Catalogue 2024
Parcourez ci-dessous le catalogue 2024 des Rencontres Internationales, ou effectuez une recherche dans les archives des oeuvres présentées depuis 2004. De nouveaux extraits vidéos sont régulièrement mis en ligne, les images et les textes sont également progressivement mis à jour.
Mahshid Afzali, MIRSHAKKAK Mahoor
a moment of exposure
Doc. expérimental | mov | couleur | 20:0 | Iran | 2024
A moment of exposure is about observing the experience of living an idea and gathering materials for an art installation. The camera, as an attentive observer, collects memories and associations related to the "Safe & Sound" multimedia interactive exhibition. Following the process of preparation, presentation, and dismantling of the installation, we seek visual and sensory origins. In the first part of the exhibition, a spatial arrangement features elements such as metal fence sculptures, archived photos of fences in graveyards, and videos of deceased creatures floating in water. These elements are gently dissected to uncover the roots of safety and any remnants of movement left after death. In the second part, different sounds can be heard by interactive audiences resting in bed-shaped sound boxes, prompting questions about the origins of these sounds. Each sound carries the weight of a past incident, reverberating in the space and creating an immersive experience. Ultimately, the film invites viewers to reflect on the connections between memory, loss, and the lingering echoes of life. It encourages an exploration of how we find safety in remembrance and the ways in which our past shapes our present.
Mahshid Afzali: Mahshid Afzali is an Iranian Video Artist and Filmmaker, based in Tehran. She graduated from University of Tehran with a B.A. degree of Scenic Design in 2018. Throughout her studies, she developed a passion for video art as a medium for self-expression. In the past few years she specialized in independent film production and post-production and created several documentary films and videos. Mahshid is also an archivist, and documents her life through videos and photographs that often serve as the foundation for her artworks. / Mahoor Mirshakkak: Mahoor Mirshakkak, Iranian freelance Filmmaker & Sound designer. Graduated in Painting from Tehran Fine Arts University. Currently Working on Multidisciplinary installations Based on Archived sound and videos.
Kamal Aljafari
UNDR
Film expérimental | mov | couleur et n&b | 15:0 | Allemagne | 2024
The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari studied at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and currently lives in Berlin. He has taught filmmaking at The New School (New York) and the DFFB (Berlin). He is a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination of Columbia University. In May 2024, IndieLisboa dedicated a retrospective to his work. In 2024 his film UNDR was selected at IFFR and A Fidai Film at Visions du Réel, where it won the Grand Jury Prize Burning Lights Competition. Aljafari is currently working on a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.
Saif Alsaegh
The Motherfucker's Birthday
Film expérimental | mp4 | couleur | 6:20 | Iraq, USA | 2024
Through dancing, the film shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in.
Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals and venues including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and The Gene Siskel Film Center. Alsaegh’s films are distributed by Video Data Bank.
Dominic Angerame
Aeon
Vidéo expérimentale | 16mm | noir et blanc | 12:0 | USA | 2024
"Thank you for sending your very great film, Aeon -- it's really a great work, truly transporting, and a vision I can wish and hope that many will see, and hopefully to feel this truth of both our small place within as well as our ultimate connectedness with the vastness of being and space -- 'our connection to the stars' as Stan would have said." -- Marilyn Brakhage "In Aeon, Dominic Angerame draws parallels between the earthly and the heavenly, linking the San Francisco cityscape and city dwellers to outer space. Filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aeon celebrates Angerame#s reunion with friends and responds to the new ways of interacting with the world on different levels. Using a meta-narrative and self-referential approach to storytelling, Angerame brings the (holy) spirit to life, filling the spaces he captures with energy, which is otherwise unattainable and invisible the naked eye, but significantly transforms our lives. Aeon is one of Angerame's major and most mature works to date, which demonstrates the potential of experimental filmmaking in superimposing images that are seemingly disparate, yet uncannily familiar." -- Kornelia Boczkowska, author of Lost Highways, Embodied Travels: The Road Movie in American Experimental Film and Video, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0875-9209
Dominic Angerame's works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker's desire to make everyday images "strange" at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem-in all the different social realities they contain-always distanced as well, as if they led to another world beyond the concrete, beyond time and defined space. In Angerame's films, which pay homage to films from early cinema and the classic avant garde to American underground films of the 1960s and 70s and non-narrative films of the present day, an amazingly comprehensive history of the "visionary" moving image is always present. It may be that precisely his refusal to adopt a signature style has diminished the immediate influence of Angerame's films; however, Angerame's decision to work "universally," not to be swayed by considerations of the art market, and to experiment with very different styles increases the pedagogical worth of his films. It's not surprising to learn that Angerame, born in 1949, teaches at several American schools in addition to having served as the executive director of the American avant garde distribution center Canyon Cinema from 1980 to 2012. His films testify to an encyclopedic knowledge of film-and also his desire to satisfy, with his own audio-visual offerings, the very different desires of his audience.
Ralph Antunes, Maia de Brito, Pedro / Amaral, Leonardo
Tudo que vi era o sol
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 20:56 | Brésil | 2023
Gil works in construction, goes to his mother’s bar and has love dates with Katia. On a day like so many others, Gil is disappearing.
Ralph Antunes is a director, editor and producer. Graduated in Digital Arts at the Fine Arts School of UFMG, he produced and co-directed the short films Carga Viva (2013), Boa Morte (2015), Praça do Peixe (2018) and Tudo Que Vi Era o Sol (2023), which were shown at important festivals such as Doclisboa, FIC Valdivia, Málaga, Brasília and Tiradentes. As an artistic assistant, since 2014 he has collaborated with filmmaker and artist Cao Guimarães, coordinating the workflow of the artist's audiovisual and photographic productions and communicating his studio with art institutions around the world. Together with Pedro Maia de Brito, he is currently developing his first feature film, The Scarlet Temple Oracle, winner of the prize for best project in development in the Arché - Doclisboa'23.
Iván Argote
Le Fond de la Seine
0 | 4k | couleur | 16:16 | Colombie, France | 2023
Que nous dirait La Seine si elle pouvait nous parler ? Se souvient-elle de tout ce dont nous avons rêvé, imaginé et dit à son sujet ? De ses passages lumineux, de ses recoins sombres ? De tous les secrets déposés ? Des mots d’amour ? Des chagrins ? Le Fond de la Seine nous parle à la première personne, nous dévoilant un portrait poétique d’un fleuve chargé de vie, de luminosité, d’histoires et d’espaces sombres. Ce portrait réalisé grâce à des images subaquatiques et des images de paysages, narré par une voix puissante et accompagné d’une bande son émouvante, se construit au fur et à mesure du film. Depuis sa source timide, origine de nombreux mythes paléolithiques, en passant par des recoins doux et cristallins qui lentement deviennent une puissante masse d’eaux, route industrielle, passage urbain et de pouvoir qui finit par se déverser dans l’océan en fusionnant cœur et âme avec toutes les masses d’eau sur terre. Le Fond de la Seine nous parle d’une façon sensible, des sentiments et fantasmes que nous projetons envers ce fleuve que nous connaissons si bien et qui pourtant nous cache tant de choses.
Iván Argote, Bogotá 1983, vit à Paris. Iván Argote est un artiste et réalisateur colombien basé à Paris. À travers ses sculptures, installations, films et interventions, il questionne notre relation aux autres, aux structures de pouvoir et aux systèmes de croyance. Il développe des stratégies basées sur la tendresse, l'affect et l'humour à travers lesquelles il génère des approches critiques des récits historiques dominants. Dans ses interventions sur des monuments, ses œuvres d'art public éphémères et permanentes à grande échelle, Iván Argote propose de nouvelles utilisations symboliques et politiques de l'espace public. Iván Argote a étudié le graphisme, la photographie et les nouveaux médias à l'Universidad Nacional de Colombia à Bogotá et est titulaire d'un MFA de l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Art (ENSBA) à Paris. Ses expositions personnelles comprennent : 'TO MOVE AND BE MOVED', KØS Museum, Copenhagen, DK (2024) ; 'The Burden of the Invisible', SCAD MOA, Savannah, GE (2024) ; 'Prémonitions', Perrotin, Paris, FR (2022) ; ‘Aliens en Madrid’,galerie Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid, ES (2022) ; ’Chaflierplatz’, Dortmunder Kunstverein, DE (2021) ; 'A Place for Us', Perrotin, New York, US, (2021) ; 'All Here Together', Artpace, San Antonio, TX, US, (2021) ; 'Juntos Together', ASU Museum, Phoenix, USA (2019) ; 'Radical Tenderness', MALBA, Buenos Aires (2018) ; 'Somos Tiernos', Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexique (2017) ; 'Somos', Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo (2017) ; 'La Venganza del Amor', Perrotin, New York (2017) ; 'Let's write a history of hopes', Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo, BR (2014) ; 'La Estrategia', Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) ; Sin heroísmos, por favor', CA2M, Madrid, (2012) . Les œuvres de l'artiste font partie des collections permanentes de nombreuses institutions prestigieuses dans le monde entier, notamment le Guggenheim Museum (New York, États-Unis) ; le Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) ; l'ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, États-Unis) ; la Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, États-Unis) ; la Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, Colombie) ; Kadist (San Francisco, États-Unis) ; le MACBA (Barcelone, Espagne).
Josefin Arnell
Buurthuis 2
Fiction expérimentale | digital | couleur | 17:3 | Suède, Pays-Bas | 2024
A real-estate developer who is a Vampire wants to convert the local community house into a luxury spa. The city man gets nervous. The Vampire calls a friend: the Wizard, who casts a spell on the neighborhood to create chaos. Soon the neighbors organize resistance. Buurthuis 2 is a fantasy film realized with the community center De Witte Boei in Amsterdam’s Wittenburg neighborhood. Visitors and staff take on the roles of vampires, wizards, and zombies who are entangled in a real-estate development scheme to turn the residential neighborhood into a luxury spa resort. Anchored by a Dutch fairytale about the pitfalls of preposterous wealth, the plot and characters were developed in scriptwriting workshops together with the artist. In the process, Josefin Arnell explores the social fabric of a place that is highly specific and at the same time faces the same problems as many other communities. The film draws from and reflects on the historic social ideals of community centers in the Netherlands, that used to serve as a tool to educate the lower classes. What does it mean to be a “good” citizen in the context of increasing wealth disparity, housing shortages, and welfare cuts?
Josefin Arnell (1984, Sweden) lives and works in Amsterdam. The work by Josefin Arnell defines a loaded visual language combining anger, desire, disgust and pleasure. Her films present complex realities, socially marginalized characters and absurd fictionalization. Through storytelling loosely narratives are often centered around characters that try to navigate in contemporary infrastructures with impossible demands. In 2015 and 2016 she participated in the residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2018 she won the Theodora Niemeijer Prijs for emerging female artists in the Netherlands. In 2023 she was nominated for the art prize Prix de Rome Netherlands with a presentation at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Places where her work has been shown include: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; WIELS, Brussels; Cell Project Space, London; Index, Stockholm; UKS, Oslo; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Athens Biennale; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Auto Italia, London; Kunsthalle Münster, Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin and IDFA International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam.
Victor Arroyo
Disappearance in Three Acts | Act l
Doc. expérimental | mov | couleur | 15:0 | Canada | 2024
Disappearance in Three Acts | Act One is an ethnography of violence reflecting on a history of conflict in Central Mexico. The video piece posits a decolonial approach to the visual representation of violence in Mexico, transporting us beyond the realm of suffering into a space for quiet contemplation as the violent terrain of occupation enters the frame. Following the pictorial European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature, this piece is an investigation on enforced disappearance in rural Mexico, reclaiming undermined histories of everyday violence and economic struggle. The video piece appropriates visual motifs from 18th century European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature and cataclysmic extremes, echoing violent occupation of land in rural Mexico. Through a poignant testimony of a kidnapping survivor, intertwined with the pastoral rural landscapes of her captivity, the video documents geographies of disappearance at the threshold of detectability.
Victor Arroyo is a video artist working in the crossfield between cinema and contemporary art. His films are informed by various modes of listening and seeing, emerging from long periods of observation and documentation. His practice is situated at the intersection between aesthetics, knowledge production and community-based research, often concerned with the encounters and tensions between lived experiences, knowledge regimes and the politics of display. His work is regularly programmed in museums and festivals internationally, including Kasseler Dokfest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM, Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA, BIENALSUR, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinémathèque Pacific, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, among others. Born in Mexico in 1977, and based in Montréal, Canada.
Rebecca Jane Arthur
Barefoot Birthdays on Unbreakable Glass
Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 18:20 | Belgique | 2023
In Barefoot Birthdays on Unbreakable Glass, three women reflect on art creation, immigration, and their own mother-daughter relationships: relationships cut short, relationships evolving, relationships to treasure. Following insights of independent experiences of love and loss, they unite in one space to celebrate a new chapter of life and friendship.
Rebecca Jane Arthur (b.1984, Edinburgh) is a visual artist working predominantly with the moving image and text. Her works often transpire as experimental film portraits of people and places, and her interest lies in how personal stories depict a socio-political context and history, giving particular attention to class politics, education and women’s experiences. She is co-founder of the Brussels-based, artist-run production and distribution platform elephy, contributor to the online film criticism platform Sabzian, and a PhD in the Arts candidate at KASK & Conservatorium/School of Arts Ghent where she teaches in the visual arts department and lectures on art and feminist theory.
Karimah Ashadu, Karimah ASHADU
Machine Boys
Vidéo expérimentale | dcp | couleur | 8:50 | Nigeria, Allemagne | 2024
“Machine Boys” is a short film which explores the informal economy of motorcycle taxis; colloquially known as “Okada”, in the mega city of Lagos. Banned due to the government’s inability to regulate it, “Machine Boys” portrays a hardy group of bikers who continue this work, seeking to attain financial autonomy and independence. “Machine Boys” dwells on the consequences of this ban, meanwhile portraying the daily rituals and challenges faced by Okada riders. The riders embody though their stylish attire, and self-assured, powerful behavior, a particular branch of masculinity, and in this performance a beautiful vulnerability emerges, questioning Nigeria’s patriarchal culture. Through this exploration of Nigerian patriarchal ideals, Ashadu relates its performance of masculinity to the vulnerability of a precarious class of workers. With its innovative, cutting-edge style and sartorial references, it engages in a dialogue around post-colonial informal economy structures in Nigeria, as well as opening a window into the socio-cultural nuances of its most populated city.
Karimah Ashadu (b. London 1985) is a British-born Nigerian Artist and Film Director living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s work is concerned with labour, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora. Her work has exhibited and screened at institutions internationally, including the 60th Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition. She has shown at Kunsthalle Bremen, Tate Modern, London, Secession, Vienna, Kunstverein in Hamburg, South London Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Ashadu is the recipient of other awards such as the Prize of the Bötterstraße in Bremen (2022) and the ars viva prize (2020). Public collections include MoMA, the City of Geneva Contemporary Art Collection and the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Germany. She was named Abigail R. Cohen 2021 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris. In 2020, Ashadu established her film production company Golddust by Ashadu, specialising in Artists’ films on black culture and African discourses.
Guillaume Aubry
Mettre feu, mettre fin.
Vidéo expérimentale | mov | couleur | 17:0 | France, Argentine | 2023
C’est suite à la description du voyage de Magellan en 1520 qu'est nommé Tierra del fuego, l’archipel de l’extrême sud de l'Amérique. Les feux observés par les colons à la surface de l'eau étaient ceux des Yámanas, peuple indigène et nomades marins de ce bout du monde au climat très hostile. Leurs feux ont aujourd'hui totalement disparu avec eux, mais des lueurs de bateaux persistent toujours au milieu des fjords : les ferries qui transportent des milliers de touristes chaque année de Punta Arenas au Cap Horn ou d'Ushuaïa vers un nouvel el Dorado : l’Antarctique.
Guillaume Aubry est architecte (co-fondateur de l'agence Freaks), artiste-plasticien (Beaux-Arts de Paris) et docteur en art (programme Radian). Sa thèse "Courser le soleil" porte sur l’expérience esthétique du coucher de soleil, spectacle quotidien de l’embrasement de l’horizon. Il poursuit aujourd’hui ses recherches en interrogeant notre fascination collective pour la fin du monde.
José María Avilés
Pista de aterrizaje
Doc. expérimental | mov | couleur | 30:0 | Equateur | 2023
The video is set in Karakam, an Achuar indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Oriente. The Achuar have been nomadic in this area since ancient times. Following the construction of an airstrip, several families settled permanently in the surrounding area. Using documentary strategies, Landing Strip immerses the viewer in the temporality of Karakam, inviting them to participate in moments of communal gathering and work. The montage of the work is determined by the gaze of each viewer, who has to choose between one screen and the other. The sound reflects the atmosphere of the place and is also the starting point for the imaginary and the unexpected. Landing Strip blurs the boundaries between past/present/future and nature/culture.
José María Avilés (1988, Cuenca, Ecuador), is a filmmaker and artist based in Barcelona. He studied Film Directing in Buenos Aires and holds a Master's Degree in Filmmaking from the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastian. He wrote and directed the feature film Al Oriente (Venice International Film Festival 2021) and La muerte del maestro (Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018) and the short films La enorme presencia de los muertos (San Sebastian Film Festival 2019), Speed Paradise (BAFICI, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, 2015), Conversaciones en el jardín (BAFICI, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, 2014) and Ricchieri (Ciudades reveladas, Buenos Aires, 2013).
Geoffrey Badel
Akousma Partie III
Fiction expérimentale | hdv | couleur | 18:30 | France | 2023
Après avoir manqué un appel tant attendu, une femme se réveille seule dans un espace vide. Par le geste et le son, elle s’adonne à un étrange rituel dans l’espoir d’une réponse qui l’aiderait à sortir de sa hantise. Sous la forme d’un huis clos somnambulique, Akousma propose une incursion dans la boîte crânienne d’un corps à l’affût, coincé entre le monde des vivants et celui des morts. Ce premier court-métrage du jeune artiste plasticien Geoffrey Badel met en scène la chorégraphe Mathilde Monnier pour laisser aux fantômes l’occasion de revenir.
Né en 1994 à Montélimar (France) Vit et travaille à Montpellier (France) Geoffrey Badel est un artiste qui explore les mondes silencieux à travers des installations immersives sous la forme de dessins, de films, d’installations et de performances. Il situe son travail dans des environnements surréalistes et leur confère des attributs magiques et analeptiques, avec une approche qui cherche à transformer les situations. Diplômé de l’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier en 2017, Geoffrey Badel a remporté la Bourse Jeune Création MAIF du Drawing Room la même année. Il participe au post-diplôme Saison 6, créé en 2018 par le MO.CO. structuré en trois temps de résidences : Cochin (Inde), Venise (Italie) et Istanbul (Turquie). En parallèle de ces expériences, en France ou à l’étranger, il intervient dans les milieux scolaires et médico-sociaux afin de proposer des ateliers et de transmettre sa pratique. Depuis 2024, dans la continuité de ses recherches sur le langage, il s’engage dans la communauté sourde dans l’intention de contribuer à l’accessibilité dans l’art. De 2022 à 2024, ses expositions récentes individuelles ou collectives incluent : le MO.CO. de Montpellier, le FRAC – Occitanie de Montpellier, le Musée d’art contemporain de Sérignan, la Fondation Bullukian de Lyon, l’Atelier Blanc de Villefranche-de-Rouergue, le 67ème Salon de Montrouge et le Centre Pompidou de Metz.
Howool Baek
BETWEEN_ in VR
Virtual/Augmented/eXtended Rea | 0 | couleur | 19:30 | Coree du Sud, Allemagne | 2023
A virtual universe from body fragments “Can we imagine the universe from which we ourselves come as something physical, but at the same time as something virtual?” To portray the social circumstances of our contemporary society, characterised by a hybrid state of physicality and virtuality, choreographer Howool Baek combines body movement with technology. In “BETWEEN_in VR”, an imaginary and deeply 'immersive' universe emerges in which our body parts such as the hands, feet or navel lead us into an unfamiliar world. Using the overwhelming 360° VR spatial experience, we discover a new type of in-between space that merges the solid boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the body and the data, the analog and the digital, and the viewer and the performer.
Choreographer Howool Baek works on discovering individual body fragments without a face and proposing a different perspective of the body by deconstructing and transforming the body. Through breaking stereotypes about the body, she wants the audience to see society from a different perspective. Lately she has expanded her stage concept towards the digital space, carrying out new artistic experiments to transplant her choreographic method to the digital stage. Her first directed film Foreign body (2022) won the Best Film at Minimalen Short Film Festival - Multiplie Dance Film (Norway) in 2024. And VR film BETWEEN (2023) was awarded the Best Virtual Reality at Digital Media Fest (Italy) in 2023.
Pariya Bakhshi, Blanca Barbat
VELODROME
Film expérimental | 16mm | | 6:0 | Iran, Allemagne | 2023
A surreal take on two people longing to bond through movement. The setting is a bygone velodrome, the Albert Richter track in Cologne. Without words, VELODROME evokes a poetic and eerie liminal space. It portrays a pursuit of communication, a permanent interruption. A moment of encounter without meeting.
Pariya Bakhshi, (they/she) born 1997 in Hiroshima, is an Iranian filmmaker and artist. Pariya lives in Germany and has been studying film at the 2019 studying film at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She grew up in Iran, Tehran and studied design at the Tehran University of Fine Arts. One of her main themes is freedom and exile, which she explores in her autobiographical essay film Displaced in Time. For her, the act of making art and film becomes political, among other things by breaking conventions and media boundaries. In her feature films, she translates the unspoken from our reality into a surreal film world, through the expression of the body, beyond language. Pariya therefore works mainly with dancers, as in Katzenbellen, L , VELODROME and ANAMORPHOSIS. Blanca Barbat : I am a multidisciplinary artist. My creative praxis can take the form of films, installations, drawings, performances, and more. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of 'bodies,' often exploring their boundaries, especially their thresholds, and their role in the ever-evolving narrative of our transforming reality. I perceive myself as both an expression of the world and a spectator within it. I connect with concepts like the rhizome and the collective unconscious.
Nicholas Baldas
Loverboy
XR expérimental | | couleur | 12:5 | Grèce, Australie | 2022
Inspired by the story of British serial killer Dennis Nilsen, Loverboy operates as a meditation on the dark side of human intimacy. The project’s approach rejects moral simplifications, offering a narrative that is less a linear story than an immersive dissection of isolation and obsession. Recurring dialogues, eerie distortions, and environmental shifts that envelope the viewer in a claustrophobic cycle of increasingly fractured reality. Designed to linger like an emotional imprint, Loverboy challenges viewers to exit the refuge of orderly modern life and confront the fragility of human empathy and connection.
Nicholas Baldas is a writer, director, and producer whose creative work utilises cutting-edge technology to explore the prohibited boundaries of human experience through psychological immersion. The Heraclitian principle "life is flux" is the only constant in his creative pursuits, his collaborator Michael Plumb is a writer, filmmaker and performer. He has a Phd in Econometrics from University of Oxford. His creative focus is on the art of storytelling, drawing on his background in academia and public policy to explore questions about society and humankind. Michael is fascinated by exploring different media - old and new - to bring stories to life and reach new audiences.
Sammy Baloji
Aequare. The Future that Never Was
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 21:0 | Congo (RDC), Belgique | 2024
Aequare. The future that never was by Sammy Baloji, 2023, 21’04 The film swings between archival film clips dating from 1943 and 1957, sourced from INEAC’s colonial propaganda, and 21st century captures of the same Yangambi premises, like a pendulum that never moves time forwards. An acronym for the former National Institute for the Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, its post-colonial successor, the Institut national pour l’Etude et la Recherche Agronomique (INERA), is on film so suffused with past, colonial “coordinate systems” that the present looks inert and at a standstill, as if held hostage by frames of knowledge that refuse to abdicate. Decades after decolonization, that persistent hold is made explicit by an imposing and intact map of the Belgian Congo hung high on the wall, and by all the remaining rusty machines, labelled test tubes and rotting reports and specimens, dusty instruments of measure, and laboratories. Against the crumbling of these infrastructures, a devoted population of Congolese clerks seem to assist the preservation of the collected data and methods, in a choreography of gestures that the montage reveals to be inherited from the colonial decades. Amidst images of farmers burning trees to make the charcoal sold at surrounding markets, or those of clerks’ motivational posts proudly professing the exactitude of their pursuit, the atavism of colonial ecology seems apparent. Excerpt from: Sandrine Colard, FROM THE EQUATOR, I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE
Since 2005, Sammy Baloji has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is an ongoing research on the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as questioning the impact of the Belgian colonization. He touches upon a variety of media to translate his research into artefacts. His use of photographic archives allows him to manipulate time and space, comparing ancient colonial narratives with contemporary economic imperialism. His video works, installations, sculptures, andphotographic series highlight how identities are shaped, transformed, perverted and reinvented. His critical view of contemporary societies is a warning about how cultural cliches continue to shape collective memories and thus allow social and political power games to continue to dictate human behavior. His recent personal exhibitions include: Sammy Baloji, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2024), Unextractable: Sammy Baloji invites, Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz (2024), Style Congo: Heritage & Heresy, CIVA, Brussels (2023), K(C)ongo, Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues. Subversive Classifications, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (2022) He has recently participated in the 35th Bienal de Sao Paulo (2023), the Architecture Biennale of Venice (2023), the 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023), the Sydney Biennial (2020), documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens, 2017) Sammy Baloji co-founded in 2008 the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi. In September 2019 Sammy Baloji started a PhD in Artistic Research titled “Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: towards a Reconfiguration of Identity and Geopolitics” at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.
Anna Baranowski, Vlad Br?teanu
Fill In The Blanks
Film expérimental | 4k | couleur | 11:5 | Roumanie, Allemagne | 2022
Anna Baranowski and Vlad Br?teanu’s collaborative piece invites the audience to experience an intimate hypnotic induction. By making use of the hypnotic methodologies of relaxation - the sound of the sea and the soft human voice; images from the seaside, and the notions of rest and recovery that vacation recalls - the artist’s voices smoothly induce into the visitors’s consciousness local stories and realities of global warming, massive migration and economic challenges inflicted by global politics and mass tourism from Radhima, Vlora, a small village at the tip of the Albanian Riviera.
Anna Baranowski was born in Bytom, Poland in 1983. Today she lives secluded in a small village surrounded by the forests of East Germany and works on her art. In 2012, she received her diploma in media art with distinction from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. After her studies, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, such as the Berlin Biennale „Forget Fear“ in 2012. She has received grants, such as the Stiftung Kunstfonds working scholarship in 2018, and in recent years has been invited to various artist residencies, such as the Greater Columbus Arts Council in Columbus, USA, to develop new artistic works. Anna Baranowski looks at historical legacies in contemporary everyday life and reflects on collective psychological phenomena of human behaviour. In the field of experimental and documentary film, she focuses on direct cinema. She always uses documentary material in her works. In addition to her own cinematic images, composed in detail, the use of archival material is a central element of her experimental films. In doing so, she uses a wide variety of sources, such as amateur recordings, NASA or military footage. By taking them out of their original context, her works release new meanings. With documentary images that depict the real world, Anna Baranowski tells fictitious stories that are irritating and contrary to obvious expectations, which is precisely why they have an inner meaning and for this very reason trigger processes - the viewer is thrown back on himself and is confronted with his own feelings. Vlad Br?teanu, born in Bac?u, in the former Socialist Republic of Romania (RSR) in 1986, currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Br?teanu holds a M.A. in Photography and Moving Image and a B.A. in Graphics from the National University of Arts in Bucharest. In 2016 he studied Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His background in graphics forms the base for theoretical and conceptual considerations in which photography functions as a primary medium. Sound/hypnotic inductions, found objects, and public interventions that use playful semiotics of imagery are found in his current practice. Navigating the boundaries between public and private spaces, and finding signifiers for (in)visibility are translated into works that raise questions on precarity, fragility and stability in neoliberal societies. Research into the concept of plasticity and the effects of language are central in his artistic practice. Vlad is the co-founder of Template, an artist initiative and exhibition project that started in Bucharest in 2018 and is an alumnus of WHW Akademija in Zagreb in 2020.
Maddi Barber, Marina Lameiro
Cambium
Doc. expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 44:30 | Espagne | 2024
CAMBIUM, the cellular stratum of trees, it’s a cambial membrane that runs along the trunk and roots, producing growth. In the Navarrese Pyrenees a community has decided to cut down a pine forest in order to recover ancient fields for cultivation and animal grazing. Structured in two parts, the film traces the change of a territory traversed by practices of violence and care for the land.After the abandonment of the villages during the 1960s in the Arce Valley, the Government of Franco planted pines in the fields that were used for grazing as part of a state programme of reforestation and forestry. More than 50 years later, in Lakabe, a village repopulated in the 1980s, they have decided to cut down the pines and recover their meadows for livestock. Through different data capture and image technologies, CAMBIUM explores, together with the inhabitants of the area, a territory in transformation.
Maddi Barber studied audiovisual communication at the University of the Basque Country and did a master's degree in visual anthropology at the University of Manchester. In 2019 she created the production company Pirenaika, with which she has produced some of her films as well as those of other artists and filmmakers from the nearby context such as Gerard Ortin, Ainhoa Gutiérrez and Irati Gorostidi. Her latest co-production, CONTADORES, by Irati Gorostidi, had its international premiere at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes. She is currently participating in Tabakalera's Ikusmira Berriak residency, where she is developing the feature-length fiction film CLAROS DE BOSQUE. Marina Lameiro is a filmmaker and producer. She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the URJC and a master's degree in Creative Documentary from IDEC-UPF and a postgraduate degree in Audiovisual Editing from the same university. She was part of the Collaborative Studio (CoLab) of UnionDocs in New York City as an artist-in-residence. In 2018 he released her first feature film YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL which, among other awards, won the Special Audience Award at the Punto de Vista Festival in 2018, was nominated for the Feroz Awards and has been screened in more than 20 countries. In 2021 she released DARDARA, her second feature film, which entered the list of the 10 most-seen films in cinemas after its premiere at the Punto de Vista Festival.
Amie Barouh
Okinawa
Installation vidéo | mov | couleur | 27:32 | France, Japon | 2023
À la rencontre de voix, de visages et de paysages, le film okinawa est une traversée à la fois documentaire et onirique dans l’épaisseur spatiale et temporelle d’un archipel aux confins du Japon et de ses enjeux géopolitiques et environnementaux.
Amie Barouh défend un documentaire expérimental s’attachant à donner la parole à des personnes évoluant dans les marges à l’instar de la communauté Rom. Son travail relève ouvertement d’un journal filmé et s’inscrit dans l’idée que tout savoir est situé, que tout cinéma, aussi informatif soit-il, est forcément subjectif. Motivés plus par des affinités que par une volonté dogmatique de « faire cinéma », les films d’Amie Barouh, entre documentaires et essais visuels, visent avant tout à transmettre une expérience, prise comme telle, et partent souvent d’un événement marquant la vie de l’artiste, à l’instar d’une rencontre. Amie Barouh ne se contente pas d’observer ceux et celles qu’elle filme. Elle vit ou a tissé un lien particulier avec eux·elles. Mue par la curiosité et l’envie de rencontrer des membres de la communauté Rom, l’artiste se fait « adopter » par une famille et intégre leur camp en banlieue parisienne. C’est en vivant avec eux, et après 2 ans de vie commune, qu’elle commence à les filmer. Ne cherchant pas à masquer les marques d’expression subjectives, les vidéos d’Amie Barouh rompent complètement avec l’illusion d’objectivité documentaire. L’artiste met non seulement en jeu son histoire personnelle, mais aussi son corps dans la matière de ses documentaires. C’est particulièrement le cas dans Je peux changer mais pas à 100%, une œuvre qui retrace sa relation amoureuse échouée avec Bobby, un Rom roumain consommateur de crack et vivant dans la rue de menus larcins. Les films d’Amie Barouh sont toujours tendus par la recherche d’une juste proximité avec les personnes dont elle capture l’image. La « bonne » distance reste cependant toujours instable pour le plus grand plaisir du spectateur. La caméra, troisième œil et troisième bras de l’artiste, négocie en temps réel la nature des relations qu’elle – en tant que documentariste mais avant tout en tant que personne – entretient avec ses sujets. La mise en scène et le montage subjectif épousent ses élans du cœur, d’où le caractère tantôt impressionniste, tantôt réaliste des images, restituant toute la complexité à documenter des mondes auxquels on n’appartient pas. Elodie Royer. Élodie Royer Biographie Élodie Royer est commissaire d’exposition indépendante, doctorante en recherche-création à l'ENS au sein du laboratoire SACRe. Sous forme d!entretiens, de textes et d!expositions, ses recherches actuelles s’attachent à relier des pratiques d’artistes femmes au Japon en regard de leur ancrage dans des milieux de vie bouleversés par des désordres environnementaux, de l’histoire des catastrophes et de l’écoféminisme. Depuis sa résidence à la Villa Kujoyama à Kyoto en 2011, elle travaille de façon régulière sur et avec la scène artistique japonaise. En 2022, elle a conçu l’exposition Les Êtres Lieux à la Maison de la culture du Japon, et entre 2016 et 2020, une série d’expositions commissionnée par KADIST et le MOT Musée d’art contemporain de Tokyo en collaboration avec Che Kyongfa (Things Entangling, MOT; Les nucléaires et les choses, KADIST; Almost nothing, yet not nothing, Tokyo University of the Arts). Elle est aussi membre des comités d’acquisition de la Fondation KADIST et du FRAC Rhône-Alpes ; et des comités éditoriaux de TextWork, plateforme éditoriale de la Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard et de PALM, magazine en ligne du Jeu de Paume. Auparavant, elle a conçu des expositions au sein de nombreuses structures d’art contemporain publique et privée en France (Palais de Tokyo, Le Plateau/FRAC Ile-de-France, gb agency, DOC!, etc.) et à l’international (Mercer Union à Toronto, Tate Modern à Londres, GAMeC – Galerie d’art moderne et contemporain à Bergame, etc.). Avec le commissaire d’exposition Yoann Gourmel, elle a notamment mis en place le programme 220 jours en 2007- 2008, en dialogue avec les artistes Isabelle Cornaro, Julien Crépieux, Mark Geffriaud, Benoît Maire, Bruno Persat, Chloé Quenum ou Raphaël Zarka: http://220jours.blogspot.com/.
Magnus Bärtås, Behzad Khosravi Noori
On Hospitality – Layla Al Attar and Hotel Al Rasheed
Doc. expérimental | digital | couleur | 18:0 | Suède | 2024
On Hospitality is a necromantic documentary where the Iraqi artist Layla Al-Attar returns from the dead to tell the story of how a Swedish company built a luxurious hotel in Baghdad, ordered by Saddam Hussein for the 1983 summit of the Non-Alignment Movement. War changed all the plans. Layla made a mosaic at the entrance of the hotel, depicting George Bush’s face, and her house was hit by an American missile.
Magnus Bärtås is an artist, writer and filmmaker, and has exhibited at Gwangju Biennial, Göteborgs Konsthall and Moderna Museet, Stockhom among other venues. He won the grand prize at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2010 with Madame & Little Boy. Behzad Khosravi Noori is an artist, writer and filmmaker working between Karachi and Stockholm. Bärtås and Khosravi-Noori won the 1st Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival with On Hospitality – Layla al Attar and Hotel al Rasheed in 2024.