Berlin 2024 Programme

The Tirana Time Capsules are a series of three virtual environments, accessible via web browser, that act as time capsules for three different neighbourhoods of Tirana in 2021. The chosen areas - 21 Dhjetori, Kombinat, and the Teatri i Gjelbërimit, an area of the Tirana Great Park - each embody different aspects of Tirana’s urban development over the past 100 years. Particularly since the early 2000s, this has been characterised by the gradual disappearance of public space as the building sector has increasingly become controlled by private interests. Drawing on the metaphor of the time capsule and employing so-called high-fidelity recording techniques such as photogrammetry and field recording, the work re-appropriates and re-constitutes these different areas of the city as virtual environments as a way of exploring the intersection of personal memory and community heritage. In addition, the work seeks to question the promises made by such recording technologies that claim to render and preserve reality as a high-fidelity digital copy: in short, what exactly is being preserved when we use these techniques of digital preservation?

Alexander Walmsley (b. 1992) is a media artist with a particular interest in the landscapes of the real and the virtual. In his practice, he investigates how our understanding of these landscapes is shifting, mediated by the new technological, environmental and social realities of the 21st century. His work is situated primarily between 3D, photography, animation, and XR. His recent work has been shown at the Daejeon Biennale of Arts and Sciences, Tirana Art Lab, Sharjah Art Foundation, The Photographers' Gallery, and VRHam! Festival. He was a commissioned artist for the Albanian pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale and has taken part in residencies at the Tirana Art Lab, Albania, and Moskosel Creative Lab, Sweden, among others. Previously, he studied Anthropology and Archaeology at the Universities of Cambridge (UK) and Geneva (CH).

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).

Blind Oedipus, in older age, left Thebes as an exile accompanied by Antigone, who was both his daughter and sister. They sought refuge in Colonus of Athens. What if the tragic hero of Sophocles’ play 'Oedipus at Colonus' was a Romani nomad residing in today’s post-industrial outskirts of western Athens? OTWTC is a ‘docufictional’ VR film cast with Romani amateurs who live at the ghettoised toxic wastelands of Thriasian Plain, where Sophocles’ wandering hero is meant to have passed from. Consisted of a spatial sound design (ambisonics), the film's audio incorporates location sounds recorded inside the dwellings that merge “high” and “low” culture, often carrying with them the “eerie echoes” of dubbed TV series, speaking themselves about “Oedipal conflicts”, ‘absent fathers’, ‘incest’, murder and death.

Loukia Alavanou is a moving image artist and filmmaker. She is representing Greece at the 59th Venice Art Biennale with the exhibition “Oedipus in Search of Colonus. Alavanou holds an MA in Photography from the RCA in London. She was the winner of the 5th Deste Prize. In recent years, after receiving international acclaim, she started to be involved with the production of VR films and founded the first VR production company in Greece. She held a retrospective exhibition at State of Concept, Athens in 2018. For the years 2021 and 2022 Alavanou is a fellow artist at ONX Studio, organised by Onassis USA and the New Museum in NY. Alavanou’s work has been presented by institutions and festivals including KANAL Centre Pompidou, Accelerator, Stockholm, Gucci Garden, Kino Der Kunst, Palais de BOZAR, Palais de Tokyo, Athens Biennale, Moscow Biennale, Fiorucci Art Trust, The Museum of Cycladic Art, Benaki Museum. Her films are part of numerous collections including the Onassis Collection, the Dakis Joannou Collection, The Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe/ ZKM, PCAI/ Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative.

When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream.

Nicolas Gebbe was born in London in 1986. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main / Germany as a 3D artist, filmmaker and sound designer. 2018 he receives his art diploma at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach with a film major. He focuses on experimental 3D animation and hybrid film formats. Since graduation, his animated short films have been screened on a variety of festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinèma Montreal and Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Everyday Vrealities is a virtual reality documentary about different kinds of families, homes and ways of life. The viewer can, using their VR-headset, walk freely around from home to home, and witness everyday scenes happening in front of them. The film consist of nine homes, each linked to another. The viewer can witness a father playing games with his daughter, a couple doing yoga, a mother helping her son do his homework, an elderly mother teaching her daughter how to make pottery, a kid doing somersaults, a family with their newborn etc. The viewer can also re-enter some of the rooms to see new scenes. In the film there are no interviews or backstories. It is not a film of big emotions, but more of reflections and observation. It is in a sense “slow tv”, with seemingly nothing much happening. We can using the free movement in the space to quietly observe an everyday event unfolding, and even revisit it later if we want. The combined length of all clips is around 50 minutes.

Timo Wright is a media artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Noteworthy exhibitions include e.g. Nakanojo Biennale, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunsthall Charlottenborg, Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie, Galerie Anhava, Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki Design Museum, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Kunsthalle Helsinki as well as festivals such as IDFA, Slamdance, Nordisk Panorama and International Film Festival Rotterdam. His films have been shown at over 80 festivals and exhibitions worldwide.

METAMORPHOSIS is a location based experience in virtual reality. It thematises the state of fear, astonishment and need for human exchange, as well as the the new comprehension and the physical reduction of the world during an ontological rupture such as the Coronavirus pandemic. In History (from the Antique with the first plague to Modern times with the Spanish flu) every kind of epidemic or pandemic has brought significant changes in societies, people had to adapt and reinvent their lives exchanging as they could. The experience refers to this kind of societal metamorphosis that imply on one hand the awareness of a reduced and different environment as well as related to the exchange of different ideas about the future . For METAMORPHOSIS, different nature and urban places (outside and inside) have been scanned and recreated as 3D scenes in a point cloud aesthetic. These eight scenes form a large corridor that brings the visitor slowly through different stories and ideas. From naive, stunned to more elaborate projections about the future of existence.

Since 2013 Karolina Markiewicz (born in 1976 in Luxembourg, lives and works in Luxembourg) and Pascal Piron (born in 1981 in Luxembourg, lives and works in Luxembourg) have been developing a collaborative body of work that stretches across cinema, visual arts and theatre. At its centre lies the individual as part of the human community, torn between resignation and hope. In their poetically charged investigations, the two artists question contemporary myths and construct metaphorical narratives based on past events.

The CONTROL NEGATIVE experience is an exercise in a loss. Using VR technology, author Monika Mas?o? situates the viewer in an emotional state where frustration, helplessness, anger, and sadness are used to reveal basic human assumptions, including the illusory conviction of being fully in control of one's own life. The unreal world of the experience — a negative version of the real world — is a training space where you can better understand yourself and your emotions. The user is guided through seven chapters, which gradually move from physical activity to contemplation.

Dr. Monika Maslon (born 1982) - visual artist and art educator. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in ?ód? and Ph.D. studies at the Film School in ?ód?, where she completed her Ph.D. thesis entitled “Do zobaczenia” (See you), under the supervision of Prof. Józef Robakowski. She is a lecturer at the University of Leipzig and the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw where she conducts classes with the students of the department of Arts education in fine arts. In 2014 she stayed at an artistic residence in Singapore, where she made an artistic project called “Comfort of Long-Distance Perceiving”. In 2016 she implemented the project “Template - a tool to learn how to use an image”, as a part of a scholarship awarded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The scope of her art activities is manifested mainly through realizations based on audiovisual material. She participated in numerous exhibitions and shows. She is the author of the VR experience - CONTROL NEGATIVE.

A Vocal Landscape is a hyperrealistic VR experience that explores the strange anatomy of a conversation between two people. In a dreamlike journey, the spectator travels through an ever-changing room depicting their associations and unspoken interactions.

Omid Zarei is a French-Iranian artist and XR producer on the quest to explore alternative ways of storytelling. He creates projects that blur the boundaries of different platforms, creating a space for collaboration between artists from a diverse range of disciplines. In 2015 he developed VR filmmaking workshop in Helsinki, one of the first VR focused workshops in Europe. He is the creator of the project Songs of Future Past, a re-imagined VR take on Opera. Anne Jeppesen is a Copenhagen-based producer with a focus on audio documentaries. She has produced audio productions for national radio, as well as immersive audio experiences for museums and theatre. With a background in classical music and musicology, Anne is driven by a never fading fascination for the richness of the human voice and is constantly seeking out new ways to work with vocal expressions. Their latest joint project “A Vocal Landscape” won an EPIC MegaGrants and a special prize in Vancouver International Film Festival for a collaboration with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studio.

The Bacchanalian Ones, VR Experience for Oculus Quest 2 Inspired by ancient mythology, modern myth, and contemporary celebrity culture, The Bacchanalian Ones compares the historical myth with a satirical mash-up of the powerful self-absorbed who preen and wallow in a banal spectacle of their own creation. In a fantastically opulent setting of unrestrained hedonism, political, religious, and military leaders with ghoulish, bouffonesque appearances are surrounded by social elite sycophants like the devotees of the cults of Bacchus and Dionysus. Solmi’s phantasmagoric world of whirling space, jerking movement, and oscillating facades that strive to overwhelm the viewer’s visual field is pushed to extremes in a new interactive Virtual Reality installation. This work invites the visitor to enter the Bacchanal by donning a VR mask and manipulating two hand-held controllers in order to pick the perspective of one of his historical avatars. Newly empowered, and emboldened, the visitor is able to control the narrative, allowing them to experience the debauchery up close and personal through their embodiment of the avatar.

Federico Solmi was born in Bologna, Italy in 1973. Since 1999 he has lived and worked in New York. Solmi’s work utilizes bright colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present-day society. His exhibitions often feature articulate installations composed of a variety of media including virtual reality experiences, video installation, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Solmi uses his art as a vehicle to stimulate a robust conversation with his audience, highlighting the contradictions and fallibilities that characterize our time. In 2009, Solmi was awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation of New York with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the category of Video & Audio. Solmi’s work was included in the 100-year anniversary exhibition of The Phillips Collection, Seeing Differently, and in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling exhibition, Outwin 2019: ‘American Portraiture Today,’ as well as the inaugural exhibition of the Ocean Flower Museum Island in Hainan Province, Danzhou, China. From 2016 to 2019 Federico Solmi was visiting Professor at Yale University School of Art, and Yale School of Drama, New Haven CT. Solmi was appointed guest critic at the Yale University School of Art for 2022.

A queer poem about gender transformations, hallucinogenic desires, and uncanny relationships. It’s past dawn, in an apartment inhabited by several figures. They are frozen in time, frozen in the movements they were making. They look at each other, caress each other, sleep, masturbate with VR helmets on their faces. In one magical moment, they come to life and start a languidly intoxicating party. In Wojciech Pu?’s essayistic 360° film, we follow several people of different genders and ethnic identities as they navigate a path through night, life, desire, and futility. Fragments of their stories are only fleetingly revealed in poetic speeches that resemble a verbal symphony rather than a narrative. The director builds the experience on hallucinogenic light work and uncomfortable camera movements. Will this party ever end, or have we found ourselves trapped with the characters in a labyrinth of existence that has no end?

Wojciech Pu? - filmmaker and artist. They work with moving images and sound. Their films/installations/live acts have been screened / exhibited / shown at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin), ICA in London, Museé du Louvre in Paris (Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin), Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, Art Museum in Lodz, Urban Glass in New York, A:D: Curatorial in Berlin, Spike Art Magazine / Yvonne Lambert in Berlin and Exchange Gallery in Lodz. Professor at the Cinematography Department in Lodz Film School, Poland.

The work is a parable on Alan Turing’s technological disembodiment, drawing on concepts from Terrence McKenna’s Hyperspace, an undoing of the matter of consciousness and technologies empty promises of liberation and progress. Imagining a future self calls for a dreaming of the kind Terence McKenna evokes in his essay New Maps of Hyperspace (1989) and from which this work formed the research. For McKenna the dream is “zero time” and “outside of history.” It is analogous to the speculative experience of hyperspace, a scifi term given to the space-time continuum in which it is possible to travel faster than light. In both states, time appears to stand still (Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that the closer an object travels to the speed of light the slower time becomes). Dreaming can quickly turn to nightmare however, and the episodic repetition of history-as-nightmare can, at times, feel like farcical simulation. Finally this work touches on the yawning gaps between our wish for escape, human connection and approval — and our seemingly Sisyphean task of achieving any of it. Hyperspace is a notion from science fiction of a superluminal method of travel. It is typically described as an alternative “sub-region” of space co-existing with our own universe which may be entered using an energy field or otherdevice. In most fiction, hyperspace is described as a physical place that can be entered and exited. Whereas in the VR work the viewer is essentially trapped in blue screen of death, unable to escape. (Text by Thomas Butler)

Doireann O’Malley (born 1981 in Limerick, IE) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Their research-led practice unites collaborative methodologies, healing and reparative movement, writing, and theory, with a strong technological emphasis on new media, virtual Reality, 3Dand film installation. O’Malley holds an MFA from University of Ulster in Belfast, UK. From 2021- 2022 held the position of Professor of Gender & Space at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. They were a research fellow at the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2020-2021) and a participant of the BPA// Berlin programme for artists (2019-2020). They acted as a guest mentor on the The Live Arts MA / AdBK Nuremberg (2001) Their exhibitions, talks and screenings have been presented at IMMA, Dublin, IE; Art Institute, Basel, CH; Biennale Zielona Góra, PL; Goethe-Institut Montreal, CA; Goethe-Institut, NY, USA; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, DE; National Sculpture Factory/Cork Film Festival, Cork, IE; GöteborgInternational Biennial for Contemporary Art, SE; Rencontres Internationales, Forum des Archives, Paris, FR & HKW, Berlin, DE; Mumok Kino, Vienna, AT; Dublin City Gallery, Dublin, IE; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, DE; Berlin Art Prize, 2018, Berlin, DE; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, DE.

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.

Inspired by Donna Haraway and John Berger’s contemporary theories on interspecies relations, Andro Eradze fills the frames of his works with plants and animals poised to exceed their boundaries. His camera follows scenes on the cusp of something undefined: a smouldering campfire, a stormy forest of wind-whipped trees, a flooding football pitch. Accompanied by haunting, transcendent soundtracks, his films feel like a compilation of the transitional moments of a feature film, leaving the viewer with a sense of expansive anticipation. Eradze’s new video installation for The Milk of Dreams, titled Raised in the dust (2022), stems from the conclusion of classical Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela’s The Snake Eater (1901). The poem’s protagonist has a supernatural talent for understanding the language of nature; he must decide between his connection to nature and his social responsibilities, ultimately bowing to the latter. Eradze’s film takes place in a forest. Taxidermized animals appear one by one, disturbed by an uproar of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Critical of the human carnival that is disruptive, toxic, and fatal for wildlife, Eradze’s film repositions fireworks as an entry point onto the dark and mythological side of the forest, a world of plants, animals, and phantoms.

Andro Eradze (b. 1993) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at the Shota Rustaveli Film Academy, as well as CCA-T (Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi) MFA program. His works meditate on the qualitative nature of images, still as well as moving. Working primarily in Georgia, Eradze experiments with introducing narratives to the outskirts of human habitation, in the literal and figurative sense. The feeling of an uncanny, non-anthropocentric presence in his works invites the viewer to the liminal space between the subjective and the visceral, between cognition, perception and the alien otherness of non-human experience. Animals, objects, plants, and digital artifacts permeate a sense of presence in a landscape that exists simultaneously parallel and entangled human experience. Eradze’s practice investigates the potentiality of animism as method. Photography, installations, experimental cinema practices and video blend into a project contemplating the fading present, in which the Anthropocene is faltering, and everything operates independently of it. Building upon the legacy of alternative approaches to reality—surrealism and magical realism—his images blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

What is our relationship to our tech devices? How do smart devices exist in the world? What do we want from them? What do they want from us? "Our Non-Understanding of Everything" is a daily practice, where we observe and speculate of how our personal tech devices and their building parts exist in a possible future, shared between the architecture of circuitry, political thought and the wild and programmed parts of our natural environments. “Our Non-Understanding of Everything” signals a complete openness to learn, shift viewpoints, upturn embedded prejudices, discover, surprise and draw connections between phenomena and things that reside and operate in wildly diverse realms. The project aligns with non-representational ideas, in which events and encounters in the world are constituted through emergent, relational, and intangible complexities that cannot necessarily be articulated or contained within the particular ways we attempt to represent them.

eteam is a two people collaboration who uses video, performance, installation and writing to instigate and articulate encounters at the edges of diverging cultural, technical and aesthetical universes. Traversing over earthly planes they trigger communication, collaborations and transformations between humans, nature, and technologies. Through their artistic practice eteam finds ways to collaborate with people who operate on the edges of mainstream culture and the marketplace. They are drawn to those willing to experiment, cross genres and cultural boundaries, they forge proximity and make visible the interconnections we humans share with land, animals, plants, ghosts, deities and objects. Eteam’s work is land- and process-based, often long term, situational and happens in places they don’t inhabit permanently. Practicing art is their way to enter the “outside,” pay close attention to the details, while trying to understand the whole. Eteam’s narratives have screened internationally in video- and film festivals, they lectured in universities, presented in art galleries and museums and performed in the desert, on fields, in caves and on mountaintops, in ships, black box theaters and horse-drawn wagons. They could not have done this without the generous support of Creative Capital and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Art in General, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, CLUI, Taipei Artist Village, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and MacDowell, the City College of New York, the Academy of Visual Art HKBU and the Fulbright Scholar Program, among many others. Their novel “Grabeland” was published by Nightboat Books in February 2020. They are represented by Gallery M29, Cologne Germany and Video Data Bank, Chicago.

Time and again, the feature film places animal actors at the side of its human protagonists – sometimes as loyal companions, sometimes as fierce opponents. However, its stagings do not only instrumentalise animals to release emotions, but also raise a fundamental question of our anthropocentric self-image: how to deal with the experience of the otherness of the animal?

Christoph Girardet, born in 1966, and Matthias Mu?ller, born in 1961, have been collaborating in film, video, photography, and installation since 1999. They had solo exhibitions at institutions such as FACT, Liverpool, Kunstverein Hannover and West, The Hague. They have participated in group shows at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, among others. Both have taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Oberhausen and Rotterdam. Their work is included in several public and private collections.

“The Peaceable Kingdom” is a deep fake ontology. It is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces metaphorically and physically as both totems and discrete intelligent beings. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks.

Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist and videographer whose practice includes the construction of large-scale outdoor sculpture and installations as well as the creation of ‘impossible’ moving and still images and architecture designed using 3D modeling, video editing, and image editing programs. Bunkley, an NZ/USA citizen, has also been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship in the USA. International screenings include the White Box gallery in NYC and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. In 2012 Bunkley was an award winner at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for the «Now&After» Festival. He took part in the Athens Digital Arts Festival and File Sao Paolo 2017, 2018, and 2019. Bunkley screened his video, Ghost Shelter/6 at The Federation Square Big Screen, Channels Festival 2017, Melbourne, and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany in 2018, Docfest Kassel 2019 and Jihlava IDFF 2021 and 2022, Czech Republic. And Video Art Miden and Video Art Projects, Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, FILE SP 2023 exhibition and Hochkantfilmfest, Portrait -video on advertising billboards, Bremen, Germany in 2023 Recent group exhibitions include the “Stories of Rust”, Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga, NZ, and “Green Around'' in Taipei, Taiwan in 2019, the Auckland Botanic Gardens 2022 and “Sculpture on the Gulf” 2022, Auckland, NZ, the “2021 National Contemporary Art Award”, Waikato Museum, Waikato, NZ and “Visions in the Nunnery”, Bows Art/Nunnery Gallery, London in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Solo exhibitions include the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand in 2018, the Institut für Alles Mögliche/Stützpunkt Teufelsberg, Berlin 2019, The Rabbit Room, Napier, NZ 2022, at Scott Lawrie Gallery, Auckland New Zealand 2022, and aGallery, Whanganui, NZ.

A bird carries us swiftly through empty lobbies and offices of a bank in Frankfurt, until it collides with a glass façade and falls to the floor. In this way, ‘Killing Kidding Colliding’ shows glass as both a material and an ideological symbol, moving between transparency and reflection, making things visible but impossible to touch. Moving mechanically between the different spaces of the bank, it draws attention to its own technique, while looking at the power and ideology of modern architecture, and how its immediate openness, transparency and smoothness also contain an underlying and invisible volatility.

Freja Sofie Kirk is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Working across video, photography and installation, and often in connection with each other, she looks at the inner mechanisms and contradictions of images. Her work takes the form of a continuous study of spatial and medial constructions, the violence they perform and the architecture they manifest. By utilizing the camera, Freja Sofie Kirk attempts to renegotiate the power relations inherent in both archi- tecture and image production.

The film Thirst is a post-human choreography of machines and displaced plants. Millions of tons of Estonian peat end up in greenhouses in the Netherlands, where it is used as a soil substrate for tropical Phalaenopsis orchids. Meanwhile, local communities in Estonia are left with dry wells and a lack of drinking water as their fragile wetlands are drained for peat extraction. The orchids from the Netherlands then find their way back to supermarkets and homes in Estonia. It is a thirst for luxury and abundance that keeps the capitalist machinery running. Thirst is one episode from Kristina Norman’s Orchidelirium film trilogy. Commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Author and director: Kristina Norman Cinematographer: Erik Norkroos Composer: Märt-Matis Lill Choreographer and cast: Mari Mägi Produced by Rühm Pluss Null in collaboration with CCA Estonia

Kristina Norman (b.1979, lives and works in Tallinn) is an artist whose interdisciplinary work includes video installations, sculpture, and projects in the city space, as well as documentaries and performance. She is interested in the issues of collective memory, the memorial uses of the public space, but also the subtle sphere of the body politic that transgresses the boundaries between the public and the private. In 2009 she represented Estonia at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, with a solo project; a multilayered mixed media installation entitled After-War. The project was a study of a conflict around the relocation of a Soviet monument in Tallinn. In 2022 at the 59th edition, the artist again represented Estonia with an ecocritical exhibition “Orchidelirium. An Appetite For Abundance”, a duo show with Bita Razavi, curated by Corina Apostol. Norman’s experimental film trilogy commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion, offers multiple ways to reflect on the legacies of colonialism from a specifically Eastern European perspective.

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.

New Centuries Are Rare is a short film by the artist collective coyote (SWE/DK). The film explores the interlaced history of the former mining village Norberg in Sweden and the emblematic story of the electronic music scene at the turn of the last century. Sampling these intersections in time, New Centuries are Rare unfolds a journey through psychological, chemical and technological rhythms placed in close proximity to the grinding resistance present in the region’s past.

coyote is a multidisciplinary artist collective founded in 2017. Their collective practice is constantly in flux and moves between artistic and curatorial work. In addition to several self-produced exhibitions and projects, coyote have exhibited at Bizarro (DK), KØS - Museum of Art in Public Spaces (DK), Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation (SE), NSFW/SVILOVA (SE) and curated events at Filmform (SE), Moderna Museét (SE) and Bonamatic (DK) among others.

Creatures of the Lines is an artist film and collaboration with anthropologist Heather Anne Swanson. It explores how desires for economic growth and linear progress have produced straightened forms in England’s watery terrains and asks what risks are associated with the conversion of once-curvy and braided worlds into a linearised landscape. Drawing on their longstanding research interests and conversations exploring the risks to and in aquatic ecologies with freshwater scientists, the film explores how English waterscapes have been transformed via the construction of canals. As arteries of British Empire, canals linked Indian cotton fields to domestic textile mills, facilitating vast ecological transformations from monoculture agriculture in the colonies to industrial discharges in England’s waters, soils, and air– and thus serve as a key site for exploring often-overlooked histories of colonial capitalism and their material presences in contemporary worlds. Attempting to work from within muddy, submerged sites, rather than from grand narratives or “god’s-eye” viewpoints, the work begins inside canals, telling stories from within the lines. Making use of the open-ended sensibilities of ethnography and natural history, it raises questions about ecological transformations and their ties to infra/structures of global political economy.

Sonia Levy's inquiry-led practice considers shifting modes of engagement with more-than-human worlds in light of prevailing Earthly precarity. Her work operates at the confluence of knowledge practices to interrogate Western expansionist and extractivist logics. She is the 2023-2024 recipient of the European Marine Board artist-in-residence programme. She was the 2022 selected artist of the S+T+ARTS4Water residency hosted by TBA21 in Venice and the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's "Ecological Globalization Research Group". She has presented her work internationally, including shows and screenings at Ocean Space, Venice; Museo Thyssen, Madrid; Museo CA2M, Madrid; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; ICA, London; The Showroom, London; Goldsmiths College, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Art Laboratory Berlin; HDKV, Heidelberg; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri, Iceland Whale Museum, Iceland; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge USA; NYU Gallatin, New-York, Paris. Her work has been published by MIT Press and Thames & Hudson.

While observing an isolated event of an artificial, industry-facilitated disaster, Normalisation of A Disaster makes a reflective commentary on the psyche of people in the vicinity of the site of disaster, albeit not immediately affected by it. Exploring the ideas of nonchalance, sensitization and casual tourism towards sites of disaster in a region plagued by disasters, this reflection includes the self of the artist, and his family, and hordes of ‘tourists’ attracted towards the light of the morbid spectacle. The Baghjan Oil Blowout happened on 27th of May 2020, which caught fire through a massive explosion on 9th of June 2020 after leaking gas in the atmosphere for two weeks, continued to burn for 6 months, before being finally doused on 15th of November, 2020. This artificial disaster in an Oil-India Limited owned site has caused the displacement of more than 1600 families who were in the vicinity of the site of gas blowout, and were being sheltered in makeshift relief camps in nearby areas.

Devadeep Gupta B. 1989 Guwahati, Assam, India I frame my artistic process as an exploration of regional ecological uncertainties through a critical examination of associated mainstream perspectives. Inspired by site-specific and vernacular occurrences, I delve into the intricate relationship between people and their land. My artistic practice encompasses the realms of film and sculpture, bridging the gap between conceptual and documentary approaches. Within this intersection, I am particularly interested in narratives that emerge from the convergence of mythology and contemporary experiences. Grounded in the rich cultural landscape of Assam, I draw inspiration from pragmatic practices, oral traditions, and folklore. Central to my artistic endeavors are performative processes that pay homage to meta-cultural practices. Through visual and conceptual stimuli, I incorporate elements of local community-led actions to portray the environmental changes specific to each site. Everyday rituals that have organically evolved as meta-cultural actions inspire the forms and expressions within my artistic practice. The outtakes of my process, realized as rhythmic sculptural forms are expressed through mediums of film, image and sculpture to illustrate these outcomes. ?

In the dead of winter, the gas flares and spectral sounds of an oil boom awaken the long-abandoned prairies and ghost towns of North Dakota.

Adam James Smith is a British filmmaker based in New York. His filmmaking practice spans rural and urban environments across China, Japan, and the United States. His first feature film, The Land of Many Palaces, on the Chinese "ghost city" of Ordos, participated in the Sundance Institute workshop and premiered at the 2015 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The film then went on to screen at festivals and on television around the world, picking up awards in Moscow, Rome, and Kyoto. His follow-up film, Americaville, on the Chinese replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming was sponsored by the Whicker's Foundation and the Asian Cinema Fund. The film was released in 2020 and has since been screened around the world at festivals and universities. Adam is currently completing a series of films documenting the diversity of the rural experience throughout the American heartland, including the country’s oldest Black rodeo in Okmulgee Invitational, the oil boom awakening the abandoned homesteads of North Dakota in Frontier Phantom, and Native American cowboys in Arapaho Pasture. Adam was educated in film at Stanford and anthropology at Cambridge, the latter of which he is currently an Affiliated Filmmaker at the university’s Visual Anthropology Lab.

A lone figure digs a grave in the dead of night. With no dialogue – and no sound other than the wind, the crackling of a fire and the scrape of a shovel against dry earth – we are confronted with a dark and mysterious, possibly cursed, universe where every object seems haunted by a meaning we barely sense, but which seem to confirm our anxieties. The head of an old doll, a comb, a lipstick. Relics whose silent language speaks of the end of their former owners. At sea, in the desert. Younes Ben Slimane’s disturbingly beautiful and melancholic imagery is bathed in darkness and in a golden chiaroscuro, lit only by the stars and the lone grave diggers’ headlamps.

Younes Ben Slimane: Tunisian artist and filmmaker, graduated from Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2022. His films have been selected in international festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, CPH:DOX, DokuFest, Festival dei Popoli. His work is part of the collections of art institutions and museums including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (IAC), France and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, MACBA - Barcelona, Spain.

Hundreds of summons letters arrive at the occupied building of La Voix des Sans Papiers. Doulo Kandé and Mamadou Taslim Diallo hand the letters over to all of the occupants, who will later appear in court. Those letters will not remain unanswered.

Elie Maissin 1990° and Mieriën Coppens 1992° are Belgian filmmakers. Since 2015 they have been documenting the struggle of the Brussels militant collective ‘La Voix des Sans Papiers’. For seven years Elie Maissin and Mieriën Coppens have directed several short films: Carry On, Almost At Rest, This House, We Are Stubborn, A new street, Caught In The Rain And Their Letters. They seek a balance between the attestation of a real existence and the evocation of other possibilities of existence.

Rien ne survit vraiment ici. Le fond est si profond qu’aucune lumière n’y pénètre jamais. Très peu de bateaux y passent. On ne sait pas quand les chutes auront lieu. Ce documentaire expérimental dresse le portrait d’un objet spatial et sa chute jusqu’aux ténèbres d’un cimetière spatial, une scientifique nous dévoile son attachement pour cet objet et l’absence d’images documentant ce lieu mystérieux. Voyage de Science-Fiction inversé, cet essai mélange archives réelles et fictives pour nous guider, tel un stalker, aux périphéries d’un lieu invisible.

Stéphanie Roland est une artiste visuelle et réalisatrice, basée à Bruxelles. Elle réalise des films et des installations qui explorent, entre le documentaire et l’imaginaire, les structures invisibles du monde occidental, les larges échelles du temps et les hyperobjets. ?Son travail est régulièrement présenté au niveau international, ses projets ont été inclus dans des expositions d'institutions majeures parmi lesquelles la Biennale de Venise, le Centre Pompidou, le musée du Louvre, le musée Benaki, la Biennale internationale d'art de Kampala, l’ISELP et le Wiels, entre autres.

« Tout a tendance à dériver avec le temps et perd de sa précision de façon périodique. Un ajustement assure que la précision reste au niveau requis. » Comme une invocation, une nécessité de calibration du paysage qui perdrait petit à petit sa condition naturelle, le film projette une nature mouvante, en constante modification et réajustement. Les niveaux de vents, hauteurs de neiges, les compositions physiques, géologiques, morphologiques et temporelles s’étalonnent lentement, la montagne s’équilibre. Dans la continuité de « Volva », film tourné en 2016 à l’observatoire astronomique du Pic du Midi, « Calibration » est une expérience physique de la nature, d’un temps vécu, en plein hiver, isolé dans un refuge de haute montagne durant trois semaines, au contact des aléas du vent, de la neige, des lumières et du temps.

Architecte de formation il collabore dans diverses agences avant de se consacrer exclusivement à sa pratique artistique. En 2006 il est lauréat de la bourse de la Fondation EDF pour les jeunes architectes. Il réalise le projet photographique Landscape scale sur les barrages des Pyrénées qui marquera la direction de ses futurs projets. Il centre ses recherches sur les relations qui se tissent entre l’architecture et le paysage, entre l’homme et la nature. Ses recherches tentent de construire la part impalpable de notre relation au naturel. Ses installations se développent entre photographies, vidéos et volumes construits. En 2016 il réalise son premier film, Volva à l’observatoire astronomique du Pic du Midi. Durant 3 semaines passées à 2871m, il capte inlassablement les traces du temps imprimés dans les expériences scientifiques, l’architecture du lieu et le paysage environnant. Nominé dans divers festivals, Volva est lauréat du prix LOOP Discover à Barcelone. Il intègre la collection du MACBA et du FRAC Normandie Caen. Il a été résident de la Casa de Velázquez et de l’Institut français. Ses travaux sont exposés en Europe, aux Etats-Unis et intègrent diverses collections publiques, FRAC, musées et Fondations. Il vit et travaille à Argut-Dessus, dans les Pyrénées.