Catalogue 2023-2024

Hazel (dual) is a split screen film, shot in 16mm b/w, inspired by the legendary recording of the underrated guitarist Eddie Hazel’s (1950-1993) ten-minute guitar solo on “Maggot Brain”, the title track to Funkadelic’s 1971 album . The film is the fictitious moment when bandleader George Clinton “misleads” the guitarist Eddie Hazel to record what is considered one of the greatest guitar solos ever recorded. Performed by actor and musician Ricky Goldman whose previous collaborations with the artist include leading roles in the short films It Seems to Hang On (US, 2015, Venice Film Festival); We Demand, co- directed with Claudrena N. Harold (US, 2016, Berlinale 'Forum Expanded' and Gospel Hill. co-directed with Claudrena N. Harold (US, 2022, Chicago Intl FF).

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965 Mansfield, Ohio U.S.) B.F.A. University of Akron; M.F.A. Ohio University. Lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, US. Commonwealth Professor of Art and Director of Studio Arts, University of Virginia Everson's work and practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and film – 12 features and more than 200 solo and collaobrative short form works. He has been recognized with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alpert Award in Film/Video, the Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities, the American Academy in Rome Prize, the American Academy in Berlin Prize and artist grants from Creative Capital, National Endowment of the Arts, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. His artwork has been the subject of retrospectives and solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern/Film, Cinema du Reel/Centre Pompidou, BlackStar, Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Graz, Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor, Ontario, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Museum of Contemporary Art, Novi Sad, Serbia, Harvard Film Archive, Cinematek Brussels/Courtisane and presented at international film festivals and art institutions including Berlin, Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, Venice, BFI/London, NYFF, BlackStar, Oberhausen, Jeonju, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, MOCA, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MoMA, NY and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington D.C.. His films have been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, the 2018 Carnegie International and the 2023 Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium. A 3 DVD Boxed Set, Broad Daylight and Other Times, was released by Video Data Bank (U.S.) in 2011 and a DVD dedicated to films focusing on the rituals and gestures of labor, I Really Hear That: Quality Control and Other Works was released by VDB in summer 2017. The DVD contains the feature film Quality Control (2011), included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. The two disc blu-ray How You Live Your Story: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson was released by the UK based boutique label Second Run DVD in Fall 2020. Everson's films are represented and/or distributed by Picture Palace Pictures, New York.

An unseen narrator tells his experience of wrongful imprisonment in an unnamed country and his random release. Based on a letter sent to Amnesty International, by the filmmaker’s father, and a surreal interview given about it. ‘Prison with Songbirds’ is a documentary and fiction hybrid in which dream-nightmare and digital-celluloid collide.

Ewan Macbeth (born 1992, UK) is a Scottish artist filmmaker based in Rotterdam. After studying Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art he did an MA in Lens-Based Media at The Piet Zwart Institute. His work has been seen in International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, EYE Filmmusuem Amsterdam, EMAF Osnabrück, CCA Glasgow, RSA Edinburgh; amongst others. He is currently a member of Time Window collective and developing his first feature film.

Filmée au Liban par une Dash Cam entre le 18 octobre 2019, date à laquelle ont débuté des soulèvements populaires, et l’après-explosion du 4 août 2020, les images rendent compte des bouleversements politiques, sociaux et économiques que traversait le Liban durant cette période. Dans la première moitié du film, on assiste à l’engouement général des Libanais au début des manifestations de 2019. Mais au fil des mois, on assiste à l’exacerbation des tensions entre les manifestants et les forces de l’ordre. Avec les différentes étapes du confinement de la crise sanitaire de 2019-2020, les manifestations vont cesser et les rues se vider. La deuxième partie est essentiellement centrée sur le soir de l’explosion du 4 août 2020 où l’on découvre les dégâts, le chaos et la stupéfaction des habitants dans les rues de Beyrouth.

Artiste, chercheure et enseignante à l’École Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon, Sirine Fattouh est née en 1980 à Beyrouth. Les déplacements constants dus aux guerres et aux conditions socio politique ont forgés chez elle un sentiment d’exil intérieur qui l’amènent à explorer son environnement dans toute sa complexité et à y faire émerger des histoires d’individus dont la parole est marginalisé. Fattouh s’intéresse aux histoires non officielles celles qui sont considérées comme anecdotiques. Elle puise son inspiration dans son passé et son présent afin d’explorer la relation complexe qu’elle entretient avec son pays d’origine et les conséquences des conflits et des guerres sur la vie quotidienne des gens. Sirine Fattouh a fait ses études à Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne où elle a obtenu en 2015 une thèse en Arts plastiques et Sciences de l’art. Entre 2004 et 2006, elle a étudié à l’école nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris Cergy et a obtenu son DNSEP. Entre 2005 et 2021, elle enseigne les arts plastiques et l’histoire de l’art dans plusieurs universités en France et au Liban. En 2010 elle travaille pendant une année au centre Pompidou à Paris en tant qu’attachée de conservation pour le programme art et mondialisation auprès de Catherine Grenier. Ses œuvres ont été exposées dans de nombreuses galeries et institutions artistiques dont le Centre d’Art Pasquart à Bienne, le MAXXI à Rome, la fondation Ricard à Paris, le Centre Pompidou à Metz, le Mucem à Marseille, le Beirut Art Center, Kaaï Studio à Bruxelles, ZKM à Karlsruhe, Brick Lane à Londres, la Villa Savoye du Corbusier à Poissy, l’Institut du monde arabe à Paris et la Biennale de Thessalonique en Grèce.

"L'Esprit du tricot" est l’aboutissement d’une résidence de création et médiation au Centre d’art Camac (Marnay sur seine - France) dans le cadre du projet Culture à l'hôpital, par Mehryl Ferri Levisse qui se situe dans une démarche de réminiscence de techniques de tricot apprises avec sa grand-mère puis oubliées avec le temps. Pour ce travail de souvenance, il s’est alternativement positionné comme médiateur, apprenant et participant au sein d’un groupe de femmes dans deux maisons de retraite qui n’avaient plus pratiqué cette activité depuis des années. A raison de quatre interventions par semaine pendant un mois, ce groupe transgénérationnel a tricoté pièce par pièce deux combinaisons sadomasochistes (SM) avec la complicité de l'artiste. Ces dernières sont présentées comme œuvres ainsi que mises en scène dans le premier film du plasticien. Tricoter pour oublier le souvenir sadomasochiste du corps intime. La sexualité des seniors est profane dans une société où les corps ont une date de péremption. Orgiaquer en tricotant constitue le cadre de ce projet créatif dont les acteurs ignorent la finalité de leur implication – la finalité de leur vie. Le masochisme de la vieillesse s’inscrit dans le sadisme de notre jeunesse. Le travail de ces femmes représente le fatalisme de l’obsolescence programmée de notre sexualité passée dans un Alzheimer naïf et innocent.

La pratique multiforme de Mehryl Ferri Levisse explore les notions de subjectivité et d'identité liées à l'expérience Queer. Utilisant des symboles et des images genrés associés à l'apparat, la mascarade et le cabaret, l'artiste produit un langage visuel extravagant qui interroge les conceptions communément acceptées de la masculinité et de la féminité. Les performances et installations de Ferri Levisse agissent comme des scènes sur lesquelles le genre est remixé et obscurci. Maître de cérémonie, l'artiste orchestre l'espace pour interroger les limites du corps et les codes sociétaux qui constituent nos comportements. Tout son travail utilise le motif, convaincu que l’ornement n’est jamais neutre, qu’il est toujours le véhicule de normes et de valeurs, Mehryl Ferri Levisse se l’approprie et le retravaille pour en subvertir les idéologies sous-jacentes. Mehryl Ferri Levisse (vit et travaille entre Casablanca et les Ardennes) est un artiste franco-italien. Ferri Levisse a exposé ses œuvres dans des musées, des galeries et des biennales internationales, dont le Centre Pompidou (Paris), le Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), la Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, le Musée Arthur Rimbaud (FR), l'International Center of Photography (New York ), l'Institut Français de Casablanca (Maroc), Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (New York), Bertrand Grimont Galerie (Paris), la Biennale Internationale de la Marionnette (FR), la Biennale Internationale de Poésie (FR), Bienalsur (Buenos Aires, Argentine) , CDA Gallery (Casablanca) la Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie d'Aubusson (FR), le SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, USA), le FRAC Alsace (Sélestat), le Musée de Picardie (Amiens), l'Institut Français de Madrid (ES), le Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds (CH), Biennale BISO, (Burkina Faso), ; et Yango II (Biennale Internationale de Kinshasa, République Démocratique du Congo), La Vilette (Paris), Nuit Blanche (Paris), le Mo.Co Hôtel des collections (Montpellier), BPS22 Musée d'Art Contemporain (BE), Luxembourg Art Week Art Fair ( LU), 1.54 Marrakech Art Fair (Maroc), le Musée des Antiquités (Rouen), le Château Dufresne (QC). Les œuvres de Ferri Levisse font partie de différentes collections privées et publiques comme le SCAD Museum, le FRAC Alsace, le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, la collection de livres d'artistes du MoMA ou la bibliothèque du Metropolitan Museum Thomas J.Watson. Activiste et militant, Ferri Levisse est engagé dans la lutte pour les droits de la communauté LGBTQIA+. En 2018, il crée le Travball, un jeu inclusif joué par les drag queens et le public pour déconstruire et lutter contre l'homophobie dans le sport. En 2021, il obtient la bourse de la DILCRAH, Délégation interministérielle à la lutte contre le racisme, l'antisémitisme et la haine anti-LGBT pour le Travball.

Film plot based on marginal conspiracy theory that russian political elites are practising magic rites in Siberia to empower. This theory gained traction from 2021 to 2022 across Russian online platforms, mostly through Telegram chanels and investigative publication of opposition journalist. With lack of documentation, author decide to re-imagine this events, and make a film reconstruction of one of the rites. Alchemy, occultism and magic rites become the object of the author's research, forming a semantic contradiction with the everyday image of casual life

Lilia Filina is an artist filmmaker, whose work is situated on the uncertain thresholds of the perceptible and the communicable, organism and environment, and knowledge regimes and power, at the intersection of media and the history of political thought. Born in Kaluga, Russia, 1999, she now lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. Alumni of the Rodchenko art school, Sergey Bratkov class, she works as director and develops independent project on edge of film and videoart.

National Treasures Explained! (Pine Tree Stump) Through three fictional video guides, National Treasures Explained! dives into a wild exploration of iconic Norwegian paintings, delivering a satirical rewriting of art discourse and cheekily suggesting there's only one correct way to interpret each masterpiece. Dealing with an abstract modernist artwork, Pine Tree Stump takes a less direct, more mystical route towards total explanation, claiming that the painter has gone missing altogether and retracing his footsteps on the day of disappearance, all by way of experimental storytelling. The film was originally produced for the opening exhibition of the new National Museum of Art in Oslo, and is part of a trilogy of video guides to iconic Norwegian paintings, the other two being Ashes (Edvard Munch) and The Bridal Procession on the Hardanger Fjord (Tidemand & Gude). During that exhibition, the films could be watched next to the original paintings. The film features original music composed by Isa Holmgren and performed by the folk choir Blåne. The coat of arms is created by illustrator Espen Terjesen.

Tor-Finn Malum Fitje is a Norwegian video and sound artist based in Oslo. He holds an MFA from the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, a BFA from Konstfack and a Bachelor in Film Production from Bergen University. His work has been exhibited at The National Museum in Oslo, Gallery of Photography in Oslo, Kunsthall Stavanger and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Video artist and writer Thomas Anthony Hill holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Bergen. He has collaborated with Tor-Finn Fitje for over a decade, and together they have created several films including Hyphenic (2018) the Ad Nauseam project (2019-2022), currently consisting of 14 essay films.

Approaches to a Theory of Punctuation speaks about quotes, punctuation and movement, all terms that have a musical connotation. In this work, the objects present in an internal environment reflect external places, and these reflections, like some sort of narration, are treated like quotes yet they are released from the expressive repetition that characterizes them. Here, the use of quotation marks as a visible and mental engine anticipates the landscape itself as a possible form of quotation. Furthermore, the continuously circling pan movement of the camera, is not treated as an autonomous essence, but becomes an interdependent system acting between the internal and external, capable of existing only by influencing other systems or objects. The internal is shot inside the house in which Flatform lived during the residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito USA, and the external is shot in the bay outside. This film is dedicated to the memory of the american novelist Paul La Farge, narrating voice of the film.

Flatform is a collective artist based in Milan and Berlin, founded in 2006. Works by Flatform have been shown in many museums and institutions including, among others, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio, MAXXI Museum in Rome, Fondazione Prada in Milan, EMPAC Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy NY, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Argos Centre for Arts in Bruxelles, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, MSU-Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Cineteca Matadero in Madrid, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, PAC in Milan, Museu da Imagem e do Som in San Paolo. Flatform has been invited in several film festivals including, among others, Quinzaine des Realisateurs de Cannes, Venice Intl. Film Festival, IFFR in Rotterdam, BFI Film Festival in London, LOOP in Barcelona, Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Lo Schermo dell’Arte in Florence, IFF in Melbourne. Selected Awards: Go Shorts in Nijmegen 2020 and 2016; Nashville Intl Film Festival 2016, Jihlava Intl Doc Film Festival 2015, Lago Film festival 2010 in Lago, 25FPS 2009 in Zagreb, Screen Festival 2008 in Oslo.

J'ai 70 ans : je pratique l'art de l'image en mouvement depuis 50 ans, depuis la réalisation de mon premier film 16mm en 1971. J'ai toujours eu conscience de la mort comme d'un enjeu pour l'âme vivante - en fait je ne Je ne pense pas avoir vécu un seul jour sans avoir ce sujet dans mes pensées. Mais cela n'a jamais arrêté mon implication dans la vie, et de fait, très tôt, faire des images avec diverses technologies est devenu le territoire constant où j'ai pu investiguer mes préoccupations. Nous devons être agiles, nous devons être prêts à apprendre, nous devons nous adapter. La technologie est donc devenue pour moi un métalangage quand je pense à la douleur et à la joie de vivre : Avec « Another Life », elle est devenue l'incarnation de cet engagement. Le fantôme dans la machine a continué à montrer son visage dans les problèmes survenus lorsque LiDAR lui-même était stressé. C'est mon poème d'amour non seulement pour la technologie, mais aussi pour la vie et la mort. Les sous-titres sont actuellement en anglais et la voix est en chinois (entre autres versions) mais si le jury le souhaite, je créerai une version française et allemande.

Terry Flaxton a travaillé avec la composition sonore, la photographie et le cinéma, développant un intérêt particulier pour la vidéo analogique dans les années 1970 et lorsque la vidéo numérique et la cinématographie de données sont arrivées, il les a également adoptées. Il a exposé internationalement, notamment à Tokyo, Moscou, Bonn, Xi'an, Milan, Alger, Strasbourg et récemment Florence, Dublin, Venise, Melbourne et New York (des expositions de ses installations à la cathédrale St John the Divine de New York ont attiré plus de 1,2 million de visiteurs). Son travail a remporté plusieurs prix dans divers festivals, dont Montbéliard, Locarno, Amsterdam et Los Angeles.

Fiction expérimentale, « The Yellow Question » met en jeu les conflits et contradictions qui se cristallisent en Californie autour d'un sujet à première vue anodin : le gazon. En 2017, Arthur Flechard accompagne à Los Angeles Marine Pesquet, étudiante en anthropologie à l’EHESS, dont la recherche porte sur les relations entretenues par les résidents suburbains avec leur gazon. Depuis 2012, la Californie est touchée par une sécheresse sans précédent. La culture des gazons est remise en question par les politiques locales, bousculant une tradition paysagère aux connotations fortement identitaires. « The Yellow Question » est la reconstitution fictionnelle d’une réunion d’association de propriétaires en proie à des restrictions d’eau. Arthur Flechard y apporte un imaginaire spéculatif, étirant jusqu'à l'absurde cette petite histoire au sein de la grande histoire du gazon, le nœud gordien qu’est la culture du gazon en Californie aujourd'hui. La réalisation du film (décor, tournage, montage…) a été déléguée a? un prestataire, basé en Californie, de la plateforme en ligne Fiverr. En se remettant aux notions de « compétences » mises en avant par Fiverr, et en se limitant à un script et des indications, Arthur Flechard questionne le rôle de l'artiste au sein du processus créatif.

Né en 1990 à la Ferté-Macé, Arthur Fléchard vit et travaille à Paris. Il est diplômé d’un baccalauréat STAV (science technique de l’agronomie et du vivant) ; du CEB (certificat d’étude Biblique) à l’université catholique de l’ouest (2011) ; du DNAP avec félicitations du jury à l’école des Beaux-arts d’Angers (2012) ; et du DNSEP à l’école nationale des Beaux-arts de Paris (atelier Tania Bruguera) (2014).Il est lauréat en 2016 du prix Leipzig lors de la 66e édition de l’exposition «Jeune Création». Il réalise en 2023 une résidence à la Villa Belleville, à Paris. Il a notamment participé aux expositions « Museum of Arte Util » au Van Abbemuseum à Eindhoven, sur l’invitation de Tania Bruguera (2013) ; « DrawingRoom 015 », commissariat Judicaël Lavrador à La Panacée - Centre de Culture Contemporaine, Montpelier (2015) ; « Nouveau Monde Industriel » commissariat Nicolas Bourriaud (2016), ou encore « Reims scène d’Europe », commissariat C-E-A, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2019).

Entre fiction fantasmagorique et investigation historique, le film suit la rêverie d’un jeune mexicain vivant à Mexico City, qui le fait s'aventurer au plus profond de la plus grande forêt de cactus au monde. C'est là, sous les traits imaginaires d'un chasseur de cactus allemand, qu'il entrevoit les histoires de convoitise et de mort qui hantent cet extraordinaire et étrange "eldorado végétal".

The final film in Friedland’s “Movement Exercises” trilogy, Trust Exercises is a hybrid experimental dance film which explores the tension between the poetics of group movement and its instrumentalization for capitalist management. Amending the choreography of team-building and the visual grammars of corporate video, Trust Exercises braids together movement from three work spaces: a fictional start-up retreat, a body work session as interview, and a dance rehearsal. Movements transmit between performers across scenes, complicating the discrete goals of their choreographies and examining their portability across spheres. Dislocating the movement of the retreat to the space of rehearsal, professional dancers transform stock exercises into intimate social dances. A body work session reconfigures the office environment. Lingering after hours, movement facilitators transmute team-building games into a playful duet. Trust Exercises examines the premise and promise of the exercise: that by moving together, repeatedly, we both create and recreate the social body.

Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Through hybrid, narrative, and experimental filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, she stages and scripts bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate and distill the undetected, embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Facilitating a research process integrating found movements, gestures, and postures from cinema and archival footage, embodied memories, and contemporary dance languages, she choreographs through practices of interviewing, pre- and re-enactment, adaptation, and improvisational play, shaping dances with diverse communities of performers and movers—from professional dancers to cohorts of seniors and teenagers. Her work has screened and been presented in numerous festivals and film spaces including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, BAMcinématek, Mubi, and Anthology Film Archives, in art spaces such as Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, MoMA, Sharjah Art Foundation, MAM Rio, Nasher Museum, Wassaic Project, and Manifattura delle Arti (Bologna), and in dance spaces including the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place, among others. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Film at Lincoln Center, Dance Films Association, Art Factory International, NYSCA/Wave Farm, Rhode Island State Council of the Arts/NEA, Berlinale Talents, where she was one of 10 selected screenwriter/directors for the 2017 Script Station/Project Lab, and most recently by the Bronx Museum, where she was an AIM Emerging Artist Fellow in 2020. Sarah graduated from Brown University's department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen, Mike S. Ryan, and Kelly Reichardt. Sarah has worked on collaborative research and writing projects with media theorists Wendy Chun on slut-shaming and new media leaks, with Erin Brannigan on the dancing body on film, and has an ongoing collaboration with writer, scholar, and programmer Tess Takahashi on masses and embodiment. She has taught workshops on dance film and been a guest artist at Brown, Yale, Skidmore, Reed, and University of Utah, among others, in addition to teaching filmmaking to older adults in senior centers through Brooklyn Arts Council’s Su Casa program. In 2021, Sarah was a Pina Bausch Fellow for Dance and Choreography, collaborating with artists Wen Hui and Eiko Otake, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Video/Film, and was awarded the Jerome Foundation’s 2021 New York City Film, Video, and Digital Production grant for her feature film in development, Familiar Touch.

The film considers the question of the vision of the future and Utopia. In 1970, Cuban architect Ricardo Porro made a master plan of the tourist settlement in the shape of a human body. The design was elaborated by a group of international artists and architects but finally was not built. The main visual in the film is the model of this tourist settlement which was to synthesize architecture, sculpture, painting, and tourism. Image treatments with an oscilloscope, lying somewhere between analogue and digital worlds, introduce a new set of artifacts and looks. Apart from the film author made a VR installation and series of artworks in different media.

Since the late 1980s, the work of artist, curator and researcher Darko Fritz has revolved around a significant investigation into the use of technology in culture. He studied architecture in Zagreb and visual arts at Rijkakademie van beldende kunsten in Amsterdam. His work bridges the gap between contemporary art, media art and network culture, taking up topics such as glitch, error, and surveillance. He uses different media (graphic art, photography, film, video, internet, etc.). He is a critical observer of technology that changes society. His long-run project Imaginary Futures started with the film Zagreb Confidential was premiered in Oberhausen 2016 and the project continued with a series of artworks and other films. Fritz is the founder and programmer of the grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art since 2006.

An opinionated moto driver’s sanity is pushed to the edge when a total lockdown confronts him with the void in his life.

Ganza Moise is a published author and independent filmmaker based in Kigali, Rwanda. He is also the co-founder of Kiruri MFN, an independent production company based in Kigali, Rwanda. To date he has directed more than 8 short films, Like Sukut and Limbo which screened in various film festivals worldwide including; Cascade Festival of African Films, the AfrYKamera film festival, Signos de Noite, Ishango Encounters, Africa In Motion, Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, ZIFF and Exhibitions Like “International Digital Kunst Festival” and “The factory of Dreams” by Maison Beaulier. His film “Sensory Overload” won the jury’s special mention for the 67th Oberhausen. His latest film MUZUNGA premiered at the 2022 Oberhausen international film festival. Films he produced like IMUHIRA by Birara Miriam and From Here by Remy Ryumugabe among many others, have screened at prestigious festivals like the Locarno film festival and Oberhausen international short film festival.

Cherry blossoms are fragile, beautiful and light. Grasping flowers with hands symbolizes a desire to grasp something beautiful, fragile but perishable in life. When the flowers fall, when the opportunity comes, some are caught and some are lost. Those caught are only temporary possessions. Trying to catch flowers, trying to catch something good but easy to lose. During the Covid pandemic, filmmaker Wei Gao started planting and gardening. Taking care of plants every day, she discovered that humans are as fragile as plants. We try to catch things in life, some succeed, some miss. “The unbearable lightness of being.”

Gao Wei is an independent photographer and filmmaker, living and working between Seoul and Paris. She graduated from the School of Photography, Beijing Film Academy, China. She previously worked in the media industry in Beijing. Currently, her artistic practice is mainly created through still and moving images. Practices involve multiple media such as photography, super 8mm, 16mm film, video and image experiments. She held solo exhibitions in Paris, France and Seoul, South Korea in 2022. One of her films was selected in the 2023 Rotterdam International Film Festival, and several of her films were screened at art festivals and institutions in New York, Seoul, Paris and Chengdu.

A General Disappointment bends the quotidian with ordinary scenes that are overlaid with stories told through text that wander through a night at a sex club, domestic duties at home, and the existential aftermath after a failed attempt to go on a date. The experience invites us to ponder over the systemic failures inherent to capitalist societies, and how vain their promises of happiness and self-fulfillment are.

Serge Garcia is a writer and filmmaker with a penchant for aimlessly wandering. His work emphasizes narratives that explore possibilities for agency. His films and documentaries have screened internationally

1518 : Une épidémie se déclare lors d’une danse collective à Strasbourg en France. Selon certaines interprétations, elle serait due à l'ingestion de champignons du seigle. 1520 : l'épidémie de variole entraîne la mort d'indigènes à Tenochtitlán et Tlatelolco, ce serait là une des principales causes de la chute des deux villes. 2020 : la pandémie de COVID-19 est déclarée, nous vivons un événement sans précédent dans l’histoire contemporaine, il a alors fallu protéger le corps, limiter son espace, son interaction, sa mobilité. Coreomanía relie ces trois moments historiques à travers un concours de danse qui se déroule dans les environs de Tlatelolco, à Mexico. Les gagnants sont les participants qui n'ont pas cessé de danser. L'action est enregistrée dans une vidéo qui est ensuite montée comme une pièce chorégraphique. Les mouvements, les corps qui se rassemblent à nouveau font allusion à la construction collective et à la force d'être ensemble. Omar Gámez consacre son travail d'artiste visuel à rendre visibles les communautés dissidentes, ainsi qu'à explorer différentes manières de représenter le corps. Son travail se distingue par l'élargissement des possibilités offertes par les médias visuels afin de présenter une autre façon d'interagir. Coreomanía est une célébration de la vie par le mouvement du corps, une célébration de l'interaction collective par la danse. Luis Josué Martinez Rodríguez Commissaire

Le travail d'Omar Gámez (vit et travaille à Mexico) génère une réflexion sur les actions provoquées directement ou indirectement, où le corps est déployé comme un sous-thème. Le corps est le moyen de propitier des pratiques concrètes. C'est dans la documentation photographique et vidéo que son travail est généralement compris. Chaque projet intervient dans des espaces publics et privés avec des activations spécifiques, générant des réflexions sur le corps en déployant divers thèmes tels que le désir, les communautés dissidentes et la production de liens affectifs. Il a présenté son travail vidéo à LesGaiCineMad 2023 ; La Nuit Blanche à l'Institut Cervantes à Paris, France, 2008 ; ADD TV et NewFest, New York, 2007 ; LesGaiCineMad, Madrid ; Video_dumbo, New York ; Expresión en Corto, Guanajuato ; Mostra Lambda, Barcelone ; Athens Video Art Festival ; Inside Out Festival à Toronto, Canada, en 2006 ; et les IXe et Xe Festival MIX à la Cineteca Nacional de México, 2005, 2006 et 2023.

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

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

Third Person (Plural) is a collage essay film based on a collection of 200 postwar USA informational films and newsreels from the Library of Congress and the American National Archives. Originating as a quest to source documents of the early European integration processes, the film offers a snapshot of the post-war American newsreel film history, and a visual reminder of the crystallisation of the cold war rhetoric. Composed of 8 episodes, the film unfolds into an expansive feminist re-reading of this hegemonic imperial masculine gaze, while paying tribute to the ‘unseen’ glances, making visible a collective ‘third person’.

Aikaterini Gegisian [b. Thessaloniki, Greece] is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose filmic and photographic collages, drawing on diverse image histories, interweave documentary, archive and found material, in examining the production of cultural and national identities. Five years in the making, Third Person (Plural) (2023) is her first feature length film based on archival research at the Library of Congress. Her short films have been exhibited internationally including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, IFF Innsbruck, Videoformes, Kasseller Documentary Film Festival, Beirut Art Center, 8th Brighton Photo Biennale, Tallin Photomonth among others. In 2016, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art organised the first survey of her moving image practice. She has received several awards including First Prize, Nagoya University of Arts, Japan & the Golden Lion for best national pavilion for her participation at the group show Armenity at the Armenian Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale. Further recent shows include International Center of Photography (ICP), New York (2023); MOMus-Museum of Modern Art, Greece (2023); Halle 14 Centre of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2021); The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (2020); The Whitworth, Manchester (2019); National Arts Museum of China (2018); The Jewish Museum, Moscow (2018); Kunsthalle Osnabruck (2017); BALTIC, Newcastle (2017); among others. She lives between London and Thessaloniki and teaches at London Metropolitan University.

As my grandfather's presence in the country becomes increasingly problematic, my mother gradually decides to never touch a camera again, my father becomes obsessively convinced of his own disappearance, and something almost miraculous happens in 1976 in Montreux: Nina Simone comes back from retirement. In Three Disappearances and a Song, I revisit the family archive, pick up my camera, and film 3 people struggling to find new ways to be: my mother, my father, and myself.

Nadia Ghanem is a filmmaker who lives and works in Cairo. She recently finished her first short film as a director Three Disappearances And A Song (2021) which premiered at the 43rd edition of the Cairo International Film Festival, Images Festival, Cinema Árabe Feminino in Brazil and received the best short film award at Gabes Cinema Fen (Tunisia) as well as the audience and Jury awards for best short film at Manassat Film Festival in Cairo. Nadia is currently working on her first feature Looking for Spiderman which received development awards from A Kiss in the Desert, Rawiyat film collective, Two Stories Production, Dox Box and is part of the Studio Seen program. In parallel to being a filmmaker, Nadia Ghanem curated film programs for the 24th edition of the Videoex festival in Basel and since 2022 is a programmer for the Panorama of the European Film organized by Zawya Arthouse Cinema in Cairo. She also works as a Program Manager at Medrar for Contemporary Art where she coordinated the 10th edition of the Cairo Video Festival.

"Animal" explores the concept of animation. Creating a parallel between the “uncanny valley” of the archaic tradition of puppetry and recent technological developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, the film is inspired by a series of conversations with scientists and researchers from the robotics labs at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Footage from the EPFL alternates with images from the ancient Carlo Colla & Figli Marionette Company in Milan. The structure of the film resembles both an inventory of images and an audiobook, combining the aseptic atmospheres of scientific laboratories with the archaic dimension of puppetry, weaving together these figures and punctuating them with black frames.

Riccardo Giacconi has studied fine arts at the IUAV University of Venezia. His work has been exhibited in various institutions, such as Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), ar/ge kunst (Bolzano), MAC (Belfast), WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), tranzitdisplay (Prague), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). He was artist-in-residence at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne, Switzerland), Centre international d'art et du paysage (Vassivière, France), lugar a dudas (Cali, Colombia), MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, Austria). He presented his films at several festivals, including the New York Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015. He co-founded the collective listening festival ‘Helicotrema’ and the audio storytelling studio ‘Botafuego’. He is Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston.

Traum means dream in German, but in Italian and English it sounds like the word trauma. With the performance and accompanying sculptures that comprise TRAUM, it is Silvia Giambrone’s intention to remind us of the dream-like reality that trauma can instigate. The artist has written the stories of those who struggle with traumatic memories on the ceramic sculptural sheets of paper, documenting the role their experiences have played in forming different parts of their identities and realities. In the artist’s own words, “TRAUM addresses domestic violence from the perspective of a survivor who goes in and out of the trauma when telling their condition. Sometimes survivors (both children and adults) act like onlookers because violence (trauma) gave them a detached perspective in order to survive. Sometimes, they find themselves immersed in it with no exit strategy. And other times they even feel like they were the abusers even if it rationally makes no sense.” As a piece of performance art, TRAUM aims to articulate the often painfully inexpressible and isolating aspects of trauma. Giambrone offers a space where audience members become collective witnesses to a shared experience of catharsis. Through the sound of the ceramic sheets breaking, Giambrone creates an opportunity to share and heal collectively.

Silvia Giambrone (Agrigento, 1981), who both lives and works between Rome and London, works about both the physical and invisible evidence of the strong connection between violence and the ‘subjectification’ process. She won the 2019 VAF Award, the most important prize for young Italian artists. She was an ambassador for Kaunas European City of Culture 2022. Some of her exhibitions include: W Women in Italian Design, Triennale Design Museum, Milan (2016); Corpo a corpo, La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2017); Terra mediterranea: in action, NiMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus (2017); Wall- eyes. Looking at Italy and Africa, Keynes Art Mile, Johannesburg (2019); VII Premio Fondazione VAF, Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany (2019); Sovvertimenti, Museo Novecento, Florence (2019); Nobody’s room. Anzi, parla, Museo del Novecento, Milan (2020); I say I, La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2021); Hall of Shadows, Dior show FW2021, Versailles Castle, France (2021); Mascarilla 19 – Codes of domestic violence, LOOP Festival, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (2021); Mascarilla 19 – Codes of domestic violence, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, Italy (2021); Reclaiming and Making: Art, Desire, Violence, Museum Of Sex, New York, NY(2022); INTERTWINGLED – The role of the Rugs in Art, Craft and Design, La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2022); Fine Arts Festival 2022, Los Angeles (2022); Female Feedback Film Festival, Los Angeles / Toronto (2022); Mill of performing Art, Larissa, Greece (2022); San Francisco Arthouse Festival, CA (2022); Accolade Global Film Festival, Los Angeles (2022); Ediplay International Film Festival, Paris (2022); London Indie Short Film Festival (2022); World of Film International Festival, Glasgow (2022); Florida shorts (2022); Some things, Nicola Del Roscio Foundation, Rome (2022); Turning Pain into Power, Kunst Mean (2022); Sensei Tokyo filmfest (2023); Tokyo Film award (2023); Reise nach Italien, Goethe house, Rome (2023) ; You owe me one, Prometeo Gallery, Milan (2023); Cinequest Film & VR Festival, San Jose, California (2023); Sexually explicit content, PAC Padiglione Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2023); Carmarthen Film Bay festival (2023); Tokyo Lift-Off Film Festival (2023); WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival (2023); L’incontro, Forof, Roma (2023).