Paris Programme
Friday, 28 November 2025

The video Berlin-Lichtenberg uses footage from a home movie filmed in 1943. The apparent intention of the filmmaker – to capture peaceful moments of family life such as a wife and child on a walk or leisure time at a lakeside restaurant in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg – is disrupted by unintended visual content. In the background, everyday life in the forced labour system becomes visible: a group of female forced labourers on the way to their work site, and the barracks of a forced labour camp behind the excursion venue. These visual elements are not consciously chosen, but rather a casual documentation of the omnipresence of forced labour in Nazi Germany. The amateur footage has been re-edited for the video with intertitles that contextualise the silent images and add a fictional level.

In his artistic work, Franz Wanner (*1975 in Bad Tölz, Germany, lives in Zurich) addresses topics such as the European Union’s migration policy, the German secret service and the arms industry, as well as their history and current structures, and the effects of Nazism on the German imperative of prosperity. “In a conceptual practice whose consistency of research and artistic output, in the tradition of Hans Haacke, continues – by means of investigations and transmedia – to ask questions where no one has yet done so” (Nora Sternfeld, HFBK Hamburg), “he creates images of a collective cognitive dissonance and analytical poetry about the pathology of overlooking within the Germany of today and its idioms” (Stephanie Weber, Lenbachhaus Munich). As Artist in Residence at the Harun Farocki Institute, he developed the exhibition Mind the Memory Gap for the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Under the title Eingestellte Gegenwarten, he realised his first solo exhibition in Italy at Merano Arte, which will be shown in modified form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2026.

A peasant’s wife loses her way in the forest and stumbles into a bear’s den. The bear keeps her with him, and after a time, a half-bear, half-child is born. They long to escape. To this backdrop, we move through the corridors and streets of a deserted German military town, once the central headquarters of the Soviet army’s occupation of Eastern Europe. Sealed off to the public for decades, this obscure complex became known to outsiders as “the Forbidden City.” A primal Russian fairy tale is employed to navigate this labyrinthine site, which appears to speak to both the legacy of this contested past and the unsettling resonances of our present.

Feargal Ward and Jonathan Sammon are filmmaking artists from Ireland. Much of their work explores the boundaries and possibilities of the hybrid-documentary form, where tropes and devices of narrative cinema are often appropriated or subverted in an attempt to interrogate established truths. Previous films they have collaborated on include 'Tin City', which premiered at this year’s Berlinale (Forum Expanded) before screening at multiple festivals including Karlovy Vary, Cinéma du Réel, and Festival dei Popoli, where it was awarded the International Discoveries Prize. Other collaborations involving Adrian Duncan include the films 'Lowland' (Cork International Film Festival), 'Memory Room' (IDFA, EVA International, Dokufest Kosovo), and 'Tension Structures' (IDFA, Hot Docs, RIDM). Ward’s feature documentary 'The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid' premiered in the main competition at IDFA and screened at multiple festivals before being broadcast on German, Irish, and Finnish television. His debut feature documentary 'Yximalloo' (co-directed with Tadhg O’Sullivan) premiered at FID Marseille, where it won the Prix Premier

The Zeppelin Grandstand on the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg is one of the most well-known architectural remnants of the Nazi era. Where the masses once gathered to cheer Hitler, today car races and various leisure activities take place. The film explores the tension between remembrance and neglect, use and responsibility - and poses the question: in a time of rising right-wing extremism, how do we engage with a place built for a criminal ideology that nonetheless remains woven into the fabric of daily life?

Saskia Kessler studied European Studies at Maastricht University and Sociology at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg before discovering her passion for filmmaking. Since October 2022, she has been studying documentary film directing at the University of Television and Film Munich.

Greetings from Kosovo 1989 (2025) nSingle-channel video, (DV Pal 4:3), 13:39 min. Greetings from Kosovo 1989 deals with archive footage from the 1989 gathering in Kosovo, made famous by Slobodan Miloševi?’s speech. Addressing a crowd of over a million, he spoke amid rising ethnic tensions in Kosovo and growing political unrest in Yugoslavia. His mention of “armed battles” in Serbia’s future has made this speech infamous, often seen as foreshadowing the Yugoslav Wars. Reframing and subverting the format of a TV reportage, the work emphasizes the mass hysteria, madness, and banality of nationalistic and religious iconography. In light of recent world events, revisiting this episode—an inseparable part of the history that profoundly marked the end of the 20th century—is a crucial gesture, as this history remains very much alive.

Bojan Fajfri? (Belgrade, former Yugoslavia) is an artist and filmmaker based in the Netherlands since 1995. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague and former resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Working primarily with moving images and photography, he creates layered narratives that reflect on history’s impact on individual lives. His interest lies in the porous relationship between memory and the moving image. His work has been presented at institutions such as Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), San Telmo Museum (San Sebastián), De Appel (Amsterdam), the Belgrade October Salon, NGBK (Berlin), and the Center for Cultural Decontamination (Belgrade). His films have screened widely at international festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Vienna International Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, Sharjah International Film Festival, Tempo Documentary Festival (Stockholm), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, and Impakt Festival (Utrecht).

In 2022, a major Russian cyberattack left the Norwegian islands of Bjørnøya and Hopen cut off from the world. On Air traces how a small group of Norwegian radio amateurs stepped in to re-establish contact, revealing the vital role of analog technology in an increasingly fragile digital society. Seen through the curious eyes of extraterrestrial anthropologists, the film explores how Morse code and radio signals may one day safeguard our hyperconnected world.

Astrid Ardagh is an artist and filmmaker from Engeløya in Northern Norway, with a bachelor’s degree in moving images from Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her site-specific works delve into the interconnections between people and their environment in a rapidly changing world. By merging her interest in anthropology with aesthetic storytelling, her films become immersive and sensory experiences that transcend traditional human-centred perspectives. Ardagh's short films have been screened at acclaimed festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand and Kortfilmfestivalen in Grimstad, as well as galleries and art museums such as Kristiansand Kunsthall, the Eye Film Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Fragmented records of events almost too sinister to believe: Cold War era covert radiation testing performed by the United States government on its citizens. The film grapples with the challenges of documenting the invisible, and capturing what is merely waves and frequencies. Shot on expired film, it is through the contaminated image and a complex soundscape that the unseen becomes manifest. – Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss, IFFR During the Cold War, the U.S. government developed a program of covert human radiation experiments, using its own citizens as test subjects. Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air is an elliptical exploration of this dark historical episode, operating across vast landscapes and individual human bodies. Fragments of archival and 16mm imagery – shot on expired film stock – evoke the locations of numerous test sites across the United States. Urban landscapes at night, bleached scenes of the American desert, and close-up details of rural America are interwoven with voice-over and on-screen text that reference testimony of the continuing impact of this period of covert testing. – Open City Documentary Festival

Sam Drake (b. Dayton, OH) is a filmmaker based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals and venues including The Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film Festival, CROSSROADS, The Museum of the Moving Image, Alternative Film/Video, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Non-Syntax Experimental Image, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, and Antimatter. She has programmed for the Union Cinema and Mini Microcinema and is currently a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"Nii tuli lõpp / And Then Came The End" is based on the experiences of a German Catholic priest, Magnus Frey, in prisoner of war camps in Narva, Estonia from 1945 to 1946. In this film, Siib depicts the locations of the story in Narva in their current state and without people, i.e. dilapidated buildings and winter landscapes. The soundtrack includes everyday life snippets from Frey’s memoirs, such as how prisoners of war were not paid the few rubles they had been promised and had their warm blankets taken away before winter came. And how religious prisoners managed to make communion bread despite the difficult conditions. And how hungry prisoners entertained themselves and each other by remembering their favourite dishes and writing down their favourite recipes. The excerpts of Frey’s diary are arranged on screen with a picture and on a soundtrack with music to create a prose poem of documentary material. The value of such micro-history, both as text and film, is not in revealing major developments or in interpreting historical turning points. Instead, the value is that individual anecdotes and fragments can be evidence that bring history to life and help us to take seriously the suffering and existence of others — past and present. By Teemu Mäki

Liina Siib is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. The topic of her works ranges from femininity and social space to different manifestations of people’s everyday practices. She combines field observations with archival sources, historical accounts and various narratives circulating in the society as well as with psychoanalytic approaches and contemporary art and film theories. The characters, spaces and situations in her works tend to go unnoticed due to their ordinariness or are silenced or ignored. In her multidisciplinary approach she uses the means of film, video, photography, installation, performance, ready-mades, print media and artist’s books. Her experimental documentary videos and staged short films have been shown both at festivals of artists' films and at art exhibitions in the galleries, often using the format of expanded cinema. In 2011, the project A Woman Takes Little Space by Liina Siib represented Estonia at the 54th Venice Art Biennale. Her work has been included in several public and private collections (e.g., the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn, Neues Museum in Nürnberg and Moderna Museet in Stockholm).

Set against silent 16mm footage filmed by a French soldier in occupied Algeria, the film stages an encounter between colonial memory and the soundscape of contemporary warfare. As present-day militarism infiltrates the archive, time fractures and the images begin to echo with conflicts past and future. What emerges is a haunting meditation on the ways colonial violence continues to reverberate through today’s military imaginaries.

Marcel Mrejen (FR/DZ) born in 1994 (Paris, FR) is a visual artist and filmmaker exploring the articulation of technology within living and economic metabolisms. The form of his work spans various time-based media — installations, filmmaking, sound, and machine-learning. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2018, before being a resident of Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains from 2021 to 2023. His work has been exhibited/screened in various cultural institutions, including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), or the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam). Parallel to his artistic practice, he co-curated the first edition of REFRESH: Future-Proof in 2021. His debut film Memories of an Unborn Sun was awarded Best Short Film at Visions du Réel in 2024 and was screened and won awards in numerous festivals around the world. In 2025, it was awarded the Scam Prize for Best Experimental Film. In collaboration with Eliott Déchamboux, his book: L’Europe c’est Deutshland quand tu rate laba tu est foutue mon frère, le reste c’est du fouma-fouma, was published by Jungle Books in 2019.

Miraculous Accident is a transtemporal film that narrates the love story between Nadir, a Moroccan student at the ?ód? Film School in 1968, his Jewish editing teacher Edyta, and their shared relationship with Jarek, Nadir’s best friend and Edyta’s protégé. Nadir is among a group of North African students sent to study communist filmmaking techniques as part of the Eastern Bloc’s support for anti-imperialist struggles. Despite her opposition to Zionism, Edyta is forced to leave Poland due to the political rift between Poland and Israel following the Six-Day War or the Naksa (The Setback). In 2024, Nadir returns to the school to make a film after discovering a forgotten letter Edyta wrote to him from Haifa in 1989. The film mourns the cruelty of nations, birthing rare miracles—accidental loves—only to crush them before they breathe. Inspired by the life of former Moroccan student, poet, and filmmaker Abdelkader Lagtaâ, who also plays Nadir in the film, Miraculous Accident weaves its plot through original footage and extracts from 1960s student films by Lagtaâ and his peers.

Assaf Gruber (b. Jerusalem, 1980) is a sculptor and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. The dynamic relationship between individuals and institutions is at the center of his practice, which aims to explore both how the political orientation of legacy establishments impact the lives of individuals and how these organizations choose to represent and communicate facts and their attendant artifacts. The absurd biographies of the protagonists in his projects simultaneously reveal and obscure the reasons and motives that lead people to obey or rebel against their inner world or the society in which they live. His photography, sculpture, and installations place the materiality of objects in relation to narrative dimensions, which in turn create fictional spaces where movement and non-movement function as a medium. Gruber’s solo exhibitions include the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018) and the Muzeum Sztuki,Assaf Gruber (b. Jerusalem, 1980) is a sculptor and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. The dynamic relationship between individuals and institutions is at the center of his practice, which aims to explore both how the political orientation of legacy establishments impact the lives of individuals and how these organizations choose to represent and communicate facts and their attendant artifacts. The absurd biographies of the protagonists in his projects simultaneously reveal and obscure the reasons and motives that lead people to obey or rebel against their inner world or the society in which they live. His photography, sculpture, and installations place the materiality of objects in relation to narrative dimensions, which in turn create fictional spaces where movement and non-movement function as a medium. Gruber’s solo exhibitions include the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018) and the Muzeum Sztuki, ?ód? (2015). His films have been featured in festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023) and FID Marseille (2022). He studied at Cooper Union in New York and is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. (2015). His films have been featured in festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023) and FID Marseille (2022). He studied at Cooper Union in New York and is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent.

I dreamed that I turned into an animal. I could cross the border freely, through the forest. I entered that land unnoticed — the land I miss and fear at the same time. I met my grandmother, whom I haven’t seen for several years. She didn’t recognize me, but we stood very close to each other, in silence. In the Animal’s Skin explores the Belarus-Poland border cutting through the ancient Bia?owie?a Forest — a protected sanctuary turned into a place of walls, detentions, and fear. The wall not only blocks refugees, but also divides animal habitats and disrupts ancient migration routes. In Bohoniki, a Tatar village near the border, the local tatar community buries refugees found in the forest with quiet dignity — a stark contrast to political neglect.The film reflects on borders, violence, and the fragile connections between humans, animals, and the forest that bears silent witness.

Yuliya Tsviatkova (b. 1993, Belarus) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Germany. With a background in microbiology and fine arts, she approaches moving image as a space where scientific observation meets poetics. Her work explores ecology, memory, and political trauma through non-linear narratives, often centering on exile, environmental violence, and the entanglement of human and non-human lives.

The central square of Izium, a few months after the city’s liberation. A hesitant camera pans over the traces of war, while residents resume their daily lives.

Juliette Corne holds a national higher diploma in visual arts from the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Her work navigates between contemporary art and cinema, exploring contemporary socio-political events and their consequences on representations and intimacy. Committed to revealing the mechanisms that lead to the normalization of violence, she captures, through her films, installations, and photographs, moments of life that continue despite horror and war. Zoé Monti

Chasing The Dot (2021-ongoing) is an immersive rollercoaster of light and colour, a sensorial plunge into the limits of perception. Within a vast, horizonless Ganzfeld space, the audience floats through storm-like fields of colour, blazing with indirect light, 1 million lumen waves carrying vivid after-images. At the centre of their gaze, a single floating point, he foveal dot, flares to life and remains fixed, no matter where the eye turns. Premiered at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, this installation explores stroboscopic thresholds and synaesthesia. Inspired by Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, the meticulously crafted light score fragments and reassembles vision, prompting open-eye hallucinations. Viewers experience a sensory fusion, seeing with their ears and listening with their eyes. Every modulation of hue, frequency, and decay reveals the hidden architecture of consciousness, exposing its hinges and seams. The audio emerges directly from the humming, pulsing, and crackling of the powerful lights, intertwining seamlessly with the visual hallucinations. It sounds like a rhythmic, electric storm rich, textured, and hypnotically synchronized with waves of colour. Here, light becomes tangible matter. Perception transforms into choreographed dance, casting each viewer as co-author. The artwork completes itself when spectators close their eyes, creating private cinemas behind their eyelids. Chasing The Dot demonstrates how flexible our perception of reality truly is, highlighting how astonishingly fine tuned our brains are in creating consciousness.

Philip Vermeulen is a Dutch artist who explores the fundamentals of human perception. His installations are to be experienced with the whole body, while challenging the physicality of light and sound, movement and vibrations. Vermeulen experiments with a variety of elements including motion, light, sound compositions, physics, nature, and digital technology, creating hypersculptures that appeal to and trick the senses of the spectator. These kinetic works act as a catalyst, dissolving the boundaries between mind and material, creating new realms of imagination and challenging perspectives. His installations have been exhibited in museums such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (NL), Rijksmuseum Twenthe (NL), Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, NL), Museum for International Light Art (Unna, DE), iMAL (Brussels, BE), Light Art Museum (Budapest, HU), Industrial Art Biennial (Labin, HR) and ART Rotterdam (NL). Works have also been featured at media festivals, including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam, NL), Ars Electronica (Linz, AT), Festival Interstice (Caen, FR), Mapping Festival (Geneva, CH), Novas Freque?ncias (Rio de Janeiro, BR) and CTM at Halle am Berghain (Berlin, DE). In 2024, Vermeulen will present his first large-scale solo exhibition Chasing The Dot at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe.

L’esprit de l’escalier, is the third in a trilogy of films surrounding Pálás, a cinema in Galway, Ireland, designed by Tom dePaor. Opening in 2018, the cinema closed to the public in February 2025, and I attended one of the last screenings at Pálás – Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, itself a film about the closing of a cinema. I returned the following morning with thoughts of this in my head as I filmed the staircases throughout the building. These spaces are untempered, part indoor, part outdoor, while the cinemas with their plush red interiors are optimised for sound, temperature, and light. The title of my film refers to the expression (to think of the perfect reply too late) but moreover to the spirit of the staircase. Just like Goodbye Dragon Inn, so much life goes on in these spaces, where people, weather, light, and sound, intersect with, and even possess the movement or the stillness of the camera, the place itself becoming a film.

Peter Maybury is an Irish multidisciplinary artist. His practice-based research encompasses works as an artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, publisher, writer, editor, curator, musician, and educator. He is a graduate of Central Saint Martins, London, and a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research, TU Dublin. He has collaborated extensively with artists and institutions, editors and curators, on more than 200 art and architecture publications. Peter is a longstanding collaborator with Tom dePaor, making books, films, and works for exhibition. His film work includes On being there (2022/23, screened at Rencontre Internationale Paris/Berlin 2023/24), Landfall (2020), an hour-long dual-screen film installation, and with dePaor the Gall films Drape (2018), and A Study (2015) which was made for exhibition at ETH Zurich. Peter is author of Make Ready (2015), and co-author with dePaor of Reservoir (2010) and Of (2012).

Where I'm calling from was an exhibition of new work by Netherlands-based artist Minne Kersten. Working with the architecture of David Dale Gallery, Minne constructed a detailed and evocative environment exploring the narrative capacity of inanimate objects, and their role in triggering memory in a transportative way. Minne takes a literary approach to her work, blending installation, video, sculpture and drawing to craft the backdrop of a fictional world. Through her immersive installations, she reveals buildings to be receptive to stories and traumas, as she stages situations subjected to chaos, decay, and deconstruction. Minne explores the traces of events left behind and exposes them as witnesses of private stories retained by the walls that surround us. Her work considers the relationship between the real and imagined, the ordinary and the uncanny, and poses questions about memory and its reconstruction. Working across a range of media, she interweaves personal themes such as mourning, loss and memory with the collective domain of fiction, fables, and symbols.

Minne Kersten (1993, NL) is an artist based in Paris and Amsterdam, working with video, installation and paintings. Underneath these media lies a literary approach in which she combines several techniques to construct a world where objects and scenes hold traces of both facts and fiction. She speculates on how we can recall events, memories and stories, by tracing what is lost in what remains. Her work considers the relationship between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the ephemeral, and poses questions about memory and reconstruction. By drawing attention to the act of construction in both our shared real and imagined world, her work offers a connection between intimate themes such as mourning, loss and desire, and the collective domain of fiction, fables and symbol making. Painting and drawings are continuously made during a process of introspection and research. They serve as a form of visual note taking, made alongside her spatial approaches. In recent years, she has used the method of crafting an architectural environment, which reveals itself as a scenography, a film set, and subsequent sculpture. Often informed by personal encounters with spaces, these sculptures provide a tangible terrain to explore how a space can witness or distort stories and events. By staging situations that embed symbolic elements such as the appearance of animals or phantom presences, she refers to ways of how the past can leave impressions on the present. Subjecting her scenes to chaos, decay and disruption, she suggests different outcomes of the familiar circumstance of feeling unstable, losing control and reaching a state of transition.

A lone airplane flies high over a dark landscape. Amid fields of untouched snow a rover is scanning both the ground and the stars, and is beginning to be troubled by the history it was once fed. People isolated inside the plane try to interpret the rover’s increasingly complex messages, while attempting to uncover the past and the future.

Appu Jasu (b.1987) is an artist living in Helsinki working with video, sound, photography and text. In his works fiction, documentary and the absurd meet and exchange ideas about life and society. His practice involves thinking through all the included mediums – picture, text and sound – each taking their turn leading the artwork into a new direction. Jasu’s video works can be found from the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Helsinki Art Museum, and they have been shown e.g. in WNDX, Canada and in doclisboa, Portugal.

'Another Woman - film adaptation' is a three channel film presenting intimate scenes of three characters, two women and a man, in the course of a breakup. The film explores a world of fiction and performance in a cinematographic and spatially designed narrative where three images are presented simultaneously. The visual style focusses both on the performing bodies and their surroundings. Subcutaneous emotions surface through tactile interaction, as the characters touch and feel their place amidst the physical properties of the space. Walls, ceiling, floor, curtains and furniture form obstacles, boundaries and voids that confront the protagonists with the situation and state of mind in which they find themselves. The interiors become mirrors for their inner worlds, surreal and intuitively recognisable at the same time. 'Another Woman - film adaptation', 2025, is a re-staging of the spatial installation 'Another Woman', 2022. We show an exerpt of 13 min 6 sec. of the final film that will have an estimated duration of 70 minutes.

Leopold Emmen is a collaboration between filmmaker Nanouk Leopold and visual artist Daan Emmen. In our work, we experiment with film as a spatial, cinematographic experience in which the visitor plays an active role. Through the characteristics of a place and the behaviour of our protagonists, we want to make tangible how a presence influences life and relationships with the other. An open invitation to explore the physical and mental world of the characters themselves. Creating awareness of the way in which space, sound and moving image can come together in a deepening, embodied experience, we want to stir up our conditioned gaze. Reflecting on how we see the world, how we see ourselves in that world and how we see each other.

Night. The moon is a rock. The ears are stopped. A chair balances on the roof of a house. A silver box composes itself: a mysterious instrument. A marble rolls around in somebody’s head. Two rocks spin. Is it possible to stop the mind?

Nelson Henricks graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1986. He moved to Montréal in 1991 and received a BFA from Concordia University. He recently completed a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal. Henricks has taught art history and studio art at Concordia University, McGill University, UQAM and Université de Montréal. A curator and artist, Henricks is best known for his videotapes and video installations, which have been exhibited worldwide. A focus on his video work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the Video Viewpoints series in 2000. Henricks was the recipient of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2002, the Prix Giverny Capital in 2015, and the Prix Louis-Comtois in 2023. An exhibition of his work was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2023. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and others. He is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Gold and Ashes is erected upon internal and external — ontological-epistemological — scaling dualities reflected in the characters but also in the time and space where the action is set or in the world they inhabit. It is structured around a concrete plane and an abstract plane as a reference to, human subjectivity. The project features two female actresses. The concrete plane plot is set in filming locations that provide a backdrop for the narrative with direct dialogues and action — mother-and-daughter, placed in the present time. It conveys a social sphere outlined by complex communication models and conventions — such as kinship and existential quests while underlining the artificiality of a constructed reality — an inhabited drawing. The abstract plane plot is set in a film studio that provides a backdrop for the para-philosophical narrative with monologues and no action — two disconnected entities (not sure if aware, of each other), placed in an unknown time. It conveys a mental labyrinth outlined by relational power dynamics and conflicting human emotions — such as humanity’s history and its relation to planet Earth while underlining the speculation of symbolic and imaginary articulations damaged by the loss of the social, political, and spiritual. Overall, the project unfolds around cognitive systems, societal models, and civilizational paradigms, and uses an approach that acknowledges human evolution, simultaneously outlining human limitations to follow the poetics and relational politics of two grand narratives — [a]naturalism, [anti]eco/[geo] constructivism — which usher the mythology of the human impact on Earth (Anthropocene); compelled by two timeless perspectives: progress and apocalypse — questioning our ability to rebuild and pilot the Earth away from the socio-ecological disasters and showing what it means to appreciate the Earth (but also humanity) as an irreplaceable becoming — a trajectory that cannot be replicated, remade or mastered. Gold and Ashes is a powerful exploration of the human condition in the face of devastation, reflecting Lamas’s ongoing commitment to addressing difficult and urgent themes through innovative techniques that often disrupt traditional narrative structures, creating films that are non-linear, fragmented, or that deliberately withhold key information. This technique enhances the parafictional quality of her work, as it mirrors the complexity and uncertainty of real-life events, where truth is often elusive. In the project she explores the idea of subjective memory and how personal and collective histories are constructed. By using parafiction, she highlights the fluidity of memory and the ways in which stories are shaped by the storyteller’s perspective, as well as by political and social contexts. Gold and Ashes symbolizes the duality of destruction and resilience—the “ashes” represent the remnants of war and loss, while the “gold” signifies the hope and strength that survivors cling to in their efforts to rebuild their lives. Lamas uses her distinctive style to blur the lines between reality and fiction, creating a layered and immersive experience that challenges viewers to question their understanding of truth and memory and its impact in both the private and public spheres.

Salomé Lamas has produced over thirty projects, which have been installed and screened internationally, both in cinema auditoriums and contemporary art galleries, and museums. Each of them gives way to a different social reality, usually characterized by its geographical and political inaccessibility. The artist’s interest in impenetrable, politically ambiguous contexts is guided by concerns and the need to problematize reality that otherwise would not be possible. The web of relations making up the socio-political fabric of her projects is made visible through representational strategies, for which she adopted the term parafiction. Rather than complying with a shapeless meaning of parafiction — for which there is no established terminology — she proposes its expansion and resignification. In her artistic practice, parafiction can be read in the light of its prefix “para-”, in which we encounter various disruptive effects that are vital for its comprehension. Derived from the Latin, “para-” indicates “alongside, adjacent to, beyond or distinct from, but analogous to”; in certain word combinations, it can also mean “wrong, irregular,” pointing towards an “alteration” or “modification”; further, “para-” implies “separate, defective, irregular, disordered, improper, incorrect, perversion or simulation.” In this way, parafiction would be something in which fiction has been perverted, altered, modified, or pushed beyond its point of reference, as opposed to remaining within the boundaries of the category of fiction. It can also be understood as a “simulation” of fiction, pointing to a distortion of the border around what is considered fiction, thus reaching what is on the other side of that border: that is, the world of non-fiction or seeking the “real” world. Thus, instead of fiction being used to blur the border with non-fiction, it is used as a way of expanding and transcending those boundaries. Salomé Lamas departs from the principle that we do not have access to a stable reality. Instead, we have an excess of meanings, interpretations, explanations, manipulations, (de)constructions, and evaluations that go into narratives and systems that sustain and occupy us. Consequently, the need for appropriating the idea of parafiction stems from the questioning of how human subjectivity is formed, drawing on psychoanalysis, with the aim of clarifying and expanding concepts such as real (something that is out of reach), reality, symbolic, and imaginary. Thus, she is led to operate at the border between fiction and non-fiction, employing representation and hypothesis generation through certain meditative criteria and a deontological code relative to what is plausible, assuming consciously the “task of the translator” —comparable to illusionism — and pushing its boundaries. In this context, she draws on distinct non-fictional strategies that include ethnographic research, as well as thought experiments, reflexivity, restaging and performativity, among others, to explore the limits of fiction. This is visible in the development of her working methodology, where we find various manifestations of parafiction, such as scenarios where characters and fictional stories intersect with the world as we are experiencing it. The combination of these strategies, to the detriment of other speculative aspects, forms a sort of hypothesis that maintains a level of accuracy with reality but also questions its authority. Through parafiction it is possible to take a convention and deconstruct it, distort it, expose the impossibility of providing evidence for the truth, to the point where doubts are raised about its validity, yet still producing reasons for understanding it as plausible. Salomé Lamas problematizes both sides of the border between historical and imaginary worlds, and records how they have changed over time, by understanding parafiction as a fundamental translation tool for defining identity, language and culture. Intensifying, exaggerating and speculating on how the world is made sensible, by triggering moments that reveal their fabrication, in a post-truth context heightened by the technological and globalized nature of our times. To reveal this transformation is a continuous and thorough undertaking, but also spiritual, having the ability to relate the individual sphere (private) with the social sphere (public) and so introducing new information and perspectives on our past, present and future. Thus, although conscious of its limits and apparent contradictions, parafiction helps give form to the chaos of life and endow it with significance, in a compromise between reality and its fictionalization.

A headfirst rush into the capitalist, urban landscape, using dynamic camerawork and canny editing. Productivity, optimisation, constant forward motion. In this experimental short from artist and filmmaker Lisa Freeman, frenetic camerawork and quickfire editing convey the body’s lacklustre requirement to always be working in our capitalist society. Using glimpses of concrete environments, bodies on treadmills, crash-test dummies, and other ubiquitous urban images, and melding these with a soundscape of ragged breathing and disjointed conversations, Hook, Spill, Cry Your Eyes Out provides a cutting commentary on what our society inflates with importance.

Lisa Freeman is an artist and filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. Her work draws into question economic and power structures and explores how intimacy might be employed as a form of resistance. Recent works have examined the everyday, where the city’s sounds play in the dreams, nostalgias, or hopes of another and where small moments lead to more surreal events (Slipped, Fell and Smacked my Face on the Dance Floor), and social isolation in the public realm (Hook, Spill, Cry Your Eyes Out). Freeman is a studio member at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. She has received several Bursary and Project awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her work is held in the collection of the Arts Council of Ireland. Freeman has taken part in residencies in South Korea (BARIM Arts, 2016), and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris x Institut Francais, supported by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Dublin and Bétonsalon, Paris (2025).

During its wanderings in a nocturnal forest, a robot encounters various flowers and plants, confronting the natural world and attempting to smell the scent of a wild bloom.

John Gillies is a Sydney (Eora)-based artist who has been creating work with time-based media, including performance, moving image, installation, music and sound, since the 1980s. Drawing on the world of experimental theatre and the languages of video and cinema, his art practice is often improvisational and collaborative.

Members of the gay linedance club ‘Outliners’ dance in a black room. ‘Glory 1’ is a video artwork conceived by Danish multidisciplinary artist Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl. The dreamy scenario presents a symbolic antidote to patriarchy and its destructive understandings of masculinity. In the mind of the artist, ‘Glory 1’ is a symbol of protest. Cowboys dancing together instead of shooting each other down is a subversive act against conventional understandings of man. It is a symbolic gesture of reversing the macho ideal within patriarchy, that weighs down and dictates the life of men.

Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Slaptstick humour and gothic horror meet up in Mejdahl's multifaceted work that often has its starting point in the artist's personal life story. Be it music album releases, film productions or large solo exhibition projects, Mejdahl's practice explore the topics of trauma healing, our relationship to nature, spirituality, and gender identity. His video works have reached international audiences with screenings across Europe and Asia. Under the alias Kim Kim, Mejdahl has made numerous live performances and released music albums. Within few years Mejdahl has collaborated with a wide range of different institutions, counting Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Roskilde Festival, Danish theme park BonBon-Land, Theater Sort/Hvid, and most recently KØN - Gender Museum Denmark. In 2025 Mejdahl was awarded the three-year working grant by The Danish Arts Foundation. His work is part of The National Gallery's collection in Denmark.

Roma Talismano, seventh instalment of the ‘Superfictional World Atlas’, explores Rome as the moral and aesthetic talisman of the West. To the sound of opera hymns and arias, the allegorical animals the she-wolf, the eagle and the lamb narrate the endless recycling of Roman aesthetics to create an artificial and pale classical universality, from the Renaissance to fascism to the present day: Roma Talismano, eternal volcano of visual and spiritual bleach.

Guerreiro do Divino Amor holds a master’s degree in architecture from the School of Architecture of Grenoble (France). His since 20 years ongoing research “Superfictional world Atlas” explore the historical, media-related, religious and corporative mythologies that make up the collective imaginary of nations. He creates an universe of science fiction from fragments of reality in the shape of films, publications, and large-scale installations. Divino Amor represented Switzerland in the 2024 Venice biennial, was a fellow of the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program in 2021-2022, was awarded the PIPA Prize 2019. In 2022 he presented the retrospective solo show “Superficitional Sanctuaries” at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. His work has been presented at the Frestas Trienal in Sorocaba (Brazil) Bangkok Biennale 2024, CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), Pinacoteca de São Paulo, among other institutions. His award-winning films have been screened at various national and international venues and festivals. Guerreiro do Divino Amor lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

If the river’s mouth could speak, what would it say? Enacting the possibility of river mouths as storytellers and historiographers, Kammakamma is the opening episode of the second work in a moving-image trilogy exploring the Eerste River in South Africa as witness and carrier of submerged narratives. Its title evokes slippages between the Khoekhoe terms for water (//amma) and similitude (khama), with 'kamma' absorbed into Afrikaans as 'make believe.' Through three interconnected chronicles by Abri de Swardt, poet Ronelda S. Kamfer, and historian Saarah Jappie, the river becomes a saturation point for understanding climate and catastrophe. In this episode, De Swardt probes a founding myth of Afrikanerdom through Hendrik Biebouw, a teenage idler who in 1707 attacked a Dutch East India Company watermill at the river, drunkenly declaring himself an “Africaander” – then a term reserved for enslaved, manumitted, or indigenous peoples. Biebouw’s declaration is inextricable from the river where it was spoken, from wine as settler-colonial agent, and from the instability of language itself. Recast in purgatory, he sifts sand from sandbags mined around the river mouth back into the blocked confluence of the Eerste and Plankenbrug Rivers, his delirious oratory jumbling Afrikaans, Dutch, German, and Malagasy. Interludes filmed after flooding show the river as both wild and engineered, while tableaux drawn from swimming and life-saving manuals foreground burden and suffocation. Through double synchronisation De Swardt frames perception itself as intoxicating disorientation.

Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working across video, photography, sculpture, and performance, De Swardt’s practice challenges the ongoing effects of settler-colonial whiteness and masculinity in Southern Africa, and perceptions of queerness as ‘unnatural’ and ‘unAfrican’, through joining historiography with fiction, auto-ethnography, ecology, desire, and the fantastical. De Swardt’s work has been exhibited, performed, and screened at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg, amongst others. Solo exhibitions include POOL x Field Station, Cape Town (2024); POOL, Johannesburg (2018); MOT International Projects, London (2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (2011). De Swardt has undertaken residencies at Rupert, Vilnius; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen; and the Nirox Foundation, Cradle of Humankind. In 2022, he was awarded a Social Impact Arts Prize and nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a 2025–2026 artistic fellow at Braunschweig Projects, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.

SPEECHLOSS is a film inhabited by isolated characters, out of sync and searching for direction. In an eerie seaside atmosphere, we come across a jogger, a bodybuilder, dogs and a strange giant organ. Speechloss is a progression of four scenes in which both the wind and a powerful desire to feel alive blow. For each of them is an abandoned AI, waiting to be activated.

Charlotte Dalia was born in 1993. She graduated from the Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse. A visual artist, video maker and film director, her research focuses on both the formal and narrative effects of cinema. Steeped in the principle of the “cinémonde” theorised by Jean-Luc Nancy, she uses cinema as a repertoire of signs that “opens the inside onto itself.” She has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and has been invited to produce two solo shows. Continuing her investigations into the writings of reality through the forms of fiction, she trained in documentary writing with Ty Films and Films en Bretagne. She is currently developing ALMERICA, a project combining climate crisis and film sets, as well as writing a medium-length film following on from SPEECHLOSS, in order to pursue and expand its universe.

"I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies. On second thought, maybe it's better to start like this: I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies."

Nicolas THOMÉ ZETUNE (1993, Brazil) is a film director based in São Paulo. In 2012, he founded the production company FILMES DE AMOR. Nicolas' short films have been screened at some of the biggest film festivals, such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nicolas' first feature film, “O Pequeno Mal”, was presented at FID Marseille in 2018. The second film, “O Tubérculo”, had its world premiere at the 27th Tiradentes Film Festival. In 2025, Nicolas was one of the selected participants for Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires, an international forum for discussion and project development organized in partnership with the Berlin Film Festival and BAFICI – Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. He is currently preparing his third feature film, "Invisible Tunnel," a project selected for FIDLab (Marseille, France). Filming is scheduled for November 2026. Felipe ANDRÉ SILVA (1991, Recife) is a filmmaker and poet. His film credits include the features Santa Mônica (2015) and Passado (2020), and the short Cinema Contemporâneo (2019). He regularly works as a curator for the Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife festival. In literature, he has published the chapbooks o escritor Xerxenesky and o autocad de Britney Spears, and currently runs &legal edições, a digital micro-publishing house dedicated to contemporary poetry.

« We do not have to know each other in advance » is a hybrid video work that alternates moments of dance performance with archive footage and textual quotations. Gabriela Löffel draws on the political aspect of public space to construct her thinking, developing a visual essay that stages the ‘performativity of bodies in this zone of political action’. Drawing on the written work of Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist who has worked on the question of the body and its normalised representativeness in contemporary society, Löffel gives corporeality to the issues raised by the author. Quotations from Butler's work are shown alongside the danced and archival elements of the video. The almost fixed camera allows us to examine in detail the slow, precise movements of the dancers. The camera's movements are almost imperceptible, so subtle are they. The artist and choreographer Cédric Gagneur worked closely together to define the various movements that make up the choreography: they propose an abstraction of gestures of resistance or revolt, drawn from archive images from the collection of the Archives contestataires de Genève. The piece is inhabited by slowness and silence, giving the body enough space to unfold individually or collectively. The work offers a dialectic of the potential for protest in the public space. Co-produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain and the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève for the Mire program.

Gabriela Löffel mainly works with time-based media and focuses on the zones of political and finance structures, and infrastructures. Shifting and translating from the documented immediate to the fields of interpretation and mise-en-scène are strategies she uses in her work process. A method that often results in long-term projects and enables her to create spaces for questions and to propose disruptions to linear narratives. She is interested in the obliquity of the subject and his context. It’s in this gap, brought about by her way of addressing subjects, that her work opens onto reflections on the sense of how we understand a world when we become conscious of the fragmentation of our knowledge. Her work has been presented at institutions and galleries including MAST Bologna, Aargauer Kunsthaus, EMAF Osnabrück, Galería Metropolitana Santiago, Dazibao Montreal, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale among others. Gabriela Löffel is a recipient of the Swiss Art Award, the Lewis Baltz Research Fund, the Landis+Gyr Grant, as well as others.