uncertainty, where longing is replaced by difficult emotions and attempts to repress reality. The film provides an intimate and poetic view of the current living conditions and the urgent decisions faced today by young Russians who cannot see a future in their native country.

Sybilla Tuxen (1990) graduated as a photographer from Fatamorgana - Denmark's photographic school of visual arts, in 2011 and as a documentary filmmaker from The Danish Film School in 2017. Since 2011, when Sybilla lived and studied Russian in St Petersburg, she has worked on films in former Soviet countries. Sybilla works with polyphonic narratives. Her visual works explore the emotional currents of poetry with a unique eye for human destinies and the worlds of our mythological and literary subconscious.

Un moment inattendu lors d’une séance avec un patient confronte un psychologue à son propre monde intérieur. Aliéné par l’isolement de sa vie citadine apparemment parfaite, le psychologue se heurte à une incapacité à comprendre et embrasser sa propre nature humaine. Son désir irrépressible pour son client l’amènera à découvrir qui il est vraiment.

Karel Tuytschaever (BE, °1985) graduates in 2007 from the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp in the Drama, an acting education led by Dora van der Groen. To date, he works as a freelance performer for theatre, ?lm and television series. You can also hear him in voice work for TV and radio. ? Since 2008, he is a lecturer at the Bachelor programs in Drama and in Contemporary Dance at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp / AP University College and is a member of the dance training mentor team. He is regularly solicited as a coach and hosts workshops and masterclasses organized by theatre studio Nest, OPENDOEK, University of Antwerp, deDansPunt, Let's Go Urban Academy, scenography education KASKA, Zuidpool, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, The Amsterdam School of the Arts & Fontys School of the Arts. ? ?In 2015 BARRY is founded on the need to create an environment where Karel’s personal hybrid own work can be developed, be made and be shared. He is rethinking of how to approach the performing arts and lens-based media in pursuit of a more authentic, intimate and honest embodiment within the arts. Since 2019, BARRY (BE) has a long-term collaboration together with DansBrabant (NL). ? ?In 2020, he starts as a researcher in the arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, with the support of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. His project The transparent body (2020 - 2022) is a practice-based search for genuine embodiment in current 2D and 3D portrait arts. How is a visual artist actually looking at the human figure? It is a tipping point in which he grafts his vision of what sincere embodiment within performative art is, and can be, on to the visual arts. Thereafter, Karel starts his doctoral research in the arts; Als de kunstenaar zijn beeld inslikt (When the artist swallows his image) (2022-2026) is an in-depth trajectory which digs into the seldom explored domain of embodied knowledge within the relationship between the maker and their image of somebody. He explores the role that the maker's unique physicality plays in depicting someone else. Throughout this journey, he looks at ways to arrive at more reciprocal and sustainable relationships between different artistic disciplines, finds new inter-medial forms, further develops his inclusive vision and explores its scope. Of great importance to him is the cross-pollination interaction between his performing, his lecturing, and his research and work as a maker. His fascination for embodiment and physicality within the arts plays a key role in this triangle.

For some years Wood Wide Web is the magic phrase to describe the web of roots, fungi and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another. In ‘What Wide Web?’ Van Bakel depicts the surreal wasteland of Rotterdam Maasvlakte and its forest of pylons. After a bumpy ride we zoom in on the improbable beauty germinating underneath high voltage lines, a living part of our world hardly ever noticed. The plants that grow below the energy-web are shown as in a digital herbarium. We can ask ourselves: are industry and nature evolving more into co-existence? Background info: Location: Rotterdam harbour, Beerweg Maasvlakte, a place that used to be a nature reserve called ‘de Beer’. Sound: Contact mics on humming power-pylons. Geophones in the earth on the spot that record the sound of falling raindrops. Camera: Animation of still photographs made with home-built scannercamera. Instead of bringing plants to a picture-scanner in his studio, the artist dragged the scanner on site over soil and green. “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Atshean word for world is also the word for forest.” Ursula K. Le Guin from The Word for World is Forest.

Michiel van Bakel studied astronomy, film/photography (Psychopolis; Frans Zwartjes) and psychology for several years before he chose for fine art, at art school. Van Bakel expresses himself artistically in film and videos, sculpture and installations. His work focuses on people and their surroundings, often resulting in a poetic reality. It conveys a fascination for the tension between humans and technology, and the perception of time in our disrupted ecosystems. Van Bakel lives and works in Rotterdam.

Within the performance and video work “Copy and Paste” Francis invites people from the public to enter the installation and take on the role of the teacher in front of a class of four ‘students’. In front of the class the assistant of the teacher helps people from the audience to recite from a scripted text. The text refers to dogma’s around art and has been run through Google Translate multiple times, causing errors that needs to be negotiated while reading it out loud. During the performance, both scripted and unscripted mistakes are made. Every time someone makes a ‘mistake’, the teacher’s assistant cleans up the person who made the mistake. In this way, a process is created in which all the participants in the room: audience, performers and artists have an influence on what is labeled as ‘fault’. By taking inspiration from the quintessential spaces for education, control and discipline, i try to flesh out a space that is familiar yet reminds us of those situations of subjection. The heightened awareness in this space, further amplified by a large ballet class like mirrored wall in the middle of the space, all windows covered with vaseline, a steel mortuary table and a series of morphic sculptures that occupy the space as silent spectators, confronts the visitors with what is left of us after endless loops of cleaning.

Benjamin Francis graduated from the Fine Arts programme at ArtEZ BEAR in Arnhem in 2020. Within his work he reflects on his lived experience of continuously being corrected for spelling mistakes, due to his dyslexia. These dissonances or errors are carefully corrected in our current-day society, as anything outside the norm is deemed unproductive and therefore excluded. By exposing the hidden dynamics of the power relations that structure and regulate the way we were taught to distinguish right from wrong, he questions how those systems came into existence and who holds the position to dictate those binary oppositions. Benjamin has recently shown at Hotel Maria Kapel, If I Can’t Dance, Kunsthuis Syb, Het HEM, P/////AKT, Joey ramone, Singular Art, W139 and Mutter, among others.

In this sensitive portrait four male models make a sincere attempt to get to know themselves better during a retreat in Thailand. While the most sensitive boy, Arjan, actively talks about the patterns he wants to break and spends a lot of time in bed, the most dominant boy in the group, Jamal, likes to be the center of attention. Among themselves, the boys behave over the top; riding naked on a scooter, renting exaggerated villas and doing photo shoots for Instagram, while you keep feeling something chafe inside. In private conversations with filmmaker Amanda van Hesteren, we learn more about their individual insecurities as the boys' vulnerabilities unfold in different ways. When you change from boy to man: where do you leave your story and how do you explore with your friends what you can and cannot tell them?

Amanda van Hesteren (1991) graduated Cum Laude from her Audiovisual Arts program at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels with a semester at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2019. Her first two short films were about her vacation lovers in Thailand and Jamaica and have been regularly screened at various art festivals in the Netherlands and Belgium. Her graduation film Mommy and me: yes but no/no but yes (2019) was co-produced by Dutch Broadcaster VPRO. In 2019 she had a solo exhibition at gallery ALMA SARIF in Brussels, and is currently preparing her second, which will take place at the Kunstverein in Cologne in March 2024. In 2021 she participated the IDFA Project Space where she developed a new script for her first feature documentary which she is currently making with production company Halal and Dutch public broadcaster VPRO as well as a documentary serie. Amanda's style is edgy, intimate and transparent. With her disarming gaze, she creates honest films in which she and her protagonists learn new things about the psyche of humanity and themselves.

The Polish word “obsada" means "film cast” but can also mean "working party" - it connotes the distribution of work positions as well as placing of a plant in the ground. Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s obsada, is a collaboration with an all-female film crew, who are at the same time the film’s cast. It is an attempt to propose non-patriarchal narratives and methods of work. Involving a group of MA and PhD students from the ?ód? Film School, the change they strive for does not consist simply in replacing men with women in film production; rather, the work develops in an open and improvised process – sensitive to the context of the place and the polyphony of the team. The women’s individual and collective experiences resonate with locations in the Film School and in Muzeum Sztuki in ?ód?.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. With these works, always shown in specially developed architectural settings, she shows widely in the art and museum context. Recent solo presentations include: unset on-set at Museum of Contemporary art Tokyo (MOT) 2022/23, tono lengua boca at CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Her work was recently included in Sonsbeek 20->24, Arnhem 2021; of bread, wine, cars, security and peace… at Kunsthalle Wien, 2020; Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Singapore Biennial 2019.

Je pars en voyage et j'emporte avec moi : un os d'éléphant pour remuer la nourriture, une plume pour attraper les termites ailées, huit papillons, une corde faite de racines odorantes... et 150 mètres de film exposé mais pas encore développé destiné au ministère des Colonies.

Sarah Vanagt (1976) makes documentaries, video installations and photos, in which she combines her interest for history with her interest for (the origins of) cinema. Her work includes films such as After Years of Walking (2003), Little Figures (2003), Begin Began Begun (2005), Boulevard d'Ypres (2010), The Corridor (2010),  Dust Breeding (2013); and video installations such as Les Mouchoirs de Kabila (2005), Power Cut (2007), Ash Tree (2007). Her work is shown at film festivals (FidMarseille, Viennale, Doclisboa, Idfa Amsterdam, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Madrid/Berlin, Hors Pistes Centre Pompidou), and in museums (Frankfurter Kunstverein, Fact Liverpool, NGBK Berlin, Shedhalle Zürich). The silent short film Girl with a fly (2013) was first shown at the 5th Biennale of Moscow. The films In Waking Hours (2015) and Still Holding Still (2015) premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The installation Showfish was presented in M HKA, the Museum for Contemporary Art of Antwerp in October 2016. Vanagt's new film DIVINATIONS had its Belgian avant-première at the opening night of the festival Courtisane in Ghent (3 April 2019).

C'est de l'été dernier que date le retour probable du lyrisme. Personne n'y pensait plus, on lui avait substitué la forme épique, on s'en était vite lassé et depuis on pataugeait dans celle dont je ne sais plus qui avait eu la pas très bonne idée de l'appelé dramatique. Tellement dramatique que tout était calme, jusqu'à cette après-midi à la campagne où nous pûmes constater les signes avant-coureurs de ce lyrisme tant convoité de quand l'artiste pre?sente son objet en rapport imme?diat avec lui-me?me. Il nous incombait dès lors d'adapter cette intuition remarquable vers quelque chose de plus rationnel et trouver un titre était la première chose à faire pour authentifier tout cela. D'où le trajet à la poste.

Loïc Vanderstichelen est un cinéaste qui vit et travaille à Bruxelles. Il réalise des films seuls ou en collaboration depuis 1993. Jean-Paul Jacquet est un historien de l’art qui vit et travaille à Bruxelles.

Emerging from a regular and spontaneous practice of film, A Árvore is an encounter with and an homage to the filmmaker’s father Guilherme Vaz (1948-2018). Major Brazilian artist, composer, experimental musician and maestro, as well as one of the pioneers of conceptual and sound art in Brazil, his compositions often traverse the filmography of Ana Vaz in a constant dialogue between music, sound and place. Guilherme Vaz’s work is marked by his experience living at the recently inaugurated Brasília, where Ana was born, as well as the many years spent collaborating with remote indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. A Árvore is a ghostly ritual woven through the fragments of a recorded conversation between father and daughter transposed to various significant geographies in life lines of both.

Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker who works with cinema as an instrument. Her films, or rather her film-poems, travel through territories and events haunted by the perennial consequences of internal and external forms of colonialism, and their footprints on the earth as well as on human and different from human forms. Her practice can also take the shape of writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs or ephemeral events, which are expansions or developments of her films. Her works have been presented at film festivals, seminars and institutions such as Locarno Film Festival – Cineasti del presente; Berlinale Forum Expanded; IFFR, Rotterdam; Viennale; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pivô, São Paulo; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CPH:Dox; New York Film Festival – Projections; TIFF Wavelengths, Toronto; BFI, London; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Tate Modern, London; LUX Moving Images, London; Tabakalera, San Sebastián; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MAM Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; Matadero, Madrid; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Mostra de Cinema de São Paulo; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; among others. She is a recipient of the Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grant (2019), the Film Society of Lincoln Center Kazuko Trust Award (2015), as well as grand prizes at Festival dei Popoli (2022), Entrevues Belfort (2022), FIDOCS (2022), Punto de Vista (2020), 25FPS (2020), Cinéma du Réel (2016), Media City Film Festival (2015), Fronteira Experimental and Documentary Film Festival (2015). Ana Vaz is also a founding member of the COYOTE collective, an interdisciplinary group working between ecology and political science through conceptual and experimental formats.