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Named after a mythical lost oasis, Zerzura addresses questions on our relations to the non human: How do we perceive 'nature'? Is it a 'thing' to which we humans are external? Or are we all part of a mesh where there is no centre nor periphery? Can an assemblage of sounds and images invite us to see 'nature' as living, sentient and endowed with agentivity? Following 'Resistance' (2017) and 'Osmosis' (2022), 'Zerzura' closes the trilogy 'Corpus Animale'.

Laurence Favre is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her practice revolves around analog images, sounds and writings. She makes experimental films, installations and film performances, looking for ways of triggering epistemic changes through sensory perception. Her films are shown internationally in film festivals (Locarno Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Rotterdam IFFR, Ann Arbor Film Festival and others), in art spaces as well as in informal spaces and in the frame of symposiums. She has been awarded several artist grants and residencies. Laurence is an active member of the artist-run filmlab LaborBerlin, and a co-funder of SPECTRAL, a platform for the creation and diffusion of Expanded Cinematic Arts.

After fifteen years of estrangement, Ryan Feldman is reacquainted with his lonely grandmother Cecile at his grandfather?s funeral. Over the next three years, they form a relationship and the source of the deep rift between Cecile and her son, Ryan?s father, is revealed. While enduring the parallel struggles of a grandson trying to find his place in the world and his grandmother fighting for the independence that is quickly vanishing from her life, humour is their only saving grace. As Cecile falls further away from reality, she slips back into her earliest childhood memories of fleeing anti-semitic persecution. "Lick Salt" is a personal documentary about heritage, separation, and survival, which celebrates the mishigas! (craziness) of life.

Ryan Feldman is a Toronto based independent filmmaker. His first film "Eulogy/Obverse" screened at various international venues and was honoured with many prestigious awards including, Best Experimental at the 1999 Montreal World Film Festival, and the Jay Scott prize for Best Overall Production at TVO?s Telefest Competition. His second film, "Folk", premiered at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Cinematexas Short Film Competition as well as Top Prize at the Hannover Up-&-Coming Film Festival. In 2004 he worked as a video journalist at the CBC, shooting & directing documentary segments for the critically praised TV show "Nerve". In 2006 Ryan Feldman founded RyFe Productions Inc. with the release of his full-length feature documentary, "Lick Salt", which premiered at Cinéma du Réel Doc Film Festival in Paris, France. "Lick Salt" was also selected for the Cork Film Festival in Ireland and the Montréal Doc Film Festival (RIDM). He is a graduate of Sheridan College, Media Arts.

BLUE is an interactive[less in the common sense] interface Shockwave Flash application. The work just presents the title in its written form and in a common contemporary typographic although in a newly designed dot font. The work and the title are one but in its paradoxical endless changing form presenting a colorful diversity and multiplicity. Not according to it?s supposed inner stable form and expected meaning. BLUE is also interacting for viewers in a physical space container of its DVD video projection as one another material form. Being first presented at jack, a non-profit contemporary art room in Lisboa, now it can also be seen at Joao Felino selected works on the internet.

"Painting is the critic of movement; movement is the critic of painting." [Octavio Paz] Having started doing art work in mid eighties, soon after Joao Felino decided to pursue architectural studies. While keeping working mainly on paper, he developed a conceptual art methodology, process and work with a minimalist material emphasis. He promotes experience and refuses interpretation and [established] narrative[s]. He started working with video, moved also towards sculpture. He sees painting as usual and any other media. He studied multimedia and new media and he starts also working with new media technologies. Joao Felino is currently director of the cultura material contemporanea e arte | contemporary material culture and art gallery He is also the author and the commissioning director of a poster gallery on the internet. In recent years he has been developing projects for the web among others the recent and close group of: the revista de poesia & politica, a web journal focusing on presenting politics & poetry and on translation, from various foreign languages to portuguese; the edition of a serie of love letters by the portuguese poet Paulo Jose Miranda as a blog; he is also the "Essais-Dattées" editor-in-chief. He has also recently finished [P]. The third of a serie of three video works, with "Desassossego de Catarina Morao" and "Destino/Destination". The all of the three constituting a reflection on Portugal.

A travelling salesman searches for connection.

Born in Sydney, Australia in 1982, Dustin Feneley is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts School of Film and Television. In 2004 and 2005, he completed the Graduate Diploma and Masters of Film and Television in Narrative Directing degrees at the VCA Film School. His short films as writer and director have screened at over fifty international film festivals. At only twenty-three years of age, his student short film Snow (2005) was officially selected for competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival in the Cinéfondation category. The film?s selection made him the second youngest Australian director to have a film screen at Cannes in the festival?s history. Snow has also received the honour of being exhibited at the world famous George Pompidou Centre in Paris alongside other films by legendary filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard. Snow was awarded Best Film at the 2007 Film Fest at Falls by a highly esteemed jury of Australian film industry members including Claire Dobbin (Chair of the Melbourne International Film Festival), Antony Zeccola (Palace Films), Robyn Kershaw (Producer), and Joel Pearlman (Managing Director of Roadshow Films). His short film Apprentice has also been commercially released by Palace Films Australia as the short-before-the-feature on the popular DVD of Russian Dolls (France, 2005). Recognising his position as one of Australia?s most promising young filmmakers he was approached by the highly respected talent agency RGM Associates and is represented by RGM as a writer and director. He has directed a range of professional actors including Robert Menzies (Oscar and Lucinda, Three Dollars), Tom Budge (The Proposition, Candy) and Syd Brisbane (Boxing Day, Silent Partner). He is the winner of the 2007 Qantas Spirit of Youth Award for Moving Image, selected by veteran film director Bruce Beresford, and will undertake a mentorship with Beresford on an upcoming feature film project. In 2008 he was invited to participate in the prestigious Accelerator program of the Melbourne International Film Festival with his short film Hawker (2008). Now in its fifth year, Accelerator has firmly established itself as a showcase of pre-eminent new Australian and New Zealand shorts. For the first time featuring filmmakers from Ireland and Singapore, Accelerator has secured international recognition as an esteemed industry program. In 2008 he also worked as director?s assistant / attachment with Glendyn Ivin (2003 Palm d?Or winner for his short film Cracker Bag) on Ivin?s highly-anticipated debut feature film Last Ride, released in 2009. Feneley is currently developing his first feature film Stray.

"Snow" observes a boy's exploration of the thin line between life and death and his father's powerlessness to prevent his inexorable search. It is a fifteen-minute narrative short film about a twelve-year-old boy who lives alone with his father in a remote alpine environment of Australia. He experiments with the fine line between life and death by burying live rabbits in the snow and creating breathing holes for them to survive. He goes to his father to enlist him in the act of unearthing the rabbits; giving them life above ground again. He eventually makes one of the breathing holes too small. When they unearth the rabbit, it is dead. The father confronts him about his behaviour, leaving him alone in the snow with the consequences. The next morning the father wakes to find him gone. The father anxiously searches for him. Finally he discovers his son, lying on the snow, lifeless, beside a small grave for the dead rabbit.

Dustin Feneley is a recent graduate of the prestigious Victorian College of the Arts School of Film and Television in Melbourne, Australia. In 2005, he completed the Graduate Diploma of Film and Television and Masters of Film and Television (Narrative Directing) degrees at the VCA Film School. His short films, which he has written, directed and edited, have screened at over 50 international film festivals. At only twenty-three years of age, his student short film "Snow" was selected for official competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The film's selection made him the second youngest Australian director to have a film screen at Cannes in the festival's sixty-year history. He is currently writing his first feature length film "Stray".

In 2005, I revisited locations for a film I had worked on several years before. "Chantal Akerman?s From the Other Side" was shot along the U.S./Mexico border. "Crossings" is a short response to my experience of the shoot and its subject. A wall exists along parts of the border facing those who live on either side. The film gives multiple views of the wall and visually confronts the idea it represents. "Crossing" is a short installment of a larger project, shot in Cuba, France, the United States and Israel that investigates insularity in both geographical and cultural terms.

Robert Fenz?s body of work demonstrates an experimental, poetic approach to non-fiction filmmaking. From 1997 to 2003, Fenz worked on Meditations on Revolution, a series of short films that explore the definition of the word ?revolution.? Fenz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. In 2006 he was a resident of the DAAD artist program in Berlin. Fenz currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is making a film-portrait of author/filmmaker Robert Gardner.

A young Slovakian immigrant opens a uranium mine near Elliot Lake in northern Ontario, and later builds a massive replica of the modest church from his childhood village. Stranded amongst suburban streets named after prize-winning Holstein cows, now sits this monumental cathedral, unfinished and private. Teenage zombies emerge from lakes and rivers around Serpent River First Nation, once poisoned with uranium waste. There is talk of eugenics at a Holstein pageant, and a retired dairy farmer and his wife remember a recurring dream where their work is never done.

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko have worked in collaboration since 2013. Their shared practice explores the interplay of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to both decode their surroundings and trouble the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery. Shifting between both gallery and cinema contexts, recent projects have been presented at Berlinale, Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, Viennale, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and others internationally.

How to resurrect a past that was never one's own to being with? The possibilities of reincarnation through satanic ritual or synthetic biology offer faint options against a landscape seemingly indifferent to the questions asked of it. Hrovji, Look at You From the Tower materializes in disparate parts of former-Yugoslavia, connected at its ends by an abandoned family farm now only accessible by illegally crossing the border of the European Union. Upon crossing, the film spirals from the perspective of a tower, down into the earth of pre-history and past lives. Through encounters with 1970's stadium rock, teenage idleness, and amateur archeology opens a hallucinatory state of memory between generations and morphing nations, searching to locate some trace of identity in an increasingly fractured present.

Ryan Ferko is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. Across cinemas and galleries his work is concerned with landscapes as unstable sources of narration, turning to myth, story-telling, amateur experts, and distorted memories as a way to find narratives alternative to official histories. Recent work has been shown at Projections (New York Film Festival), Wavelengths (Toronto International Film Festival), International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Media City Festival (Windsor/Detroit), Experimenta (Bangalore), Crossroads Festival (San Francisco), ZK/U Centre for Art & Urbanistics (Berlin), and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto).

In 1934, the Portuguese New State displayed, at the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, the ultimate symbol of its virility in Rosinha, a native of what was then Portuguese Guinea. The film questions the idea of Portugal's so-called "gentle racism", by looking back at more than a century of colonial discourse.

Marta Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1974. She studied cinema at the ESTC and has worked as Director of Photography since 1996. In 2013, she formed the production company TRÊS VINTÉNS along with Rita Palma and João Pinto Nogueira. Among other films, directed LISBON’S UNDER ARREST (2009), WARRIORS (2011), THE LURKING FEAR (2015), DAMSEL WARRIOR (2020), A NAME FOR WHAT I AM (2022) and ROSINHA AND OTHER WILD ANIMALS (2023).

Excavations in the southern Portuguese city of Lagos unearthed a huge 15th-century landfill site a few years ago. Alongside a variety of implements, the archaeologists found human remains. There were more than 150 skeletons in all, of men, women and children—and some of them were tied up. Genetic analysis confirmed that they were the skeletons of Africans who had been enslaved by traders and brought to Portugal. Perhaps they died during the voyage or shortly after their arrival; in any case, they were not given a proper burial. This shocking discovery exposed the concealed history of Portugal. Over the course of four centuries, six million people were transported in this way under the Portuguese or Brazilian flags. In Tales of Oblivion, Dulce Fernandes investigates the traces left in today’s landscape by this horrific trade in human beings. The calm camera tracks steadily from site to site—the former landfill is now a parking garage topped by a minigolf course—and museum objects bearing witness to the history of colonialism. In a quiet but thorough way, this essayistic film reveals a hidden past.

Dulce Fernandes is an Angolan-born, European-raised and Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Trained in documentary fimmaking at the International Film and Television School (EICTV) in Cuba and at the Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) in New York, Ms. Fernandes is a former photojournalist and human rights activist. Ms. Fernandes holds a B.A. in Journalism from Lisbon Technical University, a certificate in Film Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a M.A. in International Relations from the City University of New York. Letters from Angola is her first feature-length documentary.

In 1904, Ësáasi Eweera, the last native Bubi leader who opposed the Spanish rule at the current island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea, was detained by colonial guards and died three days later. By reenacting written texts through voiceovers, taping and studying native oral accounts and identifying historically charged sites, A storm was coming reflects on the gaps, silences, contradictions and falsehoods that colonial history is usually built upon.

Javier Fernández Vázquez is a filmmaker, anthropologist and visual culture researcher. In 2007 he directed his first short film Señales de Indiferencia / Marks of Indifference, which received the award to the best international short film in the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile). In 2008, he founded with Luis López Carrasco and Natalia Marín Sancho the experimental and documentary film collective, Los Hijos. Their first feature-length film, Los materiales / The Materials (2010), won the Jean Vigo award to the best direction in Punto de Vista Pamplona International Film Festival 2010 and a special mention in FID Marseille 2010. Their next feature-length films as well as several shorts and video installations were selected by international film festivals and exhibited in contemporary art centres. Their work has also received special retrospective sections in Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina) or Distrital (Mexico). In 2015, Javier Fernández Vázquez began an academic career in Film Studies and Visual Culture that has led him to research on issues related to history, memory, and colonialism. Anunciaron tormenta / A storm was coming (2020) is his first solo feature-length film.

In 1904, Ësáasi Eweera, the last native Bubi leader who opposed the Spanish rule at the current island of Bioko (Equatorial Guinea) was detained by colonial guards and forcefully taken to Santa Isabel, the colony's capital. Imprisoned and fatally wounded, Ësáasi Eweera died three days later. His home village was burned down and most of its inhabitants disappeared. An incomplete record of those events is classified in Spain's General Administration Archive. File by file, handwritten reports and letters show several accounts of what allegedly happened and expose the progressive operations of concealment carried out by colonial institutions. Meanwhile, some native oral accounts have survived and opposed Spanish official version, confronted the permanent risk of oblivion and attempted to contribute to a sort of emancipated collective memory. By reenacting written texts through voiceovers, taping and studying native Bubi oral accounts and identifying historically charged sites, A storm was coming tries to reflect on the gaps, silences, contradictions and falsehoods that colonial history is usually built upon.

Javier Fernández Vázquez is a filmmaker, anthropologist and visual culture researcher. In 2007 he directed his first short film Señales de Indiferencia / Marks of Indifference, which received the award to the best international short film in the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile). In 2008, he founded with Luis López Carrasco and Natalia Marín Sancho the experimental and documentary film collective, Los Hijos. Their first feature-length film, Los materiales / The Materials (2010), won the Jean Vigo award to the best direction in Punto de Vista Pamplona International Film Festival 2010 and a special mention in FID Marseille 2010. Their next feature-length films as well as several shorts and video installations were selected by international film festivals and exhibited in contemporary art centres. Their work has also received special retrospective sections in Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina) or Distrital (Mexico). In 2015, Javier Fernández Vázquez began an academic career in Film Studies and Visual Culture that has led him to research on issues related to history, memory, colonialism, visual culture and object theory. Anunciaron tormenta / A storm was coming (2020) is his first solo feature-length film. It was premiered at Berlinale Forum 2020.

Teufelsberg is an artificial hill in the outskirts of Berlin. It was built by the American Allies with the rubble of a city destroyed by World War II in the 20 years that followed its end. Created out of debris on Grunewald?s plateau, Teufelsberg became the highest viewing point in Berlin and a favourable location for military observation of the city. Due to the evident vantage point it could offer, in the late 50s a permanent listening station for short-wave frequencies and encrypted messages, was built on Teufelsberg, to be run by the National Security Agency until the fall of the Berlin wall. With the end of the Cold War, the listening station became redundant, it was closed down and its equipment removed. ?Berg? investigates a historical site through an alternate shift between documentary and fictional representation. A soundscape produced from samples from a series of mainstream Spy Movies overlaps a carefully edited selection of classic shots, inspired by the most repetitive cinematic clichés to be found in the ?espionage genre?. If visuals and sound have a linear continuity in certain sections of the film, as the video unfolds, it becomes clearer that the voiceover belongs to a less recognizable past ? more or less fictional - whilst the location, Teufelsberg is depicted in its current condition.

Valentina Ferrandes is an Italian artist currently living and working in Berlin. Using video, photography and sound, she investigates possible relations between collective memory, social behaviour and geographic and architectural sites. She graduated from Bologna University in Disciplines of Art, Music and Drama, before enrolling in a BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, where she graduated in 2009. In 2008 she was selected to take part in a Recidency in the New Media Art department of China Academy of Art. Since 2009 her works have been shown internationally in private galleries, experimental video festivals and museums. Exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, the European Media Art Festival, Celeste Prize, Eastern Bloc Centre for New Media and Interdisciplinary Art in Montreal, Canada, Athens Video Art Festival.

Using as a starting point parts of archive footage shot by the anthropologist De Martino?s whilst researching the phenomenon of Tarantism, ?The Oyster Effect? develops into a collage of historical references as narrating voices over a visual journey. In the film, the portrayal of women and hysteria is shown as a series of parallels between built environments, architectural spaces, landscape and their narration. The viewer travels through foreign languages and non-descriptive locations, in a journey that challenges linearity and historicity. The attempt to bridge the specific representations of women?s subjectivity as products of their cultural environments, in the north and southern Europe, is persistently negated by the conflicting relation between image and narrating voice.

Valentina Ferrandes is a London based, Italian artist. She studied Disciplines of Art, Music and Drama at Bologna University. She gained a BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, where she graduated in 2009. In 2008 she was selected to take part in a residency programme at China Academy of Art. Since 2008 her work has been shown internationally in galleries and film festivals, including the European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck, Director`s Lounge, Berlin, the Eastern Bloc Centre for New Media & Interdisciplinary Art, Montreal and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome, as part of the Biennale du Mediterranee.

People go crazy for the Pope's line of Hats but fights break out over who has the best hat. So there will no more Pope Hats. Is there a line of Pope Shoes in the future?

Chris Ferrantello's animation work has been shown at Sundance 2002 and 2004, Krakow 43 and 44, SeNef 2004 and 2005, Bitfilm 2003, the Viper 21 and 22 festivals, Streaming Cinema 2.0., Adobe.com, The Bit Screen and The Future Cinema show at the ZKM in Germany, and the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. A few of his films are now distributed by RIFF (Rome Independent Film Festival). He is also a painter and editorial illustrator whose clients include Esquire magazine, MS. magazine, Travel and Leisure magazine, Sony Entertainment, The Progressive, and The New York Times, to name a few. His work has been printed in illustration annuals published by the Society of Illustrators and the design publication "Print".

"Parallel" is the result of an audiovisual performance where electro-acoustic music meets the experimental video. Natural and sound landscapes are digitally reworked to research new narrative configurations. All sounds and video have been processed in real-time by the performer. Therefore, at the base of the work there are concrete sounds and landscape shots (or human artifacts in relationship with the landscape). Human being is part of nature but, at the same time, affirms its otherness respect to it, not only in creative (or destructive) terms, but also as the development of Consciousness towards goals free from the simple instinctual finality. If its destiny runs parallel to that of the universe, it is nevertheless bound to the destiny of the same existence.

Marco Ferrazza is a sound artist, composer of electroacoustic tracks and performer in experimental music. His pieces have been performed in various international electronic music festivals and then released on CD. In his work he constantly investigates the relationships between electronic arts and concrete music, field recordings and digital manipulation of sound, improvisation and new technologies. Visual imaginary collected in abstract tales: this is perhaps the emerging aspect from his last explorations in the field of sound, researches in which the continuous re-codifications of signs is drawn at the same time from the temptation of unlimited semiosis and the structural coherence of the musical composition.

"Parade" is a silent dialogue between two mechanisms.

Certain of having nothing more to do in this society, a man is wandering in subways of Tokyo. His aim : to find someone who could help him to break free out of his lot. Corridors are opening. Stations are slowly filling up. A first train is arriving. The man is walking, he looks determined. He asks to somebody : -?Excuse me, can you push me... -What do you want? I push you in a train. -No...No under...? Death could become a right, please...

A middle-aged man in his living room is watching the creation of the cosmos through a gallery of encyclopedic images where the human being is never present, except for some of his works, ruins or activities. He falls asleep, lulled by the vision of an advertisement that features a woman, and finds himself in an awful nightmare where he witnesses the hunting of some polar bears by arctic hunters. All the while, two pieces of contemporary music by the composer Dario Agazzi and a text inspired by a childhood memory of the director related to a suicidal event, suggest us to “write once, erase twice”.

Luca Ferri (Italy, 1976), self-taught, since 2011 has been dedicating to the writing, photography and direction of films presented to italian and international festivals, such as Atlanta Film festival, Biografilm festival, Documenta madrid, Didocs, Gent film festival, indielisboa, punto de vista, pesaro film festival, poff, queer lisboa, taipei film festival, thessaloniki documentary festival, vilnius short film festival, and in museums and art galleries, such as spazio forma meravigli (Milan), mambo (Bologna), Macro (Rome) and schusev state museum of architecture (Moscow). In 2013 the national film library of Rome organized a retrospective of his works. His first feature film abacuc, released in 2015, was presented at the Torino film festival and Mar del Plata. The film Colombi was presented at the 73rd Venice festival in the Orizzonti section. In 2018 his work dulcinea was selected at 71st locarno film festival in competition in the section signs of life while pierino was presented at 61st dok leipzig. In 2020 the house of love is presented at 70th berlinale in the section forum, selected to take part in the competition berlinale documentary award and receives the mention to 34th teddy awards; his last work sì is presented at 77th Venice international Film Festival

A man, inside his kitchen, is preparing his packed lunch. He has decided to visit The Brion Tomb, a monumental funeral complex, designed and built by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, commissioned by Onorina Brion Tomasin, to honour the memory of the deceased and beloved relative Giuseppe Brion, founder and owner of the Brionvega company, located in the small cemetery of San Vito, in the hamlet of Altivole in the province of Treviso. Placed the food inside a polka dot plastic bag, we will find it walking inside the cemetery, observing with meticulous care the details designed by the Venetian architect, while in its silent head will resound the precious words pronounced by the architect in a conference held in the summer of 1978.

Luca Ferri (Bergamo, italy, 1976), self-taught, since 2011 has been dedicating to the writing, photography and direction of films presented to italian and international festivals, such as atlanta film festival, biografilm festival, curta cinema, documenta madrid, fidocs, filmmaker, gent international film festival, indielisboa, queer lisboa, punto de vista, pesaro film festival, cinemambiente, poff, taipei film festival, thessaloniki documentary festival, vilnius short film festival, filmer le travail, videoex and in museums and art galleries, such as spazio forma meravigli (milan), mambo (bologna), macro (rome) and schusev state museum of architecture (moscow). In 2013 the national film library of Rome organizes a restrospetictive of his works. his first feature film abacuc, released in 2015, was presented at torino film festival and mar del plata festival de cine. In 2016 colombi was presented at 73rd venice festival in the orizzonti section. In 2018 his work dulcinea was selected at 71st locarno film festival in competition in the section signs of life while pierino was presented at 61st dok leipzig. In 2020 the house of love is presented at 70th berlinale in section forum, selected to take part in the competition berlinale documentary award and receives the mention to 34th teddy awards; his work sì is presented at 77th venice international film festival, orizzonti section. In 2021 his last work a thousand cypresses was presented at 67th international short film festival Oberhausen and at the 57th mostra internazionale del nuovo cinema di pesaro. won the award for best film at the 46th laceno d'oro in the section "eyes on the city."

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

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