Berlin 2022 Programme

"Night Life" provides a glimpse into the behavior of wildlife after dark and serves as a reminder of the unwitting persistence of nature. For this piece a trail camera was moved periodically to capture various angles and shots at night throughout the seasons. The animals (mostly deer) were then framed within circles against a black background and choreographed into compositions that follow their relationships with one another while creating new interactions by compressing a year’s worth of footage into fourteen minutes. "Night Life" is a meditative portal through which a nocturnal world parallel to ours reveals the resolve of its inhabitants within an everchanging environment. In the process, our relationship to the rhythms of nature is linked to personal associations, memories and metaphors.

Matthew Garrison was born in Albany, NY, and grew up in Chicago. After living and working in New York City for eleven years, he moved to Pennsylvania to teach art and technology at Albright College. His work is exhibited and screened internationally including New York City, Korea, India, Panama, Brazil and Singapore. Garrison's art explores a dialog among intimate space, landscape and the environment.

In an unknown near future and past, a filmmaker is trying to retrace the steps of Silvia. “Who is Silvia? What is Silvia?” Silvia has gone missing. In this filmic reconstruction, Silvia drifts with the forest, attempting to attune with its temporalities. In a quest for co-existence, Silvia bridges the supposedly opposing world-views of ‘Sequency and Simultaneity’, presence and duration. At the borders of not only the forest but also of science, the destructive powers of a proprietarian society only obey the laws of succession. Here, the socialists plans of the post war era are being demolished and cleared for new and profitable housing. But in Silvia’s archive, city infrastructure and forest root systems are being integrated. Silvia’s recordings are cut in intervals where time itself becomes unstable. Through a numbering system of repeating patterns, progression is broken. Silvia has abandoned the society of ‘means to an end’. In this movement lays the path to un-build the walls that have infiltrated all aspects of this world. In the film there are excerpts by: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Author of the Acacia Seeds' and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics and The Dispossessed, 1974. Walter Benjamin, Painting, or Signs and Marks, 1917. Una Canger, What the Eye Sees, 1986. Prints, photographs, drawings and architectural plans by among others: Florence Henri, Lotte Stam-Beese, Alma Buscher and Silvia.

In recent years, Pia Rönicke has been investigating different botanical collections that show traces of colonial and geopolitical conditions. She is in her work concerned with problems of space and spatial transformations. She is interested in the connection between workspace and filmic space, and how we conceive historical matters in relationship to our daily activities. Rönicke often works with archives and the practice of collecting is a recurring theme in her practice. She works with film, prints, sculptures and objects, which together builds narratives. CURRICULUM VITAE Pia Rönicke Born: Denmark, Roskilde. 1974 Education 1995-1999 The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art 1999-2001 California Institute of the Arts. Solo Exhibitions (selected): 2022: Drifting Woods, Munkeruphus, Denmark 2021: Drifting Woods, Deserted Forest, Gävle Konstcentrum, Sweden 2020 Astrid, Lotte og Florence, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen 2019: one artist / 2 films / one week, gb agency, Paris 2018: Word for Forest, Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico 2017: the Cloud Document, Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art 2015: The Pages of Day and Night, gb agency. 2012: Aurora, Museo Tamayo, M?xico City. Dream and action find equal support in it, gb agency, Paris 2011: Dream and action find equal support in it, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen 2010: Scanning Through Landscapes, WALDEN AFFAIRS, Den Haag 2009: Facing, CENTRO CULTURAL MONTEHERMOSO KULTURENEA, Vitoria, Spain. 2008: A Usual Story from a Nameless Country, gb Agency, Paris Travel Stories, Casco, Utrecth, Holland. 2007: Rosa’s Letters - Telling a Story, croy nielsen, Berlin. 2006: Rosa’s Letters - Telling a Story, gb Agency, Paris Capitol Punishment, in collaboration with Olga Koumoundouros Glassell School of Arts, Houston. The Plan is Dictator. Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden.* 2005: Hoardings II, public project, Tate Modern. London Without a Name. Gallery Andersen’s, Copenhagen. Land/Documents. Display Gallery, Prague. 2004: Without a Name, Gallery gb Agency, Paris. Landscapes of Resistance,Trafo Gallery, Budapest. Six Architects – An Architectural Rorschach Test, •• A collaporation with Michael Bears. Lunds Kunsthal, Sweden. 2003: Seven Architects – An Architectural Rorschach Test, Schindler residency, The Makey Apartments, Los Angeles ••A collaporation with Michael Bears. 2002: ‘A Place Like Any Other’, Gallery Tommy Lund, Copenhagen, Denmark. Group Exhibitions (selected): 2022: Busan Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (MoCA Busan) Flowers, MAMAC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice 2021: Acts of Listening: A Common Attempt to (Re) Articulate a Feminist Position, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen Perspectives #01,Fonds regional d’art contemporain, Alsace The Secret Life of Plants, Casa da Cerca, Almada, Portugal 2020: The City, BEK – Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, Bergen 2019: Artistic Undressings of the Royal Seaport, Moss exhibitions, Stockholm Drawing Attention, DEN FRIE, Contemporary Artcenter. Kbenhavn I slipped into my metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed, DEN FRIE This is Not An Apricot, SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen 2018: Case of Emergency, public project, Gävle, Sverige 2018: Word for Forest, Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico 2017: AMIF, LUX Scotland. Tramway, Glasgow. Collaboration with Henriette Heise, Deirdre Humphrys, Mia Edelgart Conversation I: Family, work, art, surroundings, Tom Christoffersen. Pia R?nicke, S?nder Boulevard 88, 3.tv 1720 Copenhagen V. E-mail: piaronicke@gmail.com Mapping with Plants, book work and symposium, Hamborg Art Academy. DFU Kino, screening, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning. 2016: Botany Under Influence, Apexart, New York. But Still Tomorrow Builds into My Face, Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai. 2015: A story within a Story G?teborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art.Old News, cneai, Paris. Kvinder frem. Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark. Lokale, Flensborggade 57, Copenhagen 2014: Photography and Architecture. Photographic Center, Copenhagen Human- Space-Machines. Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK), Oslo. Buildering : Misbehaving the City, Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati, Ohio 2013: Reports from New Sweden, Tensta Konsthall. Human- Space-Machines: Stage Experiments At The Bauhaus, Stiftung Bauhaus, Dessau Fokus, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen. 2012: Horizons persistants, Centre d’art le LAIT, Albi Cities of Light: Film Programme curated by Inheritance Projects, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India. Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, exhibition for the City of Mechelen, Belgium VISIT TINGBJERG, Artfestival in Tingbjerg. A Gathering, locus Athens, Athen Envisioning Buildings, MAK, Wien 2011: Ficciones Urbanas, Centro Cultural Koldo Mitxlena, San Sebastian. Community without Propinquity, Milton Keynes Art Gallery, UK Terms of Belonging (gaaafstand collaboration with Nis R?mer) Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. L'idee de nature, Mulhouse Kunsthalle, Frankrig 2010: hem ljuva hem, Konsthall C, Stockholm. THIS STORY IS NOT READY FOR ITS FOOTNOTES, Ex Elettrofonica, Roma. Danmark 2010 - en vejledning til nationen for 'verdens lykkeligste folk'. (gaaafstand collaboration with Nis R?mer) Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. Wiels, Rehabilitation, Bruxelles – Brussel Both Before and After, gb agency, Paris Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona, Film festival, Barcelona. Where are yesterday's tomorrow? Film screening, Mus?e d'Art Contemporain de Montreal. Montreal. 2009: Changes in the contemporary city, Sculpture International Rotterdam (SIR), Coolsingel cinema, Rotterdam. The Curve is Ruinous (film screening program), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz. After Architecture, CASM, Barcelona. In May (After October), Gallery TPW Toronto Gets Under the Skin (film screening program), The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York Os demos, Publik, Copenhagen 2008: Overcoming, Ernst Museum, Budapest After October, Elizabeth Dee gallery, New York Zero Gravity, The Week of Contemporary Art in Plovdiv, Bulgaria U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copehagen The Map is not the Territory, Esbjeg Artmuseum, Denmark Technically Sweet, Participant Inc, New York Danskjävlar – A Swedish declaration of love, Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Copenhagen. A NEW STANCE FOR TOMORROW, The Gallery Sketch, London 2007: “The Other City”, Hungarian cultural center, New York. “Sue?o de casa propia”, La casa encendida, Madrid “Archaeologies of the Future, Sala Rekalde, Bilboa. ”Building Society”, Contemporary artcenter La Panera, Lleida, Spain. “Imagine Action”, Lisson Gallery, London. “A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own”, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam. Habitat/Variations, B?timent d'art con temporain, Geneve “Anachronism”, ARGOS, Brussels. "Elephant Cemetary”, Artist Space, New York "Dibujos animados (Cartoons)", Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid 2006: Exportable Goods, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna Dreamlands Burn, Mucsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest Version Animee, Centre pour l'image contemporaine, Geneve. Urban Appearances, video parcour at Rosa-LuxemburgPlatz, Berlin Closely Observed Plans, Transit workshops, Bratislava. Super nova, Pommery#3, Reims, France Esplanaden, The Frie, Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen. 2005: At the Same Time Somewhere Else, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinbourg gb Agency. Paris. Opening exhibition, Andersen’s Gallery, Copenhagen. Urban Cirkulation, public project, Berlin. 2004: Channel _0, CATV Project, Local TV-NETWORK, AIAV, Japan Non Standard Cities, Stadtkunstverein, Berlin. Cycle Tracks Will Abound In Utopia, ACCA, Melbourne Architectual Adventures, Overgaden, Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. Monument, an exhibition in the city of Copenhagen. 2003: Abcity, Trafo, Budapest. Plunder, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland. Feu de bois, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France. Rent a Bench, Trapholt Moderne Museum of Art, Kolding, Denmark. Coup de Coeur- a sentimental choice, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France. Video festival, Creating New Spaces, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany. Venice biennale, Utopia Station, Venice. gb agency, Present Perfect, Paris. GNS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris Nomadic Structures, Cubiitt Gallery, London. Mursollaici, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. 2002: Home Scenes: 8 days of revision. The Schindler House, Los Angeles. Site-seeing: disneyfication of cities? Ku?nstlerhaus, Vienna. The Fall Exhibition, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. ••A collaporation with Johan Tiren. Rent-a-bench, in the street on bus benches, Los Angeles. Culture meets culture, Busan Biannale, Korea. Urbane Sequenzen, Kunsthalle Erfurt/Museum Schloss Hardenberg Manifesta 4, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, Germany* ’Concrete Garden’, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 2001: ‘Dedalic Convention’, MAK – Austrian Museum for Applied Arts, Wien. ‘Blick’, Screening touring Nordic and international venues. ‘Exile Video’, Rum46, Aarhus, Denmark. ‘New Settlements’, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. ‘Take Off’, Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark 2000:‘Site Geist’, The Porter Troupe Gallery, SanDiego, USA. ‘No swimming’, org. by Heike Ander, Kunstverein Mu?nchen, Germany. ‘Use your illusion/part 3’, Duchamp's Suitcase, Arnolfini, Bristol, England. ‘Momentum’. Nordic Biennale for Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway. ’Taenk om/What if?’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm,Sweden.

In her video installation “Westerwald: A Visitation”, the Berlin artist Sandra Schäfer - based on August Sander's series of Westerwald farmers - deals with the transformation of the rural region in which the artist herself grew up. Sandra Schäfer juxtaposes August Sander's perspective with her own and contemporary view. For it is also about how a region, its landscape and agricultural use have changed over the course of time. In her artistic work, Schäfer is interested in the various contemporary witnesses and their entanglements: How do the relatives/portrait subjects speak about the (artistic/documentary) pictures by August Sander? What does it mean to hear the dialect that always also marks a class difference? What knowledge is there about the photographer and his approach? How does this differ from that of photo curators in the museum context? And what does it mean for the artist, who was born and raised there, to return to create this artistic work?

The artist Sandra Schäfer works with film and video installations. Therein she deals with processes of unfolding and rereading of documents, images, spatial narratives and performative gestures. Often her works are based on longer researches, in which she is concerned with the margins, gaps and discontinuities of our perception of history, political struggles, urban and geopolitical spaces. Her works were exhibited at 66th and 67th Berlinale (Forum Expanded), Berlin; Camera Austria, Graz; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; mumok, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Depo, Istanbul; La Virreina, Barcelona. Schäfer also is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and an associated member of the feminist film distributor Cinenova in London. She edited the books: Moments of Rupture: Space, Militancy & Film, Spector Books, Leipzig (2020), stagings. Kabul, Film & Production of Representation, b_books, Berlin (2009) and Kabul/ Teheran 1979ff. Filmlandschaften, Städte unter Stress und Migration, b_books, Berlin (2006, together with Jochen Becker and Madeleine Bernstorff).

Taking as its starting point the Neolithic figurines found throughout the Danube region from Croatia to the Black Sea through Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia,Bulgaria and Greece Women Minor Speculations is part road trip, part time travel and part speculative fiction using fragments of time, archaeological fragments, sound fragments and imaginary audio files trying to weave a potential whole from many distinct parts. During a period of four years I collected materials in film, images, sounds, and text dealing with remains as evidential material, with landscapes as witnesses, with interwoven biographies of archaeologists, their objects and subjects of research (the figurines, the constellations, cement, gossip and songs) in an exploration of how real and unreal objects of material culture produce gendered interpretations, collisions and hallucinations of public accounts, using technologies of memory, data storage devices to fracture the official historical narrative through minor histories, minor narratives and minor speculations. Shot over a fiveyear period on 35mm, 16mm, digital Bolex, Digital 8, mobile phones and still cameras the film involves a tentative encounter of two female explorers in south eastern Europe meeting through materials and separated by 6000 years.

Nicole Hewitt is a visual artist working in film, video, installation, performance, spoken word and text. Her work has recently been shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Pogon Centre for Independent Culture, Zagreb; Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka; Invisible Savicenta – Savicenta; international festivals such as Days of Croatian Film, Hiroshima International Festival of Animation, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Festival of New Film Split, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF, New Media Festival Seoul, Mumbai International Film Festival, Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, etc. Retrospectives of her film, video and animation work were parts of Holland International Animation Film Festival Utrecht (2007) and ANIMATEKA (2006), Nicole Hewitt, Museums Quartier Vienna, 2004; Nicole Hewitt, Galerija Nova, Zagreb, 2004; UrbanFestival, Zagreb, 2011; Spaport Biennial 2009/2010, Banja Luka; Women With Vision, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 2008, Insert, Retrospective of Croatian Video Art, MSU, Zagreb, 2006; Here Tomorrow, MSU Zagreb, 2002., etc.). Hewitt is cofounder of the artist run collective Studio Pangolin , is part of the sound collective Soundspiels and teaches at The Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. Hewitt lives and works in Zagreb and London.

‘Where Lakes Once Had Water contemplates how the Earth is experienced and understood through different ontologies – ways of being, seeing, sensing, listening and thinking – that reverberate across art, Indigenous thought, science, ancient and modern cultures, and the non-human.’ Sonia Leber and David Chesworth travelled with a team of Earth and environmental scientists who are investigating changes in the climate, landscape and ecology over 130,000 years. Their journey took them to Australia’s Northern Territory, to spectacular yet challenging environments, from locations of long-term aridity to lush, green waterways. Where Lakes Once Had Water channels the experience, where Indigenous rangers, Elders and community members collaborate with scientists. Working across the ancient shorelines, everyone is receptive to the signs, signals and rhythms of the land. Meanwhile, non-human cohabitants continue their struggles for survival. Leber and Chesworth deploy video as a tool, scanning tree lines, erosions, termite mounds, and the effects of water, sun and fire. Their disquieting sound design encompasses natural and human-made sounds, and the hidden signals and energies that exist beyond human hearing. The project is a journey across audio-visual realms, scientific endeavour and Indigenous knowledge – a coalescence of efforts to understand the ancient land. "Where Lakes Once Had Water" was commissioned by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) in association with Bundanon. It was filmed on the lands and waters of the Mudburra, Marlinja, Jingili, Elliot, Jawoyn and Larrakia communities in Northern Territory, with additional filming and editing on Barkandji, Dharawal, Djabugay, Yidinji and Wurundjeri Country. University of Wollongong Art Collection, Australia.

Australian artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth are known for their distinctive video, sound and architecture-based installations that are audible as much as visible. Leber and Chesworth’s works are speculative and archaeological, often involving communities and elaborated from research in places undergoing social, technological or local geological transformation. Their works emerge from the real but exist significantly in the realm of the imaginary, hinting at unseen forces and non-human perspectives. Leber and Chesworth’s artworks have been shown in the central exhibitions of the 56th Venice Biennale: All The World’s Futures (2015) and the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire (2014). Solo exhibitions include What Listening Knows, Messums Wiltshire, UK (2021) and the survey exhibition Architecture Makes Us: Cinematic Visions of Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia (2018) touring to Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2019) and UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2019).

The work is composed of two separate films followed by each other. Both films explore transcendental issues through archaeological and illegal excavations of tombs. "After Life" consists of a sequence of meditative short scenes picturing the ruins of a small Faliscan necropolis Cavone di Monte Li Santi in Italy and its surrounding natural elements. The rock-cut chamber tombs of the necropolis had been illegally excavated before they were archaeologically discovered in 2015 – a phenomenon still faced by many rural archaeological sites. At the center of "Red Impasto Jar" is a looted archaeological tomb object. In antiquity, the funeral was a significant ceremony where entombing of the body was just one component in the complex sequence of events. This ancient Faliscan tomb item dating back to the 6th century BCE was passed on to the archaeological museum (Mazzano Romano, Italy). The jar is radically altered and damaged by being cemented into the structures of a house as a decorative element. The film portrays the state of the pottery focusing on the detailed choreography and documentation of the object with a slow 360º rotation on a robust industrial motor against a monochromatic background.

Sound, perception and imagination are essential ingredients in the research and practice of Jonna Kina (b. 1984). Her work reveals the value of fictional viewpoints in non-fictional investigations. Kina’s works have been shown in the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome; Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg; Espoo Modern Art Museum EMMA; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn and in Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, among others. Kina has recently been awarded the Finnish Art Prize “Below Zero” (2018) and her film Arr. for a Scene was awarded as the “Best Nordic Short Film” at Nordisk Panorama Film Festival in Malmö (2017). She was also shortlisted for the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize in Florence (2017).

“Water & Coltan” transports its viewer directly to the places of the struggle of women in artisanal coltan mining camps in South Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo. Superimposed with a posthuman near-future scenario of the former coal mining Ruhr area in Germany the 360° documentary immersive experience combines two local sides of one and the same violent global phenomenon: the extractivist relation to natural and human resources with its long-term consequences for the environment and society.

Daniel Kötter (Germany, 1975) is a documentary filmmaker and theater director. His research based works alternate between media and institutional contexts. They have been shown worldwide at film festivals, in galleries and theaters. Since 2007 visual research on urbanization and political landscapes leads him to the African continent and the Middle East. His major works include the film and performance series “state-theatre” about urban conditions of performativity in the cities of Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut, Mönchengladbach (2009-2014), the research, exhibition and film project “CHINAFRIKA” (2013-2019) and the film trilogy “Hashti Tehran” (2017, Special Award of the German Short Film Award), “Desert View” (2018) and “Rift Finfinnee” (2020, DEFA Award DOK Leipzig) about urban peripheries in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Since 2019 Daniel Kötter was working on the series of spatial performances and 360° films “landscapes and bodies” on the consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua and Democratic Republic of Congo. His 360° film “Water & Coltan” (2021) is premiered at IDFA DocLab Competition.

“Water & Coltan” transports its viewer directly to the places of the struggle of women in artisanal coltan mining camps in South Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo. Superimposed with a posthuman near-future scenario of the former coal mining Ruhr area in Germany the 360° documentary immersive experience combines two local sides of one and the same violent global phenomenon: the extractivist relation to natural and human resources with its long-term consequences for the environment and society.

Daniel Kötter (Germany, 1975) is a documentary filmmaker and theater director. His research based works alternate between media and institutional contexts. They have been shown worldwide at film festivals, in galleries and theaters. Since 2007 visual research on urbanization and political landscapes leads him to the African continent and the Middle East. His major works include the film and performance series “state-theatre” about urban conditions of performativity in the cities of Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut, Mönchengladbach (2009-2014), the research, exhibition and film project “CHINAFRIKA” (2013-2019) and the film trilogy “Hashti Tehran” (2017, Special Award of the German Short Film Award), “Desert View” (2018) and “Rift Finfinnee” (2020, DEFA Award DOK Leipzig) about urban peripheries in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Since 2019 Daniel Kötter was working on the series of spatial performances and 360° films “landscapes and bodies” on the consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua and Democratic Republic of Congo. His 360° film “Water & Coltan” (2021) is premiered at IDFA DocLab Competition.

“Water & Coltan” transports its viewer directly to the places of the struggle of women in artisanal coltan mining camps in South Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo. Superimposed with a posthuman near-future scenario of the former coal mining Ruhr area in Germany the 360° documentary immersive experience combines two local sides of one and the same violent global phenomenon: the extractivist relation to natural and human resources with its long-term consequences for the environment and society.

Daniel Kötter (Germany, 1975) is a documentary filmmaker and theater director. His research based works alternate between media and institutional contexts. They have been shown worldwide at film festivals, in galleries and theaters. Since 2007 visual research on urbanization and political landscapes leads him to the African continent and the Middle East. His major works include the film and performance series “state-theatre” about urban conditions of performativity in the cities of Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut, Mönchengladbach (2009-2014), the research, exhibition and film project “CHINAFRIKA” (2013-2019) and the film trilogy “Hashti Tehran” (2017, Special Award of the German Short Film Award), “Desert View” (2018) and “Rift Finfinnee” (2020, DEFA Award DOK Leipzig) about urban peripheries in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Since 2019 Daniel Kötter was working on the series of spatial performances and 360° films “landscapes and bodies” on the consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua and Democratic Republic of Congo. His 360° film “Water & Coltan” (2021) is premiered at IDFA DocLab Competition.

“Water & Coltan” transports its viewer directly to the places of the struggle of women in artisanal coltan mining camps in South Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo. Superimposed with a posthuman near-future scenario of the former coal mining Ruhr area in Germany the 360° documentary immersive experience combines two local sides of one and the same violent global phenomenon: the extractivist relation to natural and human resources with its long-term consequences for the environment and society.

Daniel Kötter (Germany, 1975) is a documentary filmmaker and theater director. His research based works alternate between media and institutional contexts. They have been shown worldwide at film festivals, in galleries and theaters. Since 2007 visual research on urbanization and political landscapes leads him to the African continent and the Middle East. His major works include the film and performance series “state-theatre” about urban conditions of performativity in the cities of Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut, Mönchengladbach (2009-2014), the research, exhibition and film project “CHINAFRIKA” (2013-2019) and the film trilogy “Hashti Tehran” (2017, Special Award of the German Short Film Award), “Desert View” (2018) and “Rift Finfinnee” (2020, DEFA Award DOK Leipzig) about urban peripheries in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Since 2019 Daniel Kötter was working on the series of spatial performances and 360° films “landscapes and bodies” on the consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua and Democratic Republic of Congo. His 360° film “Water & Coltan” (2021) is premiered at IDFA DocLab Competition.

“Water & Coltan” transports its viewer directly to the places of the struggle of women in artisanal coltan mining camps in South Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo. Superimposed with a posthuman near-future scenario of the former coal mining Ruhr area in Germany the 360° documentary immersive experience combines two local sides of one and the same violent global phenomenon: the extractivist relation to natural and human resources with its long-term consequences for the environment and society.

Daniel Kötter (Germany, 1975) is a documentary filmmaker and theater director. His research based works alternate between media and institutional contexts. They have been shown worldwide at film festivals, in galleries and theaters. Since 2007 visual research on urbanization and political landscapes leads him to the African continent and the Middle East. His major works include the film and performance series “state-theatre” about urban conditions of performativity in the cities of Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut, Mönchengladbach (2009-2014), the research, exhibition and film project “CHINAFRIKA” (2013-2019) and the film trilogy “Hashti Tehran” (2017, Special Award of the German Short Film Award), “Desert View” (2018) and “Rift Finfinnee” (2020, DEFA Award DOK Leipzig) about urban peripheries in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Since 2019 Daniel Kötter was working on the series of spatial performances and 360° films “landscapes and bodies” on the consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua and Democratic Republic of Congo. His 360° film “Water & Coltan” (2021) is premiered at IDFA DocLab Competition.

Part time Twitch streamer, part time drug courier; both low level. Slithering between life and death, online and offline. The carefree summer of global progress seems to be over - are these the final days of both, the illusion of overarching narrative, and of Jerome the Saint.

Matti Harju has screened work at the Rotterdam, Locarno, Oberhausen, Torino, BFI London, Edinburgh, AFI FEST Los Angeles and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals among others. He studied film directing at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the UK and holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

A sprawling meditation on the choreography of bodies in Moscow’s urban landscape, Detours depicts a new way of dealing illicit drugs via the Darknet, the layering of the physical and the virtual realities, as well as a poetics, and politics, of space. Taking place in sleepy neighbourhoods, among the concrete walls of high-rises, behind garages and amidst abandoned railroads, the film alternately follows and loses track of Denis, the treasureman who hides stashes of drugs all over the city.

Ekaterina Selenkina is a filmmaker, artist and curator born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1992. Her work showed at Venice International Film Critics’ Week, Viennale, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Garage Museum of Modern Art, Camerimage, Pacific Meridian, Message to Man, New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival, REDCAT arts center, among others. Together with Zaina Bseiso, Luis Gutiérrez Arias and Joie Estrella Horwitz, she is a member of the film collective called Bahía Colectiva and co-curator of Adrift Residency. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts and is currently based in Moscow.

This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor, and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.

Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His filmmaking practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and his work often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence within the framework of deconstructing the ethnographic image and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature film, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021. His short films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, MoMA Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.

In a Dutch wetland nature reserve we move across the water surface.* The images accelerate and change to infrared; we see the nature sanctuary as through the eyes of the dragonfly that can 'see' many times faster than a human being possibly can perceive. The flight ends where several canals meet; by the water at the foot of a silent witness, a timeless, overgrown bunker. *Striking fact: the former peat exploitation waterways of the Peel bog area have grown themselves into protected nature reserves in the midst of extremely industrial livestock production.

Michiel van Bakel (1966, Deurne NL) studied astronomy (Leiden university) and psychology (Nijmegen university) for several years before he chose for autonomous visual art, at art school (Den Haag and Arnhem). Van Bakel expresses himself through 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 man and technology, perception of time in our delicate man-made ecosystem.

The romantic landscape paintings often portrayed weather condition, topography of national landscape, religious themes, spirituality of nature and hunting scenes. Obsidian Blue Pearl is a minimalistic road movie mirroring the emotions of the driver through the landscapes (s)he has chosen to look at.

Jussi Eerola (b.1969) has worked as a cinematographer on many internationally rewarded short films, documentaries and tv-features since 1992. He has collaborated with many visual artist’s e.g. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Mika Taanila, IC-98, Elena Näsänen and Anu Pennanen. His directional debut was a documentary about electro-hypersensitive people titled Refugees of Technocracy (2009). Documentary film The Return of the Atom written & directed together with Mika Taanila premiered at Toronto IFF 2015 and was given the NORDIC:DOX award at CPH:DOX in 2015. In 2014 he started a production company Testifilmi Oy together with Mika Taanila and visual artist duo IC-98 (Patrik Söderlund and Visa Suonpää) and has produced several of company's films. Eerola's first short film Blue Honda Civic (2020) premiered at IFF Rotterdam and was awarded three times at international film festivals.

The ‘Z’ Unit’s operation in a world far from our own was an experiment of sorts, a test. And this place, inhabited by beings different from ourselves, served as a laboratory. A successful outcome would secure the Z Unit’s future, enabling its enterprise to expand and its methods to be applied to other worlds. An investigation into imperial image-making, and destruction.

Miranda Pennell is an artist filmmaker based in London. Her recent and current work uses photographic archives as the starting point for a reflection on colonial legacies. She originally trained in contemporary dance, and her award-winning videos exploring choreography in everyday life have been widely screened and broadcast internationally. Pennell received an MA in visual anthropology in 2010 from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and undertook practice-led PhD research completed in 2016. Selected screenings and exhibitions include Intersectional Georgraphies (2022) Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol; Lahore Biennale (2020),Tanzbilder at the Neues Museum Nuremberg (2019), one-person programme at the Stuttgart FilmWinter Festival for Expanded Media (2019), Miranda Pennell: choreographies and archives at the Film Museum Munich (2017), Choreocinema: Siobhan Davies & Miranda Pennell, Barbican, London (2017), Co-op Dialogues 1976-2016: Lis Rhodes & Miranda Pennell, Tate Britain (2016),  All Systems Go, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2016),  Europe – The Future of History at Kunsthaus Zurich (2015), and The World Turned Upside Down, Mead Gallery (2013). 

Celilo Falls is the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America, the site of a traditional fishery on the Columbia River. For 15,000 years, the cascading waters sustained the lives of many indigenous tribes. In 1957, the completion of the Dalles Dam–a massive hydroelectric generator–inundated the falls, displaced most of the families that subsisted at the site and obstructed the migrating salmon, white sturgeon and other anadromous fish. Today, only a few families reside at what is now a man-made lake. Shot from Horsethief Butte, an outcropping of basalt, we see the petroglyphs and pictographs created by indigenous people who once came here, communing here above the tumbling waters. An ethnographer records the spoken language–Chinookan–of the community just five years before they were displaced. The butte was carved out by the glacial activity of the last ice age, and stands in defiance to the signature winds wailing up the Columbia Gorge. This is a vignette of Celilo Falls during the 2020, SARS-COV-2 pandemic.

Don H?i Phú Daedalus (b. 1983) grew up in the shadow of the country's largest public observatory—an area so remote and sparsely populated that it served as the first plutonium-processing plant for the Manhattan Project. Shortly after the oldest human remains in North America were discovered near his hometown, Daedalus left to attend the University of Washington, where, coincidentally, the remains were to be held during the decade-long legal dispute between the Kennewick tribe and anthropologists. He lives and works in New York.

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself. Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum is a newly commissioned film and installation by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Against and instead of apprehension, it fosters an image of existence in which attention twins the gentleness of touch as recalled by haptic and sonic expressions.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts. He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological. Denise Ferreira da Silva is a practicing artist and an academic - Director and Professor at the Social Justice Institute-GRSJ at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Dívida Impagavel (2019), and co-editor of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her work addresses the ethico- political challenges of the global present. She is a member of several boards including Haus de Kulturen de Welt (Berlin), International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs and the journals Postmodern Culture, Social Identities, and Dark Matter.

A short film written, directed, and edited by Elijah Winfield. "Time seems to be running out for two separate souls".

Born on July 25, 2001, Elijah Winfield is a screenwriter and director from Charleston, SC. He's been screenwriting since the age of 16 and directing various short films, music videos, features, etc, since the age of 17.

‘Agony to Ecstasy’ looks at the scope of the socio-addictive condition within Scottish people. It focuses on the relationship between pain and pleasure, between stress and relief and between entrapment and escape. The film in many ways, is a dissection of two spaces – euphoric clubbing and silent Scottish nature, offering a perspective on our need for salvation within both. Neurologically, there is very little difference between the brain addicted to something, as to when falling in love. As a result, the film fluctuates between these neurological and personal perspectives on addiction and connection – where their conflating and often paradoxical relationship are juxtaposed. The film is made with reflection as its key focus. Made during the middle of the first lockdown, it uses the collective state of withdrawal and loneliness to observe realities within clubs. A slow-motion strobe follows the film throughout, as a visual deconstruction of the joy, yet ghostly inhibition of the people in the shots. Vulnerability was key in Dej’s recollections – his words occupy the emotional worlds of mental health, stigma and the ecstasy of clubbing, without having a particular stance or opinion. Ultimately 'Agony to Ecstasy' looks beyond fixed stereotypes of addicts, and into the dependencies, shame and love between Scottish people.

Cal Mac is a visual artist working and living in Glasgow. Working between sculpture print and video, he explores themes of belonging and addiction through sociological, scientific and visual dialogues. His work often looks at clubbing and natural environments, to unravel truths about our current condition and need for connection. His work has been screened at Atlas Arts (skye), The Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh), Limerick Institute of Technology, and online for Lift off Festival, and Film and Video Umbrella. Following his first commission from Film and Video Umbrella in 2020, Mac has done residencies at Cove Park and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. In 2021 Mac was shortlisted for the Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award.

Berlin, 2020. On that cloudy summer day by the lake, while observing something terrible, their bodies blocked with fear.

Carlos Pereira (1989, Lisbon) is a filmmaker and programmer. He is currently studying Film Directing at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb), having previously studied film in Lisbon, Barcelona and Stockholm. His films have been shown at festivals such as Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, IndieLisboa, Doclisboa and Vila do Conde, and screened at venues such as Cité Internationale des Arts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. He worked as a member of the selection committee for Sheffield DocFest and is a member of the advisory selection committee for Berlinale Generation.

January 2021. The museum was empty. The current exhibition found itself closed, abandoned from the gaze of its spectators. Only emptiness and silence, cruel, morbid, still inhabited this space which had become distressing.

Hotel Royal is fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

Salomé Lamas (Lisbon) studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam and is a Ph. D candidate in contemporary art studies in Coimbra. Her work has been screened both in art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, BAFICI, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB - Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF, Museu Serralves, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Bozar , Tabakalera, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, Mostra de São Paulo, CAC Vilnius, MALBA, FAEMA, SESC São Paulo, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others. Lamas was granted several fellowships such as the Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship – Harvard University, Film Study Center-Harvard Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Brown Foundation – Dora Maar House, Fundación Botín, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Sundance, Bogliasco Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Camargo Foundation, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. She collaborates with Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola. She collaborates with the production company O Som e a Fúria and is represented by Galeria Miguel Nabinho and Kubikgallery.

A voice describes the relationship between two young neighbours and their encounter with a mysterious woman that reveals an augury about future times.

Luciana is an Argentinian born film director and photographer . Her main area of interest has been always the visual language. She started from an early age taking several courses on analogue photography and Super 8 film. She obtained her BA in Image and Sound Design at the University of Buenos Aires and a MA in documentary film directing at ULHT, SZFE and LUCA School of Arts as a scholarship student. She has directed several short films that have been featured in international film festivals such as BAFICI and FIDBA in its competitive section and selected by Berlinale Talents BA as director. In 2019, she attended Biographical Documentary Theatre Course with Gudrun Herrbold at UDK awarded with a fellowship and in 2021, she was chosen to participate as a jury at ELIA Academy (European League of Institutes of the Arts). Nowadays, she is based in Brussels working on both personal and commissioned projects.

In a plant nursery, five plant-nursery employees speak about a mysterious disaster, a “terrible event”, while cultivating a plant of the genus Aeonium. They are trying to understand what was that which happened to them. They try to explain the unexplainable.

George Drivas was born in Athens. He represented Greece in Venice Biennale, 2017. ?n 2020, he was nominated for the Eye Art & Film Prize (Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam). He had solo shows at Annex M, the Athens Concert Hall (2020), at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2018 and 2009) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Rome (GNAM, 2017), tributes at the International Forum of Performance Art (Drama, Greece 2021), Lumen Quarterly Festival, Beijing, China (2017/18) and Athens International Film Festival (Greek Cinematheque 2014) and participations in over 150 group shows and festivals in Greece and abroad like ”Rencontres Internationales, New Cinema and Contemporary Art”, Louvre Museum, Paris, France (2021), “After Us”, Maxxi Museum, Rome, Italy (2021), “back forward rewind”, Media Art Lab, Moscow, Russia (2020), “Imagined Communities”, 21st Biennial of Contemporary Art_Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil (2019-20), “Resilient Futures”, Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki (2018), “ANTIDORON”, documenta 14, Kassel, Germany (2017), “As Rights Go By”, Q21 International, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, Austria (2016), Festival du nouveau cinéma, Montreal, Canada, (2015), “future past – past future”, Transmediale Festival, Berlin, Germany (2014).