Programme Paris
Vendredi 28 novembre 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Place centrale d’Izioum, quelques mois après la libération de la ville. Une caméra hésitante parcourt les traces de la guerre, tandis que des habitant·es reprennent leur quotidien.

Juliette Corne est diplômée des Beaux-Arts de Paris en 2022. Son travail navigue entre l’art contemporain et le cinéma, explorant les événements socio-politiques contemporains et leurs conséquences sur les représentations et les intimités. Attachée à révéler les mécanismes qui engendrent une normalisation de la violence, elle capte, à travers ses films, ses installations et ses photographies, des moments de vie qui continuent malgré l’horreur et la guerre. Zoé Monti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuit. La lune est une pierre. Les oreilles sont bouchées. Une chaise équilibre sur le toit d’une maison. Une boîte argentée se compose d’elle-même : un instrument mystérieux. Une bille roule dans la tête de quelqu’un. Deux pierres tournent. Est-il possible d'arrêter l'esprit ?

Henricks est diplômé du Alberta College of Art and Design. En 1991, il s'est installé à Montréal où il a obtenu un baccalauréat en cinéma de l'Université Concordia. Henricks a récemment terminé un doctorat à l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Henricks a enseigné en histoire de l’art et en arts visuels à l'Université McGill, à l’UQAM et à l’Université de Montréal. Il est présentement chargé de cours à l'Université Concordia. Artiste et commissaire, Henricks est mieux connu pour ses vidéogrammes et ses installations vidéo, qui ont été présentés à travers le monde, notamment au MoMA (New York), dans le cadre de la série Video Viewpoints. Il a été récipiendaire du Prix Bell Canada d’art vidéographique en 2002, a reçu le Prix Giverny Capital en 2015, et le Prix Louis-Comtois en 2023. Une exposition de son travail a été présentée au Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2023. Ses oeuvres sont dans la collection du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, du MoMAr (New York), du Musée des beaux-art de Montréal, du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, le Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, entre autres. Il est représenté par la galerie Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Pour plus d’information, visitez www.nelsonhenricks.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

« Nous n’avons pas besoin de nous connaître à l’avance » est une œuvre vidéo hybride, qui alterne des moments de performance dansée, des images d'archives et des citations textuelles. Gabriela Löffel s'appuie sur l'aspect politique de l'espace public pour construire sa réflexion et développe un essai visuel qui met en scène la "performativité des corps dans cette zone d'action politique". En puisant dans l'œuvre écrite de Judith Butler, philosophe et théoricienne du genre états-unienne qui a travaillé sur la question du corps et de sa représentativité normée dans nos sociétés contemporaines, Löffel donne véritablement une corporéité aux questions soulevées par l'auteure. Les citations issues de l'œuvre de Butler sont données à voir en parallèle aux éléments dansés et archivistiques de la vidéo. La caméra presque fixe permet d'examiner en détail les gestes lents et précis des danseur·euse·s. Les déplacements de l'appareil sont presque imperceptibles, tant ils sont subtils. L'artiste et le chorégraphe Cédric Gagneur ont étroitement collaboré afin de définir les divers mouvements qui composent la chorégraphie : ils proposent une abstraction des gestes de résistance ou de révolte, tirés des images d'archives issues de la collection des Archives contestataires de Genève. La lenteur et le silence habitent la pièce et donnent suffisamment d'espace au corps pour qu'il puisse se déployer de manière individuelle ou en collectivité. L'œuvre propose ainsi une dialectique du potentiel de revendication dans l'espace public. Œuvre coproduite par le Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, Genève, avec le Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève pour le programme MIRE.

Gabriela Löffel travaille principalement avec des médias temporels et se concentre sur les zones grises des structures politiques et financières, ainsi que sur les infrastructures. Le déplacement et la traduction de l’immédiat documenté vers les champs de l’interprétation et de la mise en scène sont des stratégies qu’elle utilise dans son processus de travail. Une méthode qui donne souvent lieu à des projets à long terme et lui permet de créer des espaces de questionnement et de proposer des ruptures avec les récits linéaires. Elle s’intéresse à l’obliquité du sujet et de son contexte. C’est dans ce décalage, induit par sa manière d’aborder les sujets, que son travail ouvre des réflexions sur le sens de la compréhension d’un monde lorsque l’on prend conscience de la fragmentation de nos connaissances. Son travail a été présenté dans des institutions et des galeries dont MAST Bologne, Aargauer Kunsthaus, EMAF Osnabrück, Galería Metropolitana Santiago, Dazibao Montréal, la Biennale Kochi-Muziris et autres. Gabriela Löffel est lauréate du Swiss Art Award, du Lewis Baltz Research Fund, de la bourse Landis+Gyr, ainsi que d'autres.

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

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

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

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

SPEECHLOSS est un film traversé par des personnages solitaires, des figures en décalage et en quête de sens. Dans une ambiance maritime et étrange, on croise une joggeuse, un bodybuilder, des chiens et un étrange organe géant. Speechloss est une succession de quatre tableaux dans lesquels souffle le vent et un puissant désir de se dire vivant. Car chacun.e incarne un.e IA abandonnée, en attente d’activation.

Charlotte Dalia est née en 1993. Elle est diplômée de l’Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse. Artiste plasticienne, vidéaste et réalisatrice, ses recherches portent sur les effets tant plastiques que narratifs du cinéma. Impégnée du principe de «cinémonde» théorisé par Jean-Luc Nancy, elle utilise le cinéma en tant que répertoire de signes «ouvrant le dedans sur lui-même». Elle a participé à de nombreuses expositions collectives et a été invitée à construire deux expositions personnelles. Poursuivant ses recherches sur les écritures de la réalité à travers les formes de la fiction, elle se forme à l’écriture documentaire auprès de Ty Films et Films en Bretagne. Elle travaille actuellement au développement d’ALMERICA, un projet mêlant crise climatique et décors de cinéma, et à l’écriture d’ un moyen métrage faisant suite à SPEECHLOSS, pour en poursuivre l'univers.

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

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