Paris programme
Tuesday 31 October 2023

Shabnam unfolded a research on my colonial history in relation to Muslin where I tried to visualize a certain nerve-racking situation when people from a certain part of the world reflect an accumulation of knowledge and wealth. Sometimes the monumental museum display gives a strange complexity. The difference between the one who needs to rumble around archives all around the world to connect the threads between past and present and one who gets everything compiled and labelled is an important one. By process, Shabnam is like a patchwork. The idea was cautiously extended over found images and sounds. Here, the Bangla language is a part of the sonic experience; that is why the subtitle is always coming later as part of an image. I think the sonic experience of the film is something to bear the uneasiness about unequal relationships and exchanges that we have in this world. The drawing of the Bangla letters or the sound of the language played a pivotal role in telling disturbed cartography. What was a work about cotton and lost heritage, has reached me to few questions. How do you visualize the feeling of ‘other’? How do you visualize the churn in your stomach when you find yourself in front of unresolved loss?

Reetu Sattar is an artist and film-maker, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her practice, both performative and experimental in nature, questions human perception and imperceptible nature by re-examining history and the creation of knowledge. In a constant dialogue with immediate surroundings, her work engages with the poetics of environments and explores inner urges for change, perception, (re)relation to body and matter. Born in Dhaka Reetu works and lives in Dhaka. Her recent exhibitions include Istanbul Biennial, British Textile Biennial, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Liverpool Biennial, and Dhaka Art Summit as well as venues including the British Film Institute, London; Alserkal Avenue, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; Artspace, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris and NTU CCA Singapore. Her performances have been staged internationally at venues in London, Birmingham, Bangkok and Goa. Reetu’s first film premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam, in 2019 and the second film Shabnam premiered at the latest IFFR. Reetu’s performance installation programmed in Spring 2020 will be presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York on a date forthcoming. Reetu Sattar is a member of Britto Arts Trust, an artist collective based in Dhaka. She also works with Dhaka-based theatre group Prachyanat. Reetu is currently in an 11-month residency at Jan Van Eyck, Netherlands.

A multi-vocal triptych through peripheral sites of urban infrastructure: a data center, a ring road, and a run-down mall. All three sites were built with certain worldviews: visions of the future and promises of progress that didn't turn out to be the utopias they presented themselves as. Through multi-lingual texts, a site-specific soundtrack, 16mm and 3D images, the spaces and their implications are subjectively mapped, poeticized and questioned. A poetic materialism of decay, renewal, remembering and projecting, "Center, Ring, Mall" is perhaps a mourning, but one that desires and demands a rebirth.

Mateo Vega (1994) is a filmmaker and artist from Peru raised in Amsterdam, and a graduate of Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam University College and The New School. The starting point of their work is the subjective experience of (urban) space, and the politics, histories and futurities embedded in landscapes, architecture and infrastructure. Their films and installations have been supported by Mondriaan Fund, Netherlands Film Fund, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, and shown at places like MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Framer Framed, Amsterdam Museum, and Theater Rotterdam.

An exploration of the interconnection between ghost stories, tech company culture in South Korea, and the economy of logistics in Indonesia told through a notebook/premake film and dossier of an unmade techno-horror feature-length film set in between port in Jakarta and an unnamed employee assistance programme office in Seoul.

Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between capital and technology, labour and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, FID Marseille, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc) as well as Centre Pompidou Paris, NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, Taipei Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, Biennale Jogja, National Gallery of Indonesia, and other venues and institutions. In addition, solo exhibitions and focus program of his works had been held at Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto and Centre de la photographie Genève amongst others.

I deliver everything! raps the 'delivery-anti-heroine' and 'delivers' the sound of a rebellious exhaustion in a world increasingly defined by algorithms and AI where everything seems to become a commodity and we all breathless suppliers

Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler are artists and filmmakers collaborating on films and video installations that are shown internationally at film and media festivals and in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

This film draws from conversations with Amazon Mturk workers and their relationship with the politics of the Mechanical Turk platform – the varying forms of transparencies and opacities that make the platform what it is. Focusing on the backend of AI and machine learning processes, the film investigates the relationships between the analogic, the digital and the terrestrial. What kind of work is required for smooth functioning of automation? Who does this backend work, where does it take place, and what does it entail? Using the very processes that workers help train on online platforms as material, recursions of different scales takes place, where we see language, the ability to define and speak clear English as central. A second focus is an exploration of the subjective nature of data gathering, processing and annotating, and the material infrastructures it is dependent on. In the absence of any fixed constants, context or averages, abstraction emerges as an important and forced tool.

Aarti Sunder’s research and practice lies at the crossroads of the digital humanities and contemporary art. She is interested in the fictions arising from investigating situated experiences and asking if these help us re-think the ways in which we understand technology and our relationship with it. So far she has focused on contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth and digital-terrestrial play. Aarti’s interest is to problematize the determined linearity of ‘progress’ inscribed within the promise of the algorithm, technological prowess and a quantifiable future. Looking at globalised framework of precarious labour, non-human exhaustion and storytelling that lies at the strategic intersection of power, knowledge and aesthetics. Relooking at these intersections, she believes, can help us tell better stories, of fictions past, present and future. Among other places, Aarti will exhibit her work at the forthcoming 67th BFI London Film Festival and in collaboration with Doreen Mende at Albertinum of the State Collections of Art in Dresden. She has previously shown at Akademie der Kunst, Singapore Biennale 22, Hayy Jameel, MIT, Warehouse421, the Goethe Institute in Chicago, Kunstverein Leipzig, Bauhaus Imaginista, Alserkal Avenue, Ashkal Alwan, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of many grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Harvard FSC Film Center, Art Dubai and Ashkal Alwan and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Aarti Sunder works with video, drawing and text and sculpture.

Created based on research conducted during a 2018 residency at LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto), SUMMER HEAT AN EARLY FROST combines the narrative structures of film, documentation, photography, cinematographic staging, and interview into a collage on the organizational principles of our perception. Similar to a stream of consciousness formed of constantly expanding recordings that proceed as the common denominator between a partially sensory, partially mechanically narrative voice and a screen text that fluctuates in intervals between narration, commentary, and subtitle, the image flow comprises a number of visual resources: arranged rhythmically behind an archival setup of vintage pornographic magazines from the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection, the marked text passages on film theory are taken from a collection of essays by Russian formalists. A multi-layered and narrative complement is present in the form of excerpts from “An Early Frost” (1985)—the first mainstream TV feature film to address the emerging public, social, and political crisis surrounding the spread of HIV/AIDS as part of the everyday life of a US family. Quietly and with an almost static austerity, set pieces from early silent films of the 1920s such as those from Jean Epstein and Dziga Vertov are superimposed across from sexually fetishized sequences of self-produced montages from tooth and mouth recordings, only to be expanded upon in the form of a new cut expounding on the pornographic industry’s digital infrastructure. Massed like a cluster of findings from a multimedia, multi-thematic search for the internal logics of filmic and documentary mechanisms of production and affect—whose focus potentially also stretches to include the representation and repression of queer desire, longing, and craving—the montage opens up a different access to images and their language; a language whose essence is concealed in the multiplicity of the information gathered and which, transferred via data-mining technology into the artistic process of the film, facilitates the recognition of patterns of regularity and of hidden interrelations.

Benjamin Ramirez Perez, is visual artist working primarily with film, video and installation based in Cologne, Germany. He was a participant at De Ateliers Amsterdam from 2016-2018 and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 2009–2015 with Julia Scher, Phil Collins and Matthias Mueller. His works have been screened at IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno, Edinburgh and Toronto International Film Festival, as well as Julia Stoschek Collection Du?sseldorf, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Visions du Réel Nyon among others. He had group and solo exhibitions at Artothek Cologne, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, de Ateliers Amsterdam, Gallery Markus Luettgen Duesseldorf, and more. In 2015 he was awarded the Chargesheimer Scholarship for Media Art by the City of Cologne and in 2013 he received the Prize of the German Association for Film Journalists.

What is the future of life in a world ever more dominated by Artificial Intelligence Can we develop a sense of connection and empathy towards highly elaborated machines? In a time when the lines between humanity and technology blur, "The Shape of Things to Come" takes audiences on a journey of human-AI interaction that challenges our perceptions of identity, love, and ethics. The film follows the activities of a team of pioneering researchers pushing the boundaries of AI technology, seeking to develop an AI with the capacity to feel and understand emotions. As they delve deeper into the mysteries of human emotions, they confront ethical dilemmas, technical challenges, and unforeseen consequences. Tensions rise as the project advances. Some believe that bestowing AI with emotions could revolutionize healthcare, therapy, and human-AI partnerships, while others fear the potential risks and moral implications. " The Shape of Things to Come " explores profound questions about the nature of consciousness, the essence of humanity, and the ethical responsibilities that come with playing the role of creator. As the project's success seems within reach, the researchers must confront their own humanity and the consequences of their ambition.

Pamela Breda is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living between Turin and Vienna. She holds a MA in Visual Arts from IUAV University (IT) and a PhD in Visual Arts from Kingston University (UK). She was appointed artist and fellow in residence at several international art institutions, including Max Planck Institute For Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt, DE), Pratt Institute (New York, USA), Cité Internationale Des Arts (Paris, F), PROGR (Bern, CH) Botin Foundation (Santander, E). She was recipient of several art awards and fellowships, including IMèRA Fellowship (Marseille, F), Cantica 21 (MibaC, IT), Italian Council Award (MibaC, IT), Kingston University Phd Scholarship (Kingston, UK), Moving’Up (Turin, IT), JRC, Joint Research Center, European Commission (Ispra, IT), ‘Love Me Tender’, Stonefly Production Prize (Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, IT), Italian Institute of Culture (Moscow, RU), Photography Award, IED, European Institute of Design (Venice, IT). Her film research explores the intersections of visual imaginaries, narratives, and stories that often remain on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. With a deep passion for shedding light on the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, her work dives into the complex web of human existence, particularly focusing on the clash between old and new technologies that shape worldviews.

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.

One day, an old water pipe caused a ceiling leak. On this ceiling, toxic mushrooms of the order Polyporales would grow. Sitting on the toilet, the lady of this house looks up and observes that magical and mysterious fungus, which is not an animal, nor a plant. The mushroom is the future, she thought.

1979. Graduated in Digital Arts, in Sound and Image Course, by the School of Arts of UCP (2002). She completed her training with courses and workshops such as the Maine Media Workshops Photography Management Workshop. She wrote and performed her first short film FRIENDS AFTER DARK [2016], that had it international premiere at the 69th Locarno Film Festival, and was screened at film festivals such as Curtas de Vila do Conde, Márgenes, Curtas de Verin, SACO - Oviedo Contemporary Audiovisual Week, FICA - Aguilar del Campo Film Festival, Cinema Jove, Luso Brasileiro de Santa Maria da Feira, and in other exhibitions of which Bilbao Arte stands out. She wrote and staged the film-performance AMIGOS IMAGINÁRIOS [2018], with the collaboration of Rui Lima, Sérgio Martins and Jonathan Saldanha, with a premiere scheduled at Teatro Rivoli (2019). In theater, dance and performance she collaborated in the creation, set design, visual design, video and dramaturgy of several projects, including TRÊS DEDOS ABAIXO DO JOELHO (2012), by Tiago Rodrigues, that won Best Play in 2012 by the SPA, presented internationally in Kunsten Festival Des Arts, De Internationale Keuze and Rotterdamse Schouwburg, STAGE, Théâtre de la Ville, Théâtre des Abbesses, Emilia Romagna Theater Fondazione, among others. She collaborated in the plays: SABOTAGEM (2015), by Lígia Soares, Miguel Castro Caldas and Sílvia Pinto Coelho; O ESPLÊNDIDO (2014), by Andresa Soares. She participated also in other performance projects, such as CELEBRAÇÃO (2012), a dance and performance program presented at Culturgest. She is a TV commercial director for Take It Easy since 2006, where she has made severaladvertisements brand campaigns: Compal, Luso, Matinal, Gallo, Médis, Banco Popular, Terra Nostra, Lidl, CGD, Optimus, ANF, Staples, PT, TMN, Planta, Unitel, Milaneza, RTP, etc. She directed documentary and experimental videos such as: ESFORÇOZINHO DA GENICA, SKATE NO PALÁCIO, POP FISH e GET BENT [2005], this one presented at the exhibition "J'en Rêve" at the Cartier Foundation Paris and at the festivals Imago, Video-Lisboa, Impakt Festival and Courtisane.

Dietmar Brehm's Hylo-Vision-Plus. Version 1 is a minimalistic study of ecstatic moments and it is named after eye-drop medicine.

born in 1947 in Linz 1967-72 studied painting at the University of Fine Arts/Linz. Professor at the University of Fine Arts/Linz. Drawing + painting, experimental films and photography. Numerous filmscreenings and exhibitions at home and abroad. 1974-1989: 74 Super8 films since 1990: 16mm films since 2000: video

Oscar, a renowned hypnotherapist, takes advantage of the last moments in his hotel room to say goodbye to the dazzling Mercedes and relieve old Norberto of his sorrows

Born in 1974 in Portugal, Sandro Aguilar studied film at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. In 1998, he founded the production company O Som e a Fúria. His films have won awards at festivals such as La Biennale di Venezia, Locarno FF, Gijón, Oberhausen,Vila do Conde, Indielisboa FF and have been shown in the most relevant film festivals worldwide. Two times nominated for the EFA – Best European Short Film Award. Retrospectives of his work have been programmed at Rotterdam IFF, BAFICI, New York Film Festival, Arsenal-Berlin and Oberhausen FF. In 2013, he was invited into the renowned DAAD Artist Residency, Berlin

Growing up in Kuwait close to an oil refinery by the sea, the artist would create stories for the distant petroleum operation while passing by on a traffic bridge. As she envisioned an expansive panorama of lights, fire, smoke, and towers, Al Qadiri imagined it was a city-metropolis—"filled with beings and phantoms from another world.” This dream-like film hearkens back to these childhood memories, fusing eerie, slow views of a reconstructed miniature refinery with lines from poems about city lights and industrial landscapes. Crude Eye blurs reality with speculative memory, and we are unable to tell if the scene is a real place or a fantasy. The artist says: “The work attempts to reconcile a sense of childlike wonder with the toxic environmental destruction that the refinery inherently represents.”

Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. Spanning sculpture, installation, film and performance, Al Qadiri's multifaceted practice is mainly based on research into the cultural histories of the Gulf region. Her interpretation of the Gulf's so-called "petro-culture" is manifested through speculative scenarios that take inspiration from science fiction, autobiography, traditional practices and pop culture, resulting in uncanny and covertly subversive works. She is currently based in Berlin.

A voyage to the northern border of Taiwan — the eponymous Beigu Islet, a sea rock roughly 300sqft submerged under water half of the time — delves into regional histories, the gaze on borderline landscapes, and the ambivalent state of Taiwanese territory and subjectivity.

Hsin-Yu Chen is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with experimental film, documentary, and moving image to explore the liminal space between seeing and being seen where subjectivity is implicated and constructed. Drawing on border landscapes, vision techniques, and embodied knowledge, he examines the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject. His work has been shown at 25 FPS, HR; Arkipel, ID; Festival ECRÃ, BR; and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, UK. He has participated in the Oberhausen Seminar and residencies including RAIR Philadelphia and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

The great voyages to the "New World" were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible. Therefore maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. In the myth from 1483 Brazil, or Hy-Brazil, is known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. ‘Visão do Paraíso’ is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated, and imagined, the film analyzes the contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a "New World."

Leonardo Pirondi is a Brazilian filmmaker based in Los Angeles, São Paulo, and Porto. His films explore the infinite abyss between the multiple derived versions of reality through documentary, experimental, and narrative modes. Much of his work uses analog and digital manipulations on celluloid to examine the sociopolitical unfoldings of the intersections between imagination, science, myth, and technology. His films have been exhibited at various film festivals, institutions, and venues internationally, such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, BFI London, Melbourne, Edinburgh, True/False, Ambulante, Curtas Vila do Conde, Guanajuato, Wexner Center, REDCAT, and others. Some of his work exists in the collection of Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York. He holds a Film/Video degree from CalArts, is a Sundance Ignite Fellow, and is the recipient of the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund and the Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in the Storytelling Arts.

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.

A gravel path on the edge of a village. Between fields, across to a fence. Drawn into the map of former uranium mining areas in Saxony and Thuringia. From 1946 to 1990, the Soviet corporation SAG Wismut mined uranium there for the USSR's nuclear weapons program. Above ground, socialism shines towards the future, below, the ancient rocks radiate through the torn up earth. The GDR environmental movement throws a spotlight on the way. Night. Darkness. A group of people, a flashlight, a shovel. X-ray film is buried in the gravel. The ground exposes the film, leaving a trail of its invisible rays. The film SUN UNDER GROUND follows this trace horizontally through today's landscapes, marked by mining and redevelopment, and vertically through the ground as an archive. Deep drilling through space and time traces the sedimented narratives that surround the element of uranium materially, metaphorically, and geopolitically. How does it haunt the landscape? How does it connect with the ghost of socialism? What stories and biographies surround its excavation sites? How does it radiate into its recording media? How can the spectrum of the visible be shifted to bring its invisible radiation into the image, to make it audible or palpable?

Mareike Bernien is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker and teacher in the field of filmic research and critical archival practices. Since 2018 she has been part of the production platform pong film. 2020-21 she was a fellow in the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme/gkfd. With a media-archaeological approach, her artistic works question ideological certainties of representation, their material-technological preconditions and historical continuities. Her current films include: DEPTH OF FIELD (2017) and SUN UNDER GROUND (2022) both co-directed with Alex Gerbaulet. Alex Gerbaulet is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker and producer. Since 2014 she has been part of the production platform pong film. 2020-21 she was a fellow in the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme/gkfd. In her artistic work she explores, among other things, the imageability of reality and memory. Her films move between video art, essay and documentary film, between activist impetus and fictionalizing reflection. Her recent films include: THE SLEEPER (2018), as well as DEPTH OF FIELD (2017) and SUN UNDER GROUND (2022) both co-directed with Mareike Bernien.

Ghostmarkets is part of a long-term collaboration with a group of men prisoners at Poissy prison (France). In 2019, in the wake of the prohibition of all transactions in the prison space, they engaged in the creation of a monetary production economy inside the walls. The debates conducted on this occasion testify to the prior existence of an invisible economic system, based on the exchange of services, debts of honor, and the performance of masculinity. As he was directing and recording the discussions of his work group, Jules Ramage came to realize the complex position he assumed inside the prison walls. The SD card verification protocol turned his camcorder into a surveillance tool. The sound, video, and textual archives of this collective experience were used to make an installed film, marked by the extraction of the voices of its detained collaborators, focusing on the material transformation and gain in symbolic value. With John Dow, Ben, Christophe, Brahli, Sparafucile, Youssef Rhnima, Philippe T., Ilich.

Jules Ramage (1987, France) is a 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 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 as well as prison guards. His work has been exhibited in France, the United States, Argentina, England, Spain, and Germany. He was a resident at CENTQUATRE-Paris, Cité internationale des arts, Ateliers Médicis, Fresnoy-studio national des arts contemporains. For Ghostmarkets, he worked with a group of men detained in the central prison of Poissy, formed in 2015 as part of the Section des Etudiants Empêchés, a teaching program run by the University of Paris. Over the years, the group has become self-sufficient, and, under the management of Jules Ramage, it has taken on the identity of a collaborative research-creation collective. It includes : John Dow, Ben, Christophe, Brahli, Sparafucile, Youssef Rhnima, Philippe T., Ilich.

Working with a redacted audio recording and transcript of an interview, The Whole Nine Yards explores the cool economy, loneliness and deep exposure of an anonymised New York drug dealer during his incarceration. However, his testimony, far from being police statement or court confession, is gleaned verbatim from a casting audition from a feature film (Good Time, Ben & Josh Safdie 2016) migrated into the project. He is now deceased. The recollections peak during a haunting attempted murder, nine dudes going 'the whole nine yards'. One of two new companion pieces to Intimate Distances (2020), it forms a new body of work that relates to the uneasy rapport between film-making and crime-making. This functions in a space where casting interview and crime testimonial become indiscernible, and can be received as either discarded testimony or audition as witness.

Phillip Warnell is an artist-filmmaker and writer from London, a first generation university graduate from a working class background. He produces cinematic and art works exploring a range of philosophical, poetic and sensorial thematics: ideas on human-animal relations, the political and cinematic imagination, the presence of those with prescient or extraordinary attributes and the poetics of bodily and life-world circumstances. His work is often performative, establishing elements for a film shoot as (part) event, resulting in an interplay between scripted, documented and (sometimes) precarious filming circumstances. Phillip Warnell is an academic, and has undertaken visiting professorships, fellowships and held posts at Harvard University (Film Study Center, 2017-18), Warwick University (UK) Art & History of Medicine, George Mason University (USA), University of Lincoln (UK) and Beijing Normal University (China) amongst others.

The film follows for two years a group of NYC subway dancers. In the trains, at home, at the rehearsal location, at the events organized by their commutity. The film portraits five individuals as well as the dance community they are part of, the city and the society they are living in. Despite obstacles, social backgrounds and racism, they are determined to succeed and fight against an illusional meritocratic system.

Rafaela Lopez (b. 1988, Paris) is a visual artist working in New York and Paris. Her work deploys between videos, performances, sculptures, drawings and collaborative projects. She is interested in marginalized creative practices, the pop cultures and our socio-cultural backgrounds. Each of her projects searches for a specific language, adapted to the implicated communities and questions the social role of art. Rafaela Lopez studied at Royal College of Art (London), Villa Arson (Nice) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. In 2015, she is awarded at Art-O-Rama (Marseille), in 2017 by Mécènes du Sud (Montpellier / Sète), in 2020 she is nominated for Prix Sciences Po for contemporary art (Paris), in 2021 she is awarded by the Fondation des Artistes and in 2022 she is the laureate of the Social Practice Arts Prize, organized by the Centquatre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Rotschild Foundation. She has exhibited in various venues such as Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY, 2022), NY Greek Consulate (NY, 2020), FLAX (Los Angeles, 2018), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, 2018), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2017), Centre National d’Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson (Nice, 2012, 2014, 2017), Studio Voltaire (London, 2015), Camden Art Centre (London, 2015), Flat Time House (London, 2014, 2015). She has been a resident artist at FLAX (2018, Los Angeles), Villa Arson (2017, Nice), Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2017, invited by Grace Ndiritu), Villa Lena (2015, Palaia) and Casa de Velazquez (2014, Madrid). Rafaela Lopez is the former president of DOC!, an independent art space located in North Paris.

Starring a cast of 100 people, Olho da Rua (Out Loud) is divided into eight acts and presents performance propositions in front of the camera as exercises of the gaze. Simple actions are presented, such as looking and admiring oneself in front of a mirror, improvising an assembly and saying messages to the camera, representing a collective party making the public square a great stage, or facing the camera lens that it's the eye of the beholder, whether on the streets or on the movie screen when it's ready. Made in two days at Praça do Hipódromo, in Recife, the film is made up of a cast of homeless people, linked to public shelters and non-governmental initiatives to support the vulnerable population.

Jonathas de Andrade was born in Maceió, Brazil, in 1982, and studied communications at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife. He works with installation, photography, and video to explore constructs of love and the process of urbanization, with particular emphasis on Brazil’s vibrant but often ignored northeast region. De Andrade’s series Love and Happiness in Marriage (Amor e Felicidade no Casamento, 2007) juxtaposes photographic portraits of a young couple with pages from a 1960s psychiatric textbook on love and marriage. What appear to be vintage shots are actually new images of contemporary actors, their treatment and combination framing the popular ideals of romance and family as bourgeois fictions. In 2 in 1 (2 em 1, 2010), diagrams and photographs of carpenters illustrate the process of converting two single beds into a double and also seem to offer functional instruction on how to “make” a couple. Tropical Hangover (Ressaca Tropical, 2009) also employs found material, in this case a salvaged diary that forms the basis for an installation in which a book’s pages are illustrated with original, vintage, and found photographs, offering a reflection on memory, modernity, and urban space. Since 2007, many of de Andrade’s ideas have been developed in collaboration with A Casa como Convém (The House as It Should Be), an artists’ collective that he founded with Cristiano Lenhardt and others in Recife. The group, which focuses on issues around tropical modern architecture, offers a valuable counterpoint to the dominant cultural axis of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. One example of the influence of collectivity and local community on de Andrade’s work is The Uprising (O Levante, 2012), for which the artist organized a horse-drawn cart race in the center of Recife. Also inspired by the town is De Andrade’s mural Nostalgia, a Class Sentiment (Nostalgia, Sentimiento de Classe, 2012). This work, constructed from 340 primary-colored geometric fiberglass tiles displayed in a segmented composition, reproduces a tiled panel in a Recife tropical modern house, and is shown opposite a vinyl text that quotes manifestos about modern life composed by two Brazilian architects of the 1960s and ’70s. Some of the tiles interrupt these texts, the suggestion of loss offering pointed comment on the failure of Brazil’s modernist project. De Andrade has had solo exhibitions at Instituto Cultural Itaú, São Paulo (2008); Instituto Cultural Banco Real, Recife (2009); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2010); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2013); and Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2013). He participated in the group exhibitions When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; and Salvajes: Digesting Europe Piece by Piece, Traneudstillingen Exhibition Space, Copenhagen (both 2012); and EXPO 1: Rio, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro; Love and Hate to Lygia Clark, Zach?ta National Gallery, Warsaw; HIWAR, Conversations in Amman, Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan; My Third Land, Frankendael Foundation, Amsterdam; Imagine Brazil, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; La Bienal 2013: Here is where we jump, El Museo del Barrio, New York; and Moving: Norman Foster on Art, Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes (all 2013). He participated in the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2009); São Paulo Biennial (2010); Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2011); Istanbul Biennial (2011); New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables, New York (2012); and Lyon Biennial (2013). De Andrade lives and works in Recife.