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Mira and Klodi, a young Albanian couple arrive in Marseille with a crucial mission. As they face a fateful appointment and a room full of waiting men, time is of the essence. As they confront the urgency of their choice, they must also confront the growing need to let go of each other.

Erenik Beqiri studied at the Academy of Arts, Tirana where he graduated with a Master degree in Film Directing. His thesis was "Seed Money", a short film written by Jim Uhls (Fight Club). He has participated in the Sarajevo Talent Campus as a Screenwriter, where he developed the short script "Reverse" which was produced a year later for the Sarajevo City of Film. "Reverse" collected awards for best film at the Drama ISFF and Cinematic Achievement award at Thessaloniki ISFF. In 2013 he wrote and directed the short film "Alphonso" which screened in festivals such as Vancouver International Film Festival and Brussels ISFF, among others. His next short film "Bon Appétit" was nominated for Méliès D’Argent at Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, selected in Haapsalu, Dokufest, Lund and many more. His last short film "The Van" was in the official competition in Cannes Film Festival and it is currently playing in festivals around the world. His films showcase the inner struggles of the characters as they confront with the socio-political space they inhabit, ultimately coming down to unsettling decisions that define them as comic, tragic or grotesque portraits of society. Erenik currently lives and works in Tirana, Albania.

From now on silence is a short film in which we observe characters who wander through empty building complexes of a city. They are the survivors of a time that is not separated from their places. Auras and real people blur into a questionable constellation of figures. The venues are office buildings and a disused theatre before its imminent demolition. Obscure moments of encounters and the return of walking and coming alternate. Silence from here observes these sceneries and is thus a contemporary document of a place that no longer exists.

Born in Berlin, Germany. 1982. Christin Berg graduated as Meisterschülerin of film in 2015 of Städelschule. She studied at UCL, Slade fine art media department 2013-2014. 2008 Diplom in Scenography and Set Design from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hanover.

In The Human Orchid we follow a group of individuals who look to be human but whose behavior suggests something else. They seem to be connected to each other through a sort of network or root system. Through sessions reminiscent of psychological personality tests, their perceptions and orientation abilities are evaluated. Together, they perform different examinations to approach an understanding of humanity.

Lena Bergendahl (b. 1982, SE) is an artist and film maker who completed her MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2010. Throughout her work, questions of visual storytelling, humanity, and technology are recurrent. Fictional scenarios are intertwined with archival material and investigations from geological, historical, and scientific perspectives. She works with examining these questions through short films and video installations, combined with sculpture, photography, text, and collage. The works move between mountain ranges, digital avatars, forest masks, Rorschach images, and the faces of orchids, to the evolution of flowers through time and their techniques for attracting insects. Her works have recently been shown at Ystads Konstmuseum, Ystad, SE (2024), Gislaveds Konsthall, Gislaved, SE (2024), Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, SE (2024), Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen, DK (2022), Galleri CC, Malmö, SE (2022), Galleri Format, Malmö, SE (2021), Celsius Projects, Malmö, SE (2019), Lunds Konsthall, Lund, SE (2018), Swedish Television (2018) and at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands (2017). In 2021 she was awarded the Edstrandska Stiftelsen's Scholarship.

Bergers fascination for mathematical structures is obvious in his visual language, consisting of the formal patterns of squares, lines and rectangles. No attempt is made to create an organic quality, the shapes are pure abstraction.

Erich Berger is an artist and independent researcher born in Austria. He currently lives and works in Oslo/Norway. With the sound artist PURE he founded the audiovisual improvisation duo PURE.BERGER.

RAPTURE I - VISIT piece follows Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko as he emotionally confronts his abandoned and inaccessible apartment in Donbas, Ukraine, a region affected by ten years of war. The apartment is recreated using a 3D scan of original photographs, offering a digital reconquest of the space as Marko visits it through VR for the first time since 2018.

Alisa Berger was born 1987 in Makhachkala (Republic of Dagestan, Russia) and raised in Lviv (Ukraine) and Essen (Germany). She studied film and fine arts at the Academy of Media Art Cologne (KHM) and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá. With her 2017 KHM diploma film, she was nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize and for the FIRST STEPS Award of the Deutsche Filmakademie. She was also the recipient of the Best Film Award for New Directors at Int. Film Festival Uruguay and the Screenplay Award of H.W. Geißendörfer. 2018 - 2022 she lived in Tokyo and studied Butoh. Her work often deals with a search for the spiritual, non-rational drive in our world, cultures whose practices of knowledge acquisition are related to religious ideologies, mortuary cults or futuristic concepts of these beliefs.

Doska Frank depicts some days in the life and emotions of a young couple in Stockholm, Frida and Oskar. Parallel to the young couple is the real estate agent who provides guided tours to the people. Political ideas are manipulated and removed from their context and extreme make-up trends are taken for granted. Frida desires Black Metal, and she wants it loud. Oskar needs Frida, but Frida needs music as a symbol of something more.

Hanna Bergfors, grew up in Sweden. Lived in Spain and now in Germany where she studies narrative and experimental film at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She has directed a range of short films and installations before making Doska Frank.

“Sometimes a little Sin is good for the Soul” takes place within an architectural, painterly world. Interior structures, shapes and colours form together the unusual spaces within which three women are suspended. Their actions remain bound to their surroundings, while a glowing red “Exit” sign reappears throughout the film to tease its cold surroundings. No matter how often the sign reveals itself, it never points towards a clear way out.

Alex Beriault is a visual artist (b. Toronto, Canada) whose artistic works encompass installation and film. In 2014 she received her BFA from OCAD University in Sculpture/Installation and has since developed performance-centric work, within which she positions herself as a main subject. Beriault participated in exhibitions and screenings across Canada, the United States and Europe, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor (2021), the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen (2021), GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2020), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2018). Recently, Beriault was a Meisterschülerin of Rosa Barba at the University of the Arts Bremen, and now works between Bremen, Germany and Toronto, Canada.

“A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced.”—Jury’s notes awarding the FID Marseille 2020 Alice Guy Special Mention Prize. A POTENTIALITY is a short, structural film about looming totalitarianism that adds the elements of time and sound to a graphic artwork by Susan Silton and joins the front pages of the 1933 New York Times with a mythic opera composed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944. The newspaper has local reports mixed with the increasingly disturbing accounts of events abroad, which have an uncanny echo in our current news. On a structural level, A POTENTIALITY makes a close comparison of printing dots and film grain that break apart the elements of language that support meaning.

Dana Berman Duff was named a Cultural Trailblazer by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 2020, and a retrospective of her short films is scheduled in Los Angeles for spring 2022 at REDCAT in Disney Hall. In 2019, she mounted a large multi-channel video installation titled "What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes" (in collaboration with the late Sabina Ott) at Aspect Ratio in Chicago and Alchemy Moving Image Festival in Scotland. Her film A POTENTIALITY was awarded an Alice Guy Special Mention at the 2020 FIDMarseille Film Festival. Her works in small format film and video have been screened in the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, ExIS Festival (Seoul), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), Dortmund/Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, and in over forty more festivals. She lives in Los Angeles and rural Mexico.

?The Hustle? is a Flash-animated, single channel DVD titled after the popular line dance from the artist?s childhood in the 1970s, featuring the interplay of various gender-significant characters from the same era. These range from a violent Patty Hearst to the oblivious Josie and the Pussycats, from President Nixon?s aggressive, gabbing head to a lost astronaut floating aimlessly across the screen. These characters ?dance? through such sets as Mr. Roger?s house while exploring the space between empowerment and authority. The video?s playful presentation and affable soundtrack temper the work?s complex, often dark exploration of gender-politics. As the gender-significant characters interplay becomes increasingly complicated, a fine tension between humor and discomfort is established. What the video achieves is an honest vision of gender-relations as seen through the eyes of a child: implications and overtones disguised behind the cheerful veil of pop consumer culture.

Sandra Bermudez, multimedia artist, lives and works in New York City. Bermudez?s work, based on self portraiture, delves in gender issues with a focus on identity, representation and construction of the female gender. She creates playful and seductive works that reference pornography as well as contemporary body art. Bermudez studied at Instituto Marangoni, Milan and received Masters degrees from both Columbia University, NYC and New York University, NYC. Bermudez has been selected for residencies in Chateau La Napoule Art Foundation, Cannes; Vermont Studio Center; Artists in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of Arts; Blue Mountain Center, NY; and Skopelos Art Foundation, Greece. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows internationally, including: 20 Years In, International Center of Photography (2006); Arte Americas, Museo del Barrio, New York-Miami (2006); All that you can see, Art Basel-Design District, Miami (2005); Not Only Performance, Museo del Barrio, New York (2004); The Sublime Metaphor, Oxford Museum, Oxford (2003); Rencontres Internacionales, Podewil Center for Contemporary Arts, Berlin (2003); Public Responsibility, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington (2003); Freewaves, Iturralde Gallery, Los Angeles (2002); and Socket Saliva, Videotage, Hong Kong, China (2002). In 2005 she received an honorable mention at the National Colombian Salon and was part of Optic Nerve at MOCA, Miami. During 2007 she has shown in We Are Your Future, Moscow Biennale; MACO; the Milan Triennial; and Wallflowers, Danziger Projects, New York, amongst others. Her 2007 solo shows include Luxe, Spinello Gallery, Miami; and Heavyweight, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Hidden behind the Faculty of Fine Art in Vadodara, was a hilly jungle accessible by a small wall, like a miniature. With a crown, bearing bird and a flashlight, I as- ked friends artists embodied in this scene the main characters in the Magic Flute by Mozart, as a prelude to the opera, as sus- pended time of a night down, as the slide of a absurd melodrama.

Dans un parc abritant autrefois une exposition coloniale, des gardiens invisibles s?inquiètent d?une odeur étrange. Des bruits courent dans cette fausse végétation tropicale. Des grognements, des soupirs, des voix résonnent dans les murs des anciens pavillons de foire. Une nourrice malgache, la Ramatou, et un chauffeur, « nègre-bohème » commentent le départ des maîtres, dans un colloque sentimental où se mêlent ironie et vraie-fausse mélancolie.

Historien de formation, né en 1985, étudiant en dernière année aux Beaux-Arts de Paris et ayant étudié en Inde à la Faculty of Fine de Vadodara, je développe un travail sur l?espace en vidéo à la lisière du cinéma. Les questions de la théâtralité, de la voix et de l`objet y tiennent une place centrale. Inspirés du langage scandé des lanternes magiques et du prècinéma, mes films mettent en jeu une circulation heurtée de signes. Une affaire de foire et de monstration. Je pars toujours d`un document que je distords avec une simplicité dans les moyens optiques et acoustiques que j`utilise. Je recherche des formes au seuil de l`hypnose et de la fantasmagorie, à l`agonie du sommeil. Mon travail a été montré au 57ème salon de Montrouge, à la Chapelle des Carmélites à Toulouse, à l?Alliance Française de Baroda en Inde, à la Biennale de Belleville ou encore au Passage de Retz pour l?exposition d?Emmanuel Saulnier. Mon dernier film, Colorature, sera présenté à la Galerie Jerôme Poggi sous le commissariat de Stéphanie Cottin. Depuis Juin 2011, mon travail est soutenu et diffusé par Arte Créative. Parallèlement à mon travail d?artiste, je collabore avec des maisons de productions de film comme consultant. Pendant plus de trois ans, j?ai été lecteur à Arte France Cinéma auprès de Michel Reilhac.

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The scene takes place in the darkness of the underground parking of a factory building. An individual, alone in his car, finishes his last meal and smokes a cigarette in the silent air. During this time, water accumulates in the interior of the vehicle. The camera scans this moment, in a circular motion and uninterrupted until the overflow. A slow abysmal descent.

Patrick Bernatchez lives and works in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). Over the past few years, he has developed a multiform step characterized by an esthetic union of the marvelous and the monstrous; he explores photography, the installation and video as well as drawing and painting, his media of predilection. The topics of the body, change, sex, death and the resurrection are explored with exuberance and a lyrical combination of phantasmagoric and that what is nightmarish. His interest is in the ?chronicle of a death announced? through the immutable run of time: that of living beings, individuals, and partners. He is interested in the features of a certain social schizophrenia between figuration and abstraction. These features are transmitted as well by pictorial, photographic, filmic compositions as in the form of sculptural and sound installations.

TWO TEXTS ABOUT "I Feel Cold Today": -1- Catherine Dean, Curator, group exhibition « The Boundary Layer » [www.theboundarylayer.ca], The Prairie Art Gallery [http://prairiegallery.com], Grande Prairie (Alberta, Canada), Fall 2009: "An iconic modern office space fills with snow in Patrick Bernatchez?s I Feel Cold Today, and there is a sense of foreboding and anxiety as we wonder what has caused the abandonment of this building. Normally carefully heated and cooled, sealed against the outside elements, only a catastrophe could have caused this breached in an office building?s defenses. [?] the entry of nature has begun the process of decay, although in Bernatchez?s work the feeling is funeral rather than commemorative. With its sci-fi atmosphere, dramatic soundtrack and suspensful editing, I Feel Cold Today?s interior implies emptiness on a large scale in the urban world beyond these walls." -2- Excerpt from "An Allegorical Diagnostic of an Imminent Cataclysm - Chrysalides", an ongoing project by Patrick Bernatchez, Text By Bernard Schütze, 2009 (read complete version on www.patrickbernatchez.com, in TEXTES/TEXTS Section): ?(?) In this ambitious cinematic project [The Chrysalides Trilogy incl. The Whole Fashion Plaza] Bernatchez scrutinized the building?s interior body (and the various bodies that it is a synecdoche of). In this approach the film camera is used as an instrument to artistically visualize what is ordinarily not apparent. The first film I Feel Cold Today (16 mm film, digital video transfer, colour, sound, 2007) consists of a series of lateral traveling shots that lead us up the building?s elevator and into a deserted office space. The locale is slowly being submerged by a wind-blown snow that gradually builds up to ever greater heights. A foreboding scene that signals a civilized world being overtaken by primordial elements reclaiming territories once sheltered from the storms. A vision of things to come, a post apocalyptic landscape after a coming ice age, or an ice age that is still with us? Bernatchez gives us no indications of anything in particular and leaves it entirely up to the spectator to make what s/he may of this doom-laden atmosphere. (?)?

BIO/RESUMÉ: - Patrick Bernatchez [www.patrickbernatchez.com] is born in 1072 in Montreal, Quebec (Canada). - His work has been presented since 2000 in Quebec, in Canada, and since a few years in Europe, United States. - After an art residency [www.iaab.ch] in Basel (Switzerland) in 2008-2009, Patrick Bernatchez is now working at Künstlerhaus Bethanien [www.bethanien.de] in Berlin (Germany) for a year ; both with support from Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec [www.calq.gouv.qc.ca]. - Since 2008, the artist has been part of Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid/? [http://art-action.org]. - In 2009, Patrick Bernatchez had a solo at: PREFIX ? ICA ? Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto [www.prefix.ca]; EXPRMNTL, Toulouse [www.exprmntl.fr]; Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal [www.galeriedonaldbrowne.com]; Stedelijk museum`s-Hertogenbosch ? SM?S, Hertogenbosch [www.sm-s.nl]; Galerie West, Den Haag [www.galeriewest.nl]; Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris [www.bertrandgrimont.com]. - This Fall (2009), with Bertrand Grimont, the artist has been part of SLICK ? Contemporary Art Fair [www.slick-paris.com] at CENTQUATRE Art Centre, Paris [www.104.fr]. - Next solo shows will be presented at : .e.space généric [http://espacegeneric.blogspot.com], Claye-Souilly (Seine-et-Marne, France) en déc. 2009-janv. 2010; .Galerie Studio Bethanien, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin [www.bethanien.de] in April-May 2010; - The piece "I Feel Cold Today" has been screened in the Frigidarium du Musée de Cluny ? musée national du Moyen Âge in the occasion of NUIT BLANCHE, Paris [www.nuitblanche.paris.fr] event, 8th edition, Oct.3, 2009. - "I Feel Cold Today" has been/will be also screened or exhibited at: .Experimenta Utopia Now, Media Art Biennial [www.experimenta.org], Melbourne and then national tour in 2010-2011; ."CUE: Artists? Videos" (2010) - Cultural Olympic Games program, Vancouver Art Gallery [www.vanartgallery.bc.ca]; ."The Boundary Layer" (2009), The Prairie Art Gallery, Grande Prairie, Canada [www.prairiegallery.com]; etc.

Patrick Bernatchez puise son inspiration dans différentes sources - le cinéma, l?imagerie populaire, la musique ? et nous livre une sorte d?opéra postmoderne à la fois merveilleux, exubérant et angoissant.

Die Videoarbeit ?As found? versucht die Bewegung von einer gesellschaftlichen Vorstellung, die sich auf etwas Fernes oder Zukünftiges bezieht, zu einer in der Gegenwart veorteten Inszenierung von Gesellschaft nachzuvollziehen. Die ?As-found-Ästhetik? brutalistischer Architektur in Israel steht dabei im Mittelpunkt des Filmes, wobei deren Prinzipien ? z.B. vorgefundene Markierungen eines Ortes in die Entwurfsplanung miteinzubeziehen ? im Film als Technik der Zitation selbst aufgegriffen werden. Dazu werden insbesondere zwei Filme herangezogen: ?Ortsbesichtigung in Palästina? von Pasolini und ?Ici et ailleurs? von Godard/Miéville, die beide auf der Suche nach Übersetzungen zwischen einem Hier und Anderswo, Projektion und Reflexion sind, um zu einem Ort Beziehungen herstellen zu können und darin Widersprüche formulieren zu können. Zudem werden die in der Architektur vorgegeben / angelegten Blickverhältnisse untersucht. Kamera und Architektur testen sich gegenseitig in ihren Abbildungs- und Repräsentationsstrategien. Die Videoarbeit ist eine essayistische Collage aus akustischem und visuellem Film.

Mareike Bernien,Hamburg, Berlin Kerstin Schroedinger,Hamburg,London

A gravel path on the edge of a village. Between fields, across to a fence. Drawn into the map of former uranium mining areas in Saxony and Thuringia. From 1946 to 1990, the Soviet corporation SAG Wismut mined uranium there for the USSR's nuclear weapons program. Above ground, socialism shines towards the future, below, the ancient rocks radiate through the torn up earth. The GDR environmental movement throws a spotlight on the way. Night. Darkness. A group of people, a flashlight, a shovel. X-ray film is buried in the gravel. The ground exposes the film, leaving a trail of its invisible rays. The film SUN UNDER GROUND follows this trace horizontally through today's landscapes, marked by mining and redevelopment, and vertically through the ground as an archive. Deep drilling through space and time traces the sedimented narratives that surround the element of uranium materially, metaphorically, and geopolitically. How does it haunt the landscape? How does it connect with the ghost of socialism? What stories and biographies surround its excavation sites? How does it radiate into its recording media? How can the spectrum of the visible be shifted to bring its invisible radiation into the image, to make it audible or palpable?

Mareike Bernien is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker and teacher in the field of filmic research and critical archival practices. Since 2018 she has been part of the production platform pong film. 2020-21 she was a fellow in the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme/gkfd. With a media-archaeological approach, her artistic works question ideological certainties of representation, their material-technological preconditions and historical continuities. Her current films include: DEPTH OF FIELD (2017) and SUN UNDER GROUND (2022) both co-directed with Alex Gerbaulet. Alex Gerbaulet is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker and producer. Since 2014 she has been part of the production platform pong film. 2020-21 she was a fellow in the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme/gkfd. In her artistic work she explores, among other things, the imageability of reality and memory. Her films move between video art, essay and documentary film, between activist impetus and fictionalizing reflection. Her recent films include: THE SLEEPER (2018), as well as DEPTH OF FIELD (2017) and SUN UNDER GROUND (2022) both co-directed with Mareike Bernien.

A voice speaks with the attitude of an audio guide, as it is known from gallery visits, trade show tours or Internet presentations. The spokeswoman takes the attitude of an observing, describing blind guide, who states again and again to know the place from which she is speaking. She works consciously with blind places and options, which refer to a potential of the picture, but also leave it always fragmented and incomplete. The parallel running video track is based on an editing procedure, in which found film sequences are filmed again, in their cut-out in- creased and with a simulated camera. The highly informative narrative film picture experiences an emptying of content, which draws the cinematic storyline into fragments. Similar to a screen saver, the gaze of the camera slides apparently unyieldingly away over the scenes. Sometimes this movement can appear in connection with the spoken text as an offer, contradiction or substitute. By the repetition and recombination of different sequences, possibilities of textual linkages are offered. They resemble however rather test procedures, in which language and picture cannot be depicted onto each other, but receive asymmetrical processes.

Mareike Bernien lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.

'Artifice' stars the only artificial volcano to survive its own eruption: a model replica of Vesuvius from the grounds of a pleasure palace built by an 18th-century German prince. Gardens as models of worldbuilding and empires are the subject of this queer cli-fi that mixes facts with speculation. A media archaeology of how we model earth and atmosphere runs through its images, samples, and sounds—culminating in a dazzling yet foreboding explosion of forms. The film is shot on location in Germany at the Schloss Sanssouci Potsdam, Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, and the Wörlitzer Park Dessau. 'Artifice' is the third episode in the Imaginary Explosions cosmology, which translates aesthetic forms of communication across sensory modalities while being in relation to inhuman alterities and non-normative bodies. How can we understand and interpret the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being in a body? Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through technologies and mutual alliances, the cosmology explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere.

Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist and writer to explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices through sculptural instruments, moving images, and new technologies. Her extensive speculative cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, blends research science with art and fiction alongside emerging media instruments and new technologies. The episodic series centers geological animacies as transfeminist scientists cooperate with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. The work has been the subject of a book (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) solo shows at JOAN Los Angeles (2023) and Art in General (2019) reviewed in Artforum, and a world premiere in the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020). Berrigan has presented her work at the Whitney Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, Union Docs, Ashkal Alwan, and the European Media Arts Festival among other international venues. Her experimental writings are published by e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, Duke University Press and Broken Dimanche Press. She has received fellowships and residencies from Creative Capital, the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. She earned a Master’s from MIT’s program for Art, Culture and Technology and a B.A. from Hampshire College.

Listening, to Kins is a performance of listening to 279 vultures. Seated on a chair, dressed in a brown suit, one member from HP (Hillside Projects) actively listens to a wake of vultures' tumultuous feast on a carcass, a macabre yet tender act of eating and being eaten, a recycling of life. The performance took place on 25 January 2023 at Jatayu Vulture Restaurant, a vulture conservation project located in Kawasoti in southern Nepal. The sounds from the feast: hissing, kicking and flapping have, in turn, been transcribed as words that phonetically imitate, resemble, or suggest the sound that they describe, also known as onomatopoeia. The transcribed onomatopoetic words are then presented as subtitles accompanying the video, creating a playful and slightly absurd narration of the act of eating the dead. T?his video was produced through generous support during an artist residency in 2023 with PhotoKTM5 at Jatayu Vulture Restaurant in Kawasoti, Nepal, organised by photo.circle Nepal, a platform for photography based in Kathmandu founded in 2007. *Since the 1980s, the vulture population in Nepal and India has declined by 98% due to unintentional poisoning through the consumption of carcasses containing Diclofenac, a painkiller given to cattle to work harder and longer and increase milk production. Jatayu Vulture Restaurant is a local community conservation project in Kawasoti, Nepal, working to increase the vulture population. Old animals (not treated with Diclofenac) are taken care of and served to wild vultures upon their natural death.

HP (Hillside Projects) is an artistic entity formed by Emily Berry Mennerdahl (1980) and Jonas Böttern (1977). HP is based in Stockholm. HP’s main interest is in performance and the role of the performer, with an emphasis on the discursive possibilities of telling tales and the resisting of single narratives. Through a conceptual approach and a performative methodology, HP creates works where birds, most often, serve as the main protagonists. The works take their form as video and public performances alongside text, sound and imagery. In their making, the tales of birds expand into larger narratives where socio-political layers and existential emotions unravel alongside notions of life’s many cycles, transition, eating and being eaten, and dust. We are all stardust. At times, the tales HP tells appear tragic, yet HP believes that absurdities, humour and intimacy are all essential elements in telling the tragic. Quite recently, HP has begun to shift its gaze upon itself, questioning its members’ roles in telling tales. Who are they to tell a story, and which stories are theirs to tell? How do they tell the stories in relation to each other and in relation to their audience? HP also actively explores the concept of an audience. An audience in movement, an audience that is not alive, an intimate audience, a large audience, and one not physically present. HP asks what an audience is and what it can be. HP intermittently collaborates with others as part of its artistic vision and occasionally engages in smaller curatorial spurs. It aims to create works that can unravel in environments such as, but not limited to, an ambulating stage, participatory walks, research contexts, screenings, community halls and exhibitions. HP’s videos are distributed by FilmForm - The Art Film and Video Archive and Vidéographe Montréal. HP has taken part in artist residencies such at IASPIS (SE),Clark House Initiative-Mumbai, Box Autumn Studios at Galleri Box-Gothenburg, Banff Centre Canada, TCG Nordica Kunming-China as well as shown their works in exhibitions and screenings at amongst others Röda Sten konsthall, Dazibao Montréal, Galleri54 Gothenburg, Oberhausen Film Festival Germany, Bonniers Konsthall etc. RThey have been awarded grants from the Swedish Arts Council, Konstakademin as well as private stipends.