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The video installation "Hugging Angela Davis" is a filmic, performative investigation of a spontaneous hug between Angela Davis and a young East German. The woman, Erika Berthold, was the daughter of communist functionaries and married to the son of the famous communist dissident Robert Havemann, and was active in oppositional circles herself. The work probes into the potentiality opened by this encounter between the two figures and their political struggles. It weaves the narrative questioning of this encounter with a filmic and performative examination of the motif of the embrace as a somatic, affective, political gesture. What can be made of the two women's mutual recognition, their shared departure from protocol? How does their momentary complicity cross or complicate cultural and political differences and ascriptions? What might a - dissident - politics of the hug look like? "Hugging Angela Davis" is part of the long term project "A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures" – which looks at the body as the site and archive of historical experiences.

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S.(GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists. Her works have been featured in international exhibitions, among others at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2020; Goethe Institute Moscow (2020), “Palast der Republik, Haus der Berliner Festpiele (2019), f/stop Leipzig (2018), Gorki Herbstsalon III (2017), mumok kino, Vienna (2016), steirischer herbst festival, Graz (2015), Devi Art Foundation, Delhi (2013) and “Former West”, Utrecht (2010). In 2018 together with Suza Husse she organized the project “wild recuperations. material from below. Artistic Research in the Archive of the GDR Opposition”. In 2019 she co-curated the festival “Palast der Republik” at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Content Summary/ Accompanying Info: This video is an intervention into footage from the first meeting of the Central Round Table of the GDR. The meeting took place on December 7th 1989 in East Berlin, two months after the beginning of mass demonstrations across the country. The Round Table was set up to bring together members of the established political parties and the newly formed oppositional groups on equal terms. A few hours into the meeting, proceedings are interrupted as a noisy demonstration approaches outside. In the ensuing 10-minute scene, participants try to decide on a collective response. Sounds from the demonstration can be heard ebbing and swelling outside the window, while the participants inside debate. The demonstrators are never seen, only heard. The 2-channel video shows the scene in its entirety. It unfolds as a series of interventions into the material that are themselves based on motions and gestures taken from the footage: pans, zooms, the shaking of the camera, the gestures and movements of the participants, the different qualities and sources of sound. These are amplified, repeated, looped, in order to confront and confound notions of inside and outside, language and body, representation and embodiment.

Biography: Elske Rosenfeld (b. 1974 in Halle/S., GDR) uses a variety of media to rework archival materials from the history of state socialism in Eastern Europe and to relate them to contemporary political forms. Recent works in the formats video, performance, and writing have focussed on the physical, gestural content of archival documents from situations of revolution or protest (Paris 1968, East Berlin 1989, Cairo 2011) – to address the body as a site and archive of political events. Various abstracted interventions into and around these materials reactivate political energies that were set loose in these instances and continue to reverberate into the present day. Rosenfeld lives and works in Berlin and Vienna. She holds a PhD-in-Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including Forum Stadtpark/Steirischer Herbst 2015, Graz; Berlin Art Week 2014; Sarai Reader 09/Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; Vienna Art Week 2011; BAK, Utrecht; Shedhalle, Zürich; mumok kino, Vienna; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; GfzK, Leipzig; tranzit, Cluj, Romania; the Education Programme of documenta13. She has taken part in international residencies, including the Visual Arts Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Her texts have been published in/on eipcp.net, Reviews in Cultural Theory, Springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, and in a number of books and collections. She has been awarded a DOC-Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and project funding from the Programme for Arts-based Research/FWF, Austria. www.elskerosenfeld.net

I read in the writings of one painter that, for him, the Polish landscape seems to constantly draw our gaze to the ground, making us look not over the horizon but under our feet, at the bones buried beneath each step. The film shifts between a portrait of my eighty year old grandparents and my view on the elements and imagery of the national-Catholic narrative in the Polish landscape. The title “Ashes by name is man” is borrowed from a church notice board in Nowa Grobla, in Roztocze. At the centre of my explorations is the rage of hills Roztocze, while Krakow and Lviv form the boundaries of the area in which I was shooting.

Ewelina Rosinska (1987, Poland) holds an MA in Art History and is based in Germany and Portugal. Between 2013 and 2022 she studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (dffb), where she was a member of Ute Aurand's Bolex Workshop. Her Films were screened at Her DOCS in Warsaw, Courtisane Festival in Gent, International Film Festival in Rotterdam IFFR, at the Musée de la Photographie Charleroi or at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Her last film “Ashes by name is man” won Best Exis Award at the Exis Film Festival in Seoul.

How do the Burmese continue to live under a dictatorship that for the past two generations has curbed any form of hope? Along the Irrawaddy River appear signs of resistance of a people deprived of its guide, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was viciously attacked and locked away. The inner voices of exile express the sufferings of a wounded nation.

Born in Paris in 1963, François Rosolato is an author, director, actor, and director of photography. After finishing his film studies at the Ecole Nationale Louis Lumière, he began working behind the camera for fictions and later for documentary productions. Attracted by non-fiction, he at the same time touched upon directing with a very personal point of view. He attained financial backing in the margin of the French television channels? formatted universe.

NOUVEAU SYNOPSIS 09/04/08: Trilling scrolls right to left across the screen, recombining footage from the early 80s television program "Three's Company" into a sequence of traveling gestural loops. Trilling is about physical humor. It emerged out of a curiosity about my childhood obsession with the well-known sitcom "Three's Company". The show was written for adults, but through the actor?s performances it conveyed a humor that enabled anyone (including children) to laugh out loud. The physical comedy became the vehicle for the narrative, expressing the humor of the show in a way that words could not. Unlike verbal comedy, which needs time to register and be translated before we recognize its wit, physical humor is immediate; awkward bodily movement can trigger an uncontrollable hysterical response. By excerpting and reformatting physical gestures from the actors in the show, I constructed a new narrative in collaboration with Trumpeter Taylor Haskins. Haskins composed the music spontaneously, creating a unique improvised response to each clip that fold together into a unified whole. ANCIEN SYNOPSIS: Trilling recombines footage from the early 80s sitcom "Three`s Company" into a sequence of travelling gestural loops. Trumpeter Taylor Haskins collaborated on the audio track, creating a unique improvisational response to each clip.

Catherine Ross works in video and photography, framing gestures of performances that often go unnoticed in their original context. Isolating the movements of humans and/or objects, her videos create new musical sequences that reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. Here she finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes our own vulnerabilities. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including venues in Brazil, Finland, Ireland, England, Canada and the United States. Ross attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2002, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2003 and received a 2005-06 residency from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. Ross was recently awarded "Best International Short Award" at the 2006 Darklight Festival (Dublin, IRELAND). She received her BA in studio art from Dartmouth College in 1994. Catherine Ross lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Théodolitique (2015) merges the geodetic and the filmic, linking the very long history of land surveying with the comparatively new technologies of film-making. Connecting these two methods of visual observation and recording, Théodolitique documents student surveyors from the école des Métiers du Sud-Ouest-de-Montréal as they take an outdoor exam over the course of a single day. The project utilizes a wide range of filmic and acoustic techniques ? including a parabolic microphone to capture distant audio, and a custom built ?theodocam? to provide a surveyor?s eye view ? to reflect and mimic how the students move, think and learn their trade. Recorded on a designated practice field adjacent to the école des Métiers, Théodolitique is a film that is both chorographic and choreographic.

The works of David K. Ross are concerned with the processes and activities which enable infrastructural monuments, cultural institutions, and architectural structures to exist. Using photography, film and installation to carry out these inquiries, he examines the performative capacities of un-scripted activities, along with the relationships that exist between the recorded event and its re-presentation in physical space. These inquires have been applied to various projects including a study of the enigmatic activities of student land surveyors, the uncanny and oneiric qualities of a series of rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, the nuanced and poetic movements of dancers about to perform, the mythic and sublime qualities of an urban lighting fixture in Montréal, the quietude of artists’ storage spaces, and a close examination of colour coded art shipping crates.

The United Nations building in New York at night. Douglas Ross films an architecture void of animation, except for the intermittent flickering lights.

Douglas Ross was born in Brockton, MA, USA, in 1969. He lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at the Miami Contemporary Art Museum; at the Rotterdam Film Festival; in Turin; at the KW Contemporary Art Institute in Berlin; the PS1 Contemporary Art Centre; and MoMA, the Walker Art Centre. He has also completed artist residencies and exchange programs in Japan.

Nicolas Rossi, geboren 1978 in Thonon-les-Bains (F), studierte, nach einem Gaststudium bei Gerd Roscher in Experimenteller Filmkunst an der HFBK Hamburg, an der Bauhaus Universität Weimar, bevor er 2012 die Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig als Meisterschüler absolvierte. Aktuell forscht er im Rahmen eines wissenschaftlich-künstlerischen Projekts namens „Essayismus als Tool der Kritik im Zeitalter der hybriden Bewegtbildformate“ an der Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.

Appréhendées comme un voyage mental, visuel et sonore proche de l’esprit surréaliste, les images se succèdent au rythme de l’énonciation mystique du thàme astral de Ersnt dressé par un astrologue de Sedona, également saxophoniste, qu’il a lui-même dressé après avoir constaté une erreur dans l’heure de naissance de celui commandé par Breton en 1930. Sa voix off accompagne le spectateur. à la fois atmosphère sonore et piste narrative, elle parait guider cette chasse au fantôme - probablement celui de l’esprit de Max Ernst qui, partout, imprègne les lieux. Tandis que la mélodie rappelle les bandes sonores de méditation disponibles dans les boutiques de souvenirs de la ville, la désynchronisation répétée des rushes dans le temps évoque, tel ce chat dont le corps se dédouble, le “voyage astral” cher aux surréalistes, l’expèrience de hors corps, la sensation de flottement. Dans son film Real Estate Astrology (2015), Maxime Rossi développe une réflexion à facettes pour portraiturer un lieu. Il confronte deux états de narration entre lesquels le spectateur peut osciller, du diagnostic des traces objectives d’une quète, real estate, au pronostic à valeur prédictive d’une vie dressé d’après l’interprètation stellaire, astrology.

Le travail de Maxime Rossi contourne les limites de genre prédéfini comme de style pour puiser ses formes et son inspiration dans de multiples sources : l’histoire de l’art, l’ethnographie ou la littérature. L’impressionnant éventail des registres provoque une étrange narration, que l’artiste utilise pour dévoiler des vérités en portant un nouveau regard sur des sujets que nous pensions connaître avec certitude. À travers le prisme kaléidoscopique d’une pratique complexe et hétéroclite mêlant la sculpture, l’installation, la performance, la scénographie et la vidéo, Maxime Rossi ignore l’idée même de catégories et propose une discipline singulière qui convoque la « beauté convulsive » chère aux surréalistes. Maxime Rossi est né en 1980, il vit et travaille à Paris, France. Son travail a fait l’objet de projections au Centre Pompidou, Paris et au MUMOK, Vienne (Autriche). Il a notamment été montré dans le cadre d’expositions personnelles et collectives au Palais de Tokyo, Paris, à l’Emba / Galerie Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers, à la Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller, à La Halle des bouchers, Vienne, à la 19e Biennale de Sydney, au S.M.A.K. de Gent ou au Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Suisse.

Avec « Sister Ship » [le navire de la Soeur], Maxime Rossi propose une nouvelle étape de son projet d’envergure inspiré par Soeur Corita Kent (1918-1986), religieuse américaine ayant quitté les ordres en 1968 et connue pour avoir contribué à la culture pop. À partir des années 1960, cette soeur a effectivement développé une pratique artistique en produisant des affiches sérigraphiées qui entremêlent slogans publicitaires, paroles de chansons et versets religieux. S’inspirant de ce personnage hors-normes, Maxime Rossi propose une installation dynamique de cinéma élargi qui regroupe une vidéo spatialisée dans La Halle des bouchers et des éléments de décor scénique colorés. Cette comédie musicale décalée combine les séquences du film documentaire Pygmée Blues (2013) tourné le long du fleuve Congo, avec une bande son constituée de la transcription d’un livre sur Soeur Corita, chantée par Emma Daumas accompagnée de musiciens africains.

Le travail de Maxime Rossi contourne les limites de genre prédéfini comme de style pour puiser ses formes et son inspiration dans de multiples sources : l’histoire de l’art, l’ethnographie ou la littérature. L’impressionnant éventail des registres provoque une étrange narration, que l’artiste utilise pour dévoiler des vérités en portant un nouveau regard sur des sujets que nous pensions connaître avec certitude. À travers le prisme kaléidoscopique d’une pratique complexe et hétéroclite mêlant la sculpture, l’installation, la performance, la scénographie et la vidéo, Maxime Rossi ignore l’idée même de catégories et propose une discipline singulière qui convoque la « beauté convulsive » chère aux surréalistes. Maxime Rossi est né en 1980, il vit et travaille à Paris, France. Son travail a fait l’objet de projections au Centre Pompidou, Paris et au MUMOK, Vienne (Autriche). Il a notamment été montré dans le cadre d’expositions personnelles et collectives au Palais de Tokyo, Paris, à l’Emba / Galerie Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers, à la Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller, à La Halle des bouchers, Vienne, à la 19e Biennale de Sydney, au S.M.A.K. de Gent ou au Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Suisse.

ARCHIPELAGO was filmed in the ruins of a former Soviet gulag, where prisoners were forced into hard labor to quarry limestone. After the collapse of the USSR, the infrastructure that prevented flooding fell into disrepair, submerging the prison beneath the waters of Lake Rummu in Estonia. In recent years, Estonian authorities have transformed the area into a recreational park, inviting tourists and families to explore this once-hidden place—a layered testament to collective memory and history. Through a blend of static and weightless filming styles, Archipelago contemplates the passage of time and nature’s quiet reclamation, offering a reflective perspective on impermanence and transformation

Sergei Rostropovich (b. 1986) is a New York-born filmmaker and photographer based in Paris. After graduating from the International Film School of Paris, he began his career as an assistant director on Faust by Alexander Sokurov, which won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. He went on to direct a range of short films, including Ophelia, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014, marking his shift toward non-narrative video work. Rostropovich’s art explores the fleeting nature of human experience, balancing moments of celebration and ritual against darker themes of violence and inevitable decay. Through his video and photographic work, he contemplates life’s fragile beauty and the quiet, constant force of entropy, capturing a world where joy and impermanence are inextricably linked.

;Yerevan, Armenia, in the illigible secret of the country imprisoned in its shadows in its nights of the underground nights of the basements trains for nowhere the quiet splendor of the mountains mystical paradox mutism and song the voices of the prisons ephemeral traveler light sleeper

Born on May 29, 1951 in Montpellier, Martine Rousset resided in Sète, France until 1975. She studied Philosophy of Cinema at the Université Paul Valery of Montpellier. As a director, she focuses on light and script. She has worked in cinema since 1977, and has been working as an expert beside Suzanne Pagé since 1978 in the audiovisual department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris.

A woman performs Butoh alone in her bedroom; a foreigner wanders the buzzing streets of Tokyo; a poet speaks of rivers, pity and ghosts.

Clément Roussier was born in 1984. He is the author of two poetry collections (Now It Is Always Three O’Clock and Fondane), published in 2025 by Derrière la salle de bain, as well as a novel, Sullivan and the Fiery Skies of the Savannah Evenings, published in 2020 by L’École des Loisirs. In Silence and clamour, his first film, won the Grand Prize of the French Competition at FID Marseille 2023.

In June 2011, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant set a livecam on site. Displaying a fake transparency, this propaganda tool shows the unique images of an endless disaster. A single, continuous, static shot reveals a lethal landscape exuding an invisible toxicity and a strange, paradoxical beauty. Earthquakes, shrouding mists, smoke coming out of the reactors, ravens flying across the sky, radioactive rains... those images of a geographical landscape wiped off the map follow on from each other outside the human timeline. Yet, a defiant gesture made by an anonymous liquidator towards the ocular device takes us back from this forbidden outerworld.

Philippe Rouy lives and works in Paris (France).

À Fukushima daiichi, le ventre de la centrale nucléaire effondrée maintient pour encore très longtemps les humains à distance. Seules d’autres machines peuvent s’en approcher. Elles filment pour les hommes ce qu’ils ne peuvent plus voir. Entre mouvements pendulaires lancinants et pénétrations gyroscopiques, ces images annoncées par l’exploitant comme des explorations scientifiques rigoureuses s’avèrent être des plongées chaotiques et hallucinées au cœur d’un magma radioactif irréductible.

Philippe Rouy vit et travaille à Paris. Ses films sont montrés dans des festivals et des lieux de diffusions tels que FIDMarseille, Torino Film Festival, Rotterdam IFF, Jihlava IFF, UnionDocs New York, Cinéma Spoutnik de Genève, Cinema Nova de Bruxelles, etc...

Un homme filme le vivant. Il l’archive dans des préparations humides paradoxales . Des images en fluide qui pourraient lui survivre. En 2100, sa fille aura 86 ans. Il en aura 129.

Philippe Rouy est réalisateur. Sa trilogie consacrée à la catastrophe nucléaire de Fukushima, 4 bâtiments, face à la mer, Machine to Machine et Fovea centralis, a été présentée, entre autres, au FIDMarseille, Cinéma du Réel, Mumbai Film Festival, Torino Film Festival.

"After the bridge, starts the land of ghosts" (Dracula - Bram Stocker)

Vincent Royen was born in May 1968. He studied in Marseilles´s Fine Arts School- Luminy. He obtained his superior studies diploma in plastics arts in 1994. Since 1995, he has been living and working in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and took part in the realization of several AV/cinema works among which: - "Kyrie ou le début du Chaos" (fiction, 35mm, 15 min., 1998): filmmaker assistant/artistic director: - "Jusqu´à 120 ans" (documentary, digital, 70 min., 2002): co-direction - ULALAPA (fiction/doc - digital, 12 min., 2003): co-direction, editing, sound - LOGOLOGO (fiction - digital, 7 min., 2005): realization, editing, sound and photography He also develops activities linked with plastic arts and has realized many group and solo exhibitions among which: 2001 - "Medodanóia" - solo exhibition realized at "Centro Cultural São Paulo" - São Paulo - Brazil 2000 - "SUNSET" - solo exhibition realized at the "FUNARTE" (Fondation Nationale des Arts) - São Paulo - Brazil

This documentary film follows a heroin-addicted professional escort as she moves between New York City, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Combining frank images of the actual labor of sex work with intimate portraits of her interpersonal life, the film is an alternately humorous and harrowing look at a seldom depicted side of American life as well as a meditation on the performativity at the core of documentary filmmaking and the sex industry alike. Shot on a mixture of 16mm and HD digital video in luxuriant long takes, its disciplined style foregrounds the sensual texture of the everyday while playing with the conventions of narrative cinema, focussing on the profound interrelation of performance and identity within the socioeconomic fabric of the U.S. Written in close collaboration with its subject/star, Empathy marks the feature-length directorial debut for Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, editor/producer of Bx46 (FID Marseille 2014).

Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli was born in 1988 in Boston, USA. Following a degree in Film Studies from Wesleyan University. They currently reside in New York City, where they also work as a critic, editor, and colorist. Empathy is their first feature, following two short films.

Lost?Prairie?Valley (2025) explores the intersection of machine vision, ecology, and extinction on Minnesota’s prairie lands. Using 4K digital video, 16?mm film, LiDAR, and AI image recognition, the film observes threatened plant species and landscape change across research sites—asking how our technological gaze shapes what we see and what we lose.

Steve Rowell is an artist and educator working across photography, moving image, sound, and spatial media. His research-driven practice investigates landscape as a site of political imagination, focusing on perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and ecological crisis. Drawing on methods from geography and archaeology, he explores the entanglements of built systems and natural terrains. Steve holds an MFA with Distinction from the University of Oxford and a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas. He is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019), a MacDowell Fellow (2021–22), and a 2024 McKnight Media Artist Fellow. Additional support includes Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board (2022, 2025), and international residencies in Berlin, Vienna, and Fogo Island. Formerly a longtime collaborator with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, SIMPARCH, and the Office of Experiments, Steve has lived and worked in Los Angeles, Oxford, Berlin, D.C., and Chicago. He is currently based in Minneapolis, where he teaches and conducts field-based research at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Parallelograms is an experimental documentary film and mapping project aimed at representing corruption and dark money in American politics. Political Action Committees, think tanks, trade associations, lobbying agencies, and advocacy groups are institutions where experts gather to discuss, map, and strategize, creating political and economic environments that help secure their visions of the future. This project is concerned with the multiverse of these near futures -- some more probable than others -- as well as with the present. Parallelograms is about where vectors of geography, landscape, politics, finance, and temporality intersect and how they are manifested. It also serves as a linear “cognitive mapping” experiment in which the viewer experiences a compressed, systematic tour of a dense and complex political terrain. Abstraction coexists with the real as a reflection of the current state of political discourse in America today. Corrupted power and distorted influence affects us all by exacerbating economic disparity, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and civil rights abuses. The intent of Parallelograms is not simply to present documentation from an exhaustive list, or to dictate any particular activist agenda, but rather, to extrapolate from the political landscape in a way that compels discussion about dark money.

Steve Rowell is a research-based artist who works with still and moving images, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts. Currently based in Los Angeles, he has lived in Berlin, Chicago, and Washington DC, over the past 20 years. His transdisciplinary practice focuses on overlapping aspects of technology, perception, and culture as related to ontology and landscape. Rowell contextualizes the built environment with the surrounding medium of nature; appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist. In addition to being Program Manager at The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles) since 2001, he has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago) and The Office of Experiments (London).

This is a film about plants. It was made by plants. They transmitted their instructions to the human director through artificially intelligent means. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," (1935) in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Shocken, 1969) Prior to the nineteenth century, western philosophers thought of eyes as broadcast centers, producing images of the world. As this perceived center of the universe shifted away from humans, and the Earth, it became more difficult to see the natural world exactly at the moment that industrial society’s exploitation began driving entire species towards extinction. Since that time, increasingly complex machines and algorithms do the work of seeing and recording the effects of the global climate emergency. Lost Prairie Valley investigates this moment at ecological research stations in the American state of Minnesota, with a little object recognition help from artificial intelligence.

Steve Rowell is a human, artist, and educator who works with photography, moving image, sound, maps, and spatial relations. His research-based practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.