Paris Programme
Sunday, 30 November 2025

From the Campidoglio to the Zoo is a film and sound work that examines the bridging of coloniality into a postwar Italy drawing upon the Ponte Flaminio, a bridge projected to celebrate fascist aspirations and to provide a ceremonious entry to the city, constructed based on the original proposal of Armando Brasini after WWII. The work borrows its title from an unpublished essay by author William Demby, written as a critique of the 1959 Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers which he attended. The congress, dedicated to the development of vision and solidarity amongst Afro-diasporic cultural producers existed in contrast to its hosting by the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa. The film is activated through a live sound performance recorded inside the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, by Dudu Kouate and Justin Randolph Thompson drawing upon the essence of negritude advanced in relation to the congress and the fragmentary nature of global Black unity. The sound was performed using a range of instruments that are part of the ethnographic collection of the Pigorini Museum in Rome housed by the Museo delle Civiltà. This was the first time that these instruments have been played since their placement in the collection in some cases over one hundred years ago. The work was supported by the British School at Rome and the Museo delle Civiltà.

Justin Randolph Thompson is an artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Based between Italy and the US since 1999. Thompson is a recipient of a 2024 MAP Fund Award, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Italian Council Research Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park amongst others. His work and performances have been exhibited widely in institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and The American Academy in Rome and are part of numerous collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museo MADRE. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.

Images de Tunisie reclaims and recontextualizes archival footage from 1940s newsreels produced by Les Actualités Françaises, combining it with new images filmed at the same sites, among the architectures that still remain.

Younès Ben Slimane is a Tunisian visual artist and filmmaker. He graduated in architecture from the National School of Architecture and Urbanism in Tunis before completing postgraduate studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR). His work has been showcased at the Mucem in Marseille (FR), the Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain in Dakar (SN), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje (MK), the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (FR), the Beirut Art Center (LB), ETH Zurich – gta exhibitions in Zurich (CH), the Versailles Architecture Biennale in Versailles (FR), the Art Explora Museum Boat, and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio (US), the Zaha Hadid Foundation in London (UK) and the Galeria de Arte Cinemática in Vila do Conde (PT). His films have been selected for international festivals including the Locarno Film Festival (CH),CPH:DOX (DK), Black Star Film Festival (US), DokuFest (XK), EXiS Seoul, (KR) and Prismatic Ground New York (US), among others. He has received numerous awards, including Loop Barcelona Award (2022, ES). His work is part of art collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) Print and Kadist Paris–San Francisco.

In the 21st century, you returned to the archipelagos Saint Louis of Sénégal, and Saint Louis of Paris to unearth vestiges of signares—women once at the centre of Occidental French West African commerce and society. Through the night, through the whispers of your aunts and nieces, through the institutions that house present-day French “patrimoine (cultural heritage),” you fell into a spiral between colonial presents and the past.

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye is a pluridisciplinary researcher and educator from T?maki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Her matrilineal ancestry traces to Senegal and France, while her patrilineal lineage is of Polish and Czech descent. Through iterative and ritualistic processes, Yana’s practice is a poetic inquiry into the material and immaterial conditions of belonging, approaching artistic practice as archaeological gesture, unearthing the spectral, often erased presence of intercultural identities embedded in sites marked by colonial history and personal heritage. At present, Yana is at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, participating as one of ten internationally selected artists in the In Situ program, which will conclude March 2026.

La Quema (del Planeta “B”) is a video installation that reflects on the 1624 burning and sacking of Guayaquil by the Nassau Fleet through the lens of Ecuador’s current vernacular practices—most notably año viejo, a popular custom in which effigies are collectively burned during New Year’s celebrations. This mestizo ritual resists linear narratives, offering instead an Andean zig-zag perspective on renewal through repetition. The crafting of these effigies embodies Guayaquil’s vibrant popular culture and capitalist-driven desires, while paradoxically creating space for (political) protest. In a context where sustaining artistic practices remains precarious, this tradition has also given rise to informal economies. Artists Joshua Jurado and Diego Cuesta—both based in southern Guayaquil—were invited to construct a año viejo in the shape of a galleon, inspired by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessel Amsterdam. Paraded through the city before being set alight, the sculpture marked 400 years since the original event, confronting historical cycles through collective action and vernacular symbolism. Filmed during one of Guayaquil’s recent peaks in violence—tied to extractivist legacies—the project brings together two temporal perspectives shaped by the same hegemonic system. La Quema (del Planeta “B”) stands as a pointed question to that very system—one that has shaped our bodies, ethics, and desires in service of capital.

Francisco Baquerizo-Racines (b. 1993, Quito, Ecuador) Currently living and working in the Netherlands. Baquerizo-Racines holds an MA in Fine Arts from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht (2022) and a BA in Visual Arts from PUCE (2017). His work has been shown across Ecuador, South America, and the Netherlands, with projects held in the MACBA archive and supported by the Mondriaan Fonds. In 2025, his film installation La Quema (del Planeta “B”) premiered at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

Under the butterfly effect triggered by the second wave of reform and opening up of China, a small family found itself caught in a continuous hurricane in life. Many years later, Yang Xiaolong received four letters from his long-unseen father. As a result, the textual clue of "country grows and family broke " unlocked the suppressed childhood memories within him...

Renjie ZHU, director and cinematographer, born in 1992, has lived in the ancient city of Anyang and the metropolis of Shenzhen due to family reasons since childhood. He currently resides in Hangzhou. He graduated from the China Academy of Art with both his bachelor's and master's degrees, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in film creation at the same institution. His work has won the New Wings Promotion Award in Golden Rooster Youth Short Film Season, and won the Qilin Outstanding short film in In Moment Film Festival, and has been selected for the Beijing International Short Film Festival and Light My Fire Youth Film Festival and so on.

Kamikaze bird that has embarked on a journey to a savage place of no return. A representation of the state of overflowing violence brought from drug trafficking through the oneiric vision of a marginal teenager recruited by a cartel.

Mauricio Sáenz (b. 1977, Matamoros, Mexico) is a visual artist with a practice spanning installation, sculpture, and video. His work explores the limits of impossibility as an active drive for transformation represented through notions as isolation, confinement, uncertainty and historical memory. He received a master’s degree from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and has displayed his work at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City, Galerie Art Virus in Frankfurt, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, as well as in video art festivals such as Proyector and MADATAC in Spain, Traverse and Instants Vidéo in France, and FIVA in Argentina, among others.

In the Garden of Hesperides, a fruit, capable of granting immortality to whoever ate it, once grew. This garden, located somewhere off the coast of West Africa, was guarded by a dragon with one hundred heads. Through the use of bio-sonification of banana trees, a monoculture crop in the Canary Islands, we discover a tale of eternal life where this mythical garden used to exist.

Their work investigates the relationship between mythology, history and materialism. Their first feature film, Eles transportan a morte (2021), premiered at the Venice and San Sebastian festivals winning awards at both. It has subsequently been shown at international festivals such as Rotterdam, Cairo, Mar del Plata, Viennale, Hamburg and Sao Paulo. Their short films have been shown at festivals like Toronto, Locarno, New York, Ann Arbor and many others. They have made installations and performances in art centers like CCCB (Barcelona), BAM (New York), TEA (Tenerife) or Solar (Vila do Conde).

An old man awakens in a deforested rubber estate and finds himself in the colonial past. A distant old folk song ripples as he falls into the eternal loop of rubber tapping.

Wey Yinn Teo is a Kuala Lumpur based filmmaker. Her works often drift away from realms of reality and truth, exploring grief, alienation and the spectrum of the human experience. Aside from her work in sound and music, Yinn’s debut short ‘Enflightenment’ (2023) won the Audience Award in the Short Waves Festival in Poland, and has continued to screen in festivals including Leiden Shorts, EXPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin and more. 'Latex Labyrinth' has recently internationally premiered at the Ji.hlava IDFF and won 'Best Dance Video' at Eye Catcher Global 2025, Hong Kong.

"There’s been a strange epidemic lately Going amongst the folk, So that many in their madness Began dancing. Which they kept up day and night, Without interruption, Until they fell unconscious. Many have died of it."

Carlos Pereira, born in Lisbon, is studying Film Directing at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). His films have been screened at festivals such as Locarno, San Sebastián and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. His film Slimane (2023) won the German Film Critics Award for Best Short Film. His first feature film, Remote Islands, written during a residency at The Bergman Estate on Fårö, is currently in pre-production.

The abandoned spaces of a Wild West theme-park, a love hotel, and a billionaire's mansion are brought to life with plant overgrowth and animals, late-summer rain, and the haunting remnants of past human habitation.

Adam James Smith is a British-American filmmaker based in New York. His filmmaking practice spans rural and urban environments across China, Japan, and the United States. Adam was educated in film at Stanford and anthropology at Cambridge, the latter of which he is currently affiliated with the university’s Visual Anthropology Lab.