Catalogue 2024

In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the country. The film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.

Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Throughout her career, we can trace the ways that her experimentation dares to confront social and political issues by embracing both familiar and intimate processes. Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception. Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at MoMI (Museum of the Moving Image), Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, among others. In 2021, both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center gave her awards for her lifetime achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

This video is a part of a longer research into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, and is an exploration of the ghostly, undead, half-eaten and slowly decomposing stories sourced from the platform that forms a metaphoric link with online/offline technocultures. Here the the Mturk platform is introduced as specter where turkers, farmers and bots signal towards magic that complicates the almost transcendental belief in technocratic and algorithmic management. The three ghost stories. Relying on heavy abstraction, the film considers obfuscation, concealment, and pretense as the premise of the platform. The title comes from the now famous 2018 claim that ‘bots’ had taken over Mturk. However, numerous studies since has shown that it was farmers (digital workers who use server farms as a way to camouflage identity and location), bots (digital workers have poor English language, or, who use scripts to filter jobs) in non-english speaking countries who were being flagged as ‘bad actors’. Simultaneously ghost stories in Indian languages sourced from Mturk via high-paying jobs speak of three hauntings – an individual encounter, a communal haunting, and a humorous re-telling of a mythological story where a ghost gets trapped in a riddle. On screen we view three stages of life/death: decay and consumption, composting of the dead (the promise of life again), and the few minutes before death.

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India. She works with moving images, writing and drawing. Her interest lies within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics. Sunder has exhibited her work at the Singapore Biennale 22, Shanti Road Studio Gallery, HKW Berlin, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Institut, Kunstverein Leipzig, bauhaus imaginista, ISCP New York and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has received grants and fellowships from ArtEZ University of the Arts, MIT, Sommer Akademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj.

A two-screen video based on the book Undercover: ‘The True Story of Britain's Secret Police’ and witness statements from victims. The narrative revolves around the audition of a cop becoming an undercover agent and incorporating a new identity. He is trained to lie and act as a sympathetic and trustworthy person. The video is set in Melbourne and therefore only speculative, based on rumors. It is edited as a shattered timeline, with parallel realities. Starting as a small group in the 1960s, a time of violent student riots, the British undercover police unit steadily grew in the decades that followed. Its main task being to infiltrate activist circles. Romantic relationships were seen as necessary and condoned by these men’s superiors. The video draws a parallel to parasitic mimicry, such as the caterpillar of The Large Blue butterfly, that, to get enough food, mimics the pheromones of ants. Once taken into the nest it can eat all the larvae undisturbed, slowly but surely depleting the colony of its future.

Jan Adriaans works in video, sound, performance and installation. He finished his Master at the Dutch Art Institute and is currently finishing a course: Posthumanism, alien bodies, cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence in American Literature, at the University in Leiden. He showed his work at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin / BB15 space for contemporary art, Linz (solo) / Now and After ecology without borders, The National Darwin Museum Moscow / Visions Programme 1, The Nunnery London / There’s absolutely No cause for alarm, TAAK Amsterdam, curated by Katia Krupennikova / After Year Zero, Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade curated by Doreen Mende (Dutch Art Institute) / Prometheanism 2.0, Showroom Arnhem, symposium curated by Bassam El Baroni / Videonale 12, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, and was in the following artist-in-residences: SeMA NANJI Residency, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Projectstudio, Künstlerhaus Bethaniën Berlin, Townhouse, Cairo.

A moment of exposure is about observing the experience of living an idea and gathering materials for an art installation. The camera, as an attentive observer, collects memories and associations related to the "Safe & Sound" multimedia interactive exhibition. Following the process of preparation, presentation, and dismantling of the installation, we seek visual and sensory origins. In the first part of the exhibition, a spatial arrangement features elements such as metal fence sculptures, archived photos of fences in graveyards, and videos of deceased creatures floating in water. These elements are gently dissected to uncover the roots of safety and any remnants of movement left after death. In the second part, different sounds can be heard by interactive audiences resting in bed-shaped sound boxes, prompting questions about the origins of these sounds. Each sound carries the weight of a past incident, reverberating in the space and creating an immersive experience. Ultimately, the film invites viewers to reflect on the connections between memory, loss, and the lingering echoes of life. It encourages an exploration of how we find safety in remembrance and the ways in which our past shapes our present.

Mahshid Afzali: Mahshid Afzali is an Iranian Video Artist and Filmmaker, based in Tehran. She graduated from University of Tehran with a B.A. degree of Scenic Design in 2018. Throughout her studies, she developed a passion for video art as a medium for self-expression. In the past few years she specialized in independent film production and post-production and created several documentary films and videos. Mahshid is also an archivist, and documents her life through videos and photographs that often serve as the foundation for her artworks. / Mahoor Mirshakkak: Mahoor Mirshakkak, Iranian freelance Filmmaker & Sound designer. Graduated in Painting from Tehran Fine Arts University. Currently Working on Multidisciplinary installations Based on Archived sound and videos.

Indian director Ashim Ahluwalia and designer Little Shilpa joined forces for a dark and mysterious film that turns sociocultural conventions of beauty, desire, and sophistication on their head. HUM ?? (We/Us) is a strange beast of a film that lives somewhere between avant-garde performance film, narcotic fashion parade, Bollywood wedding freakout and Toshio Matsumoto’s underground cinema. The film commences amidst a fever dream on a particularly stifling afternoon. A modern-day Cinderella toils endlessly, exposing the tedious labour that maintains the grandeur of the space within which she is trapped. Tragedy and despair follow as this Cinderella is brutally rejected from the hallowed inner halls by its gatekeepers - the latter present themselves as spiritually (and materially) superior. From the nightmare’s shadows, glorious phantoms emerge as if to exact revenge, disrupting the stale splendour at a typical heterosexual wedding party. In the aftermath, contradictory energies coalesce in a riotous, maximalist rave of third-world proportions. Nothing is the same ever again. Despite its gothic beginnings, the campy dystopian fairy tale is fundamentally about the joy, humour, and boundless imagination of the marginalised. The performance and theatricality of high avant-garde fashion are strategically subverted to challenge the notion that the wealthy have a total monopoly over beauty. Glamour here emerges from the gutter in the dead of night. Workers, drag performers and queer outsiders, acid attack and gender-based violence survivors, people who are deemed undesirable or remain invisible before beauty and fashion standards - an entire community shows up to exact vengeance from the stuffy and the conventional. Led by Cinderella, the wedding crashers unabashedly take their space, stirring the party-goers to let loose in an anarchic, hypnotic frenzy.

Ashim Ahluwalia is a director, writer, and producer. His debut, JOHN & JANE, premiered at the Berlin and Toronto Film Festivals. His subsequent film, MISS LOVELY, explored the underbelly of India's sex-horror film industry and was selected as an official entry at the Cannes Film Festival. Ahluwalia's first two films, recognized for their tone and themes, won multiple Indian and International Awards, reshaping the perception of contemporary Indian cinema. This was followed by DADDY, starring Arjun Rampal and Farhan Akhtar, an unconventional biopic on real life Mumbai crime lord Arun Gawli, narrated through varied, fractured viewpoints. His short film EVENTS IN A CLOUD CHAMBER, created in collaboration with modernist painter Akbar Padamsee and shot entirely on Super 8 film, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The film was screened at Experimenta (BFI London Film Festival), New Directors/ New Films and Punto De Vista, amongst others. Ahluwalia’s distinctive works, straddling the line between pulp and high art, and between disparate formats and scales, have been showcased at venues like the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou. His latest series, CLA$$, delves into wealth disparity and social dynamics at an elite New Delhi school. Released in February 2023 on Netflix, it ranked as the No. 1 show in over 22 countries, including India, Brazil, and Mexico. Ahluwalia was named "one of the ten best emerging film directors working today" by Phaidon Press in "Take 100: The Future of Film”, and is the sole Indian filmmaker to have had films premiere in the official selections of Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, and SXSW festivals.

"Close your eyes and imagine: ARBEIT" is an experimental video project in which we searched for positions, perspectives, contradictions, wishes, utopias and imaginations around the term "work" together with young people from the Marienfelde transitional home in Berlin. We were inspired by the film "Workers Leave the Factory" by Harun Farocki and remixed it with our own voices, perspectives and images.

We are a group of friends with different interests and work focuses that came together in 2019 around Christian Limber, Miriam TrostorfChristian Diaz Orejarena und Lara Dade. Since then, we have been connecting with more and more friends and colleagues - also in an international context. We work and think together on a mediation practice that transcends disciplines and is located at the intersections of visual art, social work, film, art education, activism and curating. Partly we realize projects together, in smaller groups or alone - but always in exchange and dialogue with each other.

The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.

Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari studied at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and currently lives in Berlin. He has taught filmmaking at The New School (New York) and the DFFB (Berlin). He is a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination of Columbia University. In May 2024, IndieLisboa dedicated a retrospective to his work. In 2024 his film UNDR was selected at IFFR and A Fidai Film at Visions du Réel, where it won the Grand Jury Prize Burning Lights Competition. Aljafari is currently working on a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

“Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U.” is a film written and directed by Italian collective ALMARE. The film is set in a future society, in which an imaginary technology called ECHO detects on any surface sound waves imprinted over centuries, making them readable as an archaeological sound-find. “Life Chronicles” follows the voice diary entries of researcher Dorothea Ïesj. Her precarious financial situation drove her into sound-finds trafficking, especially in ancient erotic sounds. Thus began a smuggling network run with her friends and colleagues Juliette, Tancred and Miss Lowenhaupt. Thanks to them, Dorothea receives a scholarship funded by the military industry and the powerful fraternity S.P.U., to study antique warfare sounds. During her research, Dorothea extracts a sequence of cannon shots and Soviet naval sirens. This discovery arouses the interest of a range of misfit buyers who will stop at nothing to get hold of those «talking relics». Entirely filmed from movable type prints "Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U." is an imageless film which straddles the borders between radio drama, cinema and literature. The screenplay is written in a dystopian language that mixes ancient and contemporary Italian and openly alters excerpts from essays and novels.

Founded in Turin in 2017 by Amos Cappuccio, Giulia Mengozzi, Luca Morino and Gabriele Rendina Cattani, ALMARE is an artistic-curatorial collective dedicated to contemporary practices that use sound as an expressive medium. ALMARE works between artistic and curatorial practices, through writing, collective research, sound and music production, concert organisation, performance lectures, talks and exhibitions. In 2020, ALMARE inaugurated the production of its first feature film and audio-drama “Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U.”

Through dancing, the film shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in.

Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals and venues including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and The Gene Siskel Film Center. Alsaegh’s films are distributed by Video Data Bank.

"Thank you for sending your very great film, Aeon -- it's really a great work, truly transporting, and a vision I can wish and hope that many will see, and hopefully to feel this truth of both our small place within as well as our ultimate connectedness with the vastness of being and space -- 'our connection to the stars' as Stan would have said." -- Marilyn Brakhage "In Aeon, Dominic Angerame draws parallels between the earthly and the heavenly, linking the San Francisco cityscape and city dwellers to outer space. Filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aeon celebrates Angerame#s reunion with friends and responds to the new ways of interacting with the world on different levels. Using a meta-narrative and self-referential approach to storytelling, Angerame brings the (holy) spirit to life, filling the spaces he captures with energy, which is otherwise unattainable and invisible the naked eye, but significantly transforms our lives. Aeon is one of Angerame's major and most mature works to date, which demonstrates the potential of experimental filmmaking in superimposing images that are seemingly disparate, yet uncannily familiar." -- Kornelia Boczkowska, author of Lost Highways, Embodied Travels: The Road Movie in American Experimental Film and Video, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0875-9209

Dominic Angerame's works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker's desire to make everyday images "strange" at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem-in all the different social realities they contain-always distanced as well, as if they led to another world beyond the concrete, beyond time and defined space. In Angerame's films, which pay homage to films from early cinema and the classic avant garde to American underground films of the 1960s and 70s and non-narrative films of the present day, an amazingly comprehensive history of the "visionary" moving image is always present. It may be that precisely his refusal to adopt a signature style has diminished the immediate influence of Angerame's films; however, Angerame's decision to work "universally," not to be swayed by considerations of the art market, and to experiment with very different styles increases the pedagogical worth of his films. It's not surprising to learn that Angerame, born in 1949, teaches at several American schools in addition to having served as the executive director of the American avant garde distribution center Canyon Cinema from 1980 to 2012. His films testify to an encyclopedic knowledge of film-and also his desire to satisfy, with his own audio-visual offerings, the very different desires of his audience.

Gil works in construction, goes to his mother’s bar and has love dates with Katia. On a day like so many others, Gil is disappearing.

Ralph Antunes is a director, editor and producer. Graduated in Digital Arts at the Fine Arts School of UFMG, he produced and co-directed the short films Carga Viva (2013), Boa Morte (2015), Praça do Peixe (2018) and Tudo Que Vi Era o Sol (2023), which were shown at important festivals such as Doclisboa, FIC Valdivia, Málaga, Brasília and Tiradentes. As an artistic assistant, since 2014 he has collaborated with filmmaker and artist Cao Guimarães, coordinating the workflow of the artist's audiovisual and photographic productions and communicating his studio with art institutions around the world. Together with Pedro Maia de Brito, he is currently developing his first feature film, The Scarlet Temple Oracle, winner of the prize for best project in development in the Arché - Doclisboa'23.

Que nous dirait La Seine si elle pouvait nous parler ? Se souvient-elle de tout ce dont nous avons rêvé, imaginé et dit à son sujet ? De ses passages lumineux, de ses recoins sombres ? De tous les secrets déposés ? Des mots d’amour ? Des chagrins ? Le Fond de la Seine nous parle à la première personne, nous dévoilant un portrait poétique d’un fleuve chargé de vie, de luminosité, d’histoires et d’espaces sombres. Ce portrait réalisé grâce à des images subaquatiques et des images de paysages, narré par une voix puissante et accompagné d’une bande son émouvante, se construit au fur et à mesure du film. Depuis sa source timide, origine de nombreux mythes paléolithiques, en passant par des recoins doux et cristallins qui lentement deviennent une puissante masse d’eaux, route industrielle, passage urbain et de pouvoir qui finit par se déverser dans l’océan en fusionnant cœur et âme avec toutes les masses d’eau sur terre. Le Fond de la Seine nous parle d’une façon sensible, des sentiments et fantasmes que nous projetons envers ce fleuve que nous connaissons si bien et qui pourtant nous cache tant de choses.

Iván Argote, Bogotá 1983, vit à Paris. Iván Argote est un artiste et réalisateur colombien basé à Paris. À travers ses sculptures, installations, films et interventions, il questionne notre relation aux autres, aux structures de pouvoir et aux systèmes de croyance. Il développe des stratégies basées sur la tendresse, l'affect et l'humour à travers lesquelles il génère des approches critiques des récits historiques dominants. Dans ses interventions sur des monuments, ses œuvres d'art public éphémères et permanentes à grande échelle, Iván Argote propose de nouvelles utilisations symboliques et politiques de l'espace public. Iván Argote a étudié le graphisme, la photographie et les nouveaux médias à l'Universidad Nacional de Colombia à Bogotá et est titulaire d'un MFA de l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Art (ENSBA) à Paris. Ses expositions personnelles comprennent : 'TO MOVE AND BE MOVED', KØS Museum, Copenhagen, DK (2024) ; 'The Burden of the Invisible', SCAD MOA, Savannah, GE (2024) ; 'Prémonitions', Perrotin, Paris, FR (2022) ; ‘Aliens en Madrid’,galerie Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid, ES (2022) ; ’Chaflierplatz’, Dortmunder Kunstverein, DE (2021) ; 'A Place for Us', Perrotin, New York, US, (2021) ; 'All Here Together', Artpace, San Antonio, TX, US, (2021) ; 'Juntos Together', ASU Museum, Phoenix, USA (2019) ; 'Radical Tenderness', MALBA, Buenos Aires (2018) ; 'Somos Tiernos', Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexique (2017) ; 'Somos', Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo (2017) ; 'La Venganza del Amor', Perrotin, New York (2017) ; 'Let's write a history of hopes', Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo, BR (2014) ; 'La Estrategia', Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) ; Sin heroísmos, por favor', CA2M, Madrid, (2012) . Les œuvres de l'artiste font partie des collections permanentes de nombreuses institutions prestigieuses dans le monde entier, notamment le Guggenheim Museum (New York, États-Unis) ; le Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) ; l'ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, États-Unis) ; la Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, États-Unis) ; la Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, Colombie) ; Kadist (San Francisco, États-Unis) ; le MACBA (Barcelone, Espagne).

A real-estate developer who is a Vampire wants to convert the local community house into a luxury spa. The city man gets nervous. The Vampire calls a friend: the Wizard, who casts a spell on the neighborhood to create chaos. Soon the neighbors organize resistance. Buurthuis 2 is a fantasy film realized with the community center De Witte Boei in Amsterdam’s Wittenburg neighborhood. Visitors and staff take on the roles of vampires, wizards, and zombies who are entangled in a real-estate development scheme to turn the residential neighborhood into a luxury spa resort. Anchored by a Dutch fairytale about the pitfalls of preposterous wealth, the plot and characters were developed in scriptwriting workshops together with the artist. In the process, Josefin Arnell explores the social fabric of a place that is highly specific and at the same time faces the same problems as many other communities. The film draws from and reflects on the historic social ideals of community centers in the Netherlands, that used to serve as a tool to educate the lower classes. What does it mean to be a “good” citizen in the context of increasing wealth disparity, housing shortages, and welfare cuts?

Josefin Arnell (1984, Sweden) lives and works in Amsterdam. The work by Josefin Arnell defines a loaded visual language combining anger, desire, disgust and pleasure. Her films present complex realities, socially marginalized characters and absurd fictionalization. Through storytelling loosely narratives are often centered around characters that try to navigate in contemporary infrastructures with impossible demands. In 2015 and 2016 she participated in the residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2018 she won the Theodora Niemeijer Prijs for emerging female artists in the Netherlands. In 2023 she was nominated for the art prize Prix de Rome Netherlands with a presentation at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Places where her work has been shown include: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; WIELS, Brussels; Cell Project Space, London; Index, Stockholm; UKS, Oslo; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Athens Biennale; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Auto Italia, London; Kunsthalle Münster, Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin and IDFA International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam.

Taking the form of a fable-cinematography, Borj el mechkouk follows in the footsteps of a man sent by the village chief to observe and eventually un-sand a system of underground water galleries used by villagers to irrigate farmland. The story takes place in a pre-desert area of Morocco, where water management is a central element of oasis life. The system of underground drainage galleries is called “Khettara”. These man-made structures allow groundwater to be mobilized on a continuous basis. In this film, we follow the man on his journey through these vast, dry spaces. Once there, he settles in and applies his knowledge and dexterity to his work. In this charged and mysterious space, we discover the culmination of his mission. Commissioned by his oasis village, a man sets off into the desert to observe and eventually restore a system of underground water galleries known as Khettara. We follow his journey to Borj el mechkouk, where he works and lives for a time in this arid zone. What will he discover?

Born in Morocco in 1979, Aroussi lives and works in Marseille, France. Driss Aroussi's artistic work is polysemic, borrowing from several lines of research and navigating between experimentation and documentary form. In his practice, Driss Aroussi uses whatever enables him to reproduce reality, such as photography, or to capture it, such as video. In recent years, he has photographed construction sites, spending time with workers, sharing their daily lives, considering men, tools, objects and places. For him, reality also bears the mark of work, the stigma of its contradictions, the signs of the transformation it wrought on our reality.

Disappearance in Three Acts | Act One is an ethnography of violence reflecting on a history of conflict in Central Mexico. The video piece posits a decolonial approach to the visual representation of violence in Mexico, transporting us beyond the realm of suffering into a space for quiet contemplation as the violent terrain of occupation enters the frame. Following the pictorial European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature, this piece is an investigation on enforced disappearance in rural Mexico, reclaiming undermined histories of everyday violence and economic struggle. The video piece appropriates visual motifs from 18th century European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature and cataclysmic extremes, echoing violent occupation of land in rural Mexico. Through a poignant testimony of a kidnapping survivor, intertwined with the pastoral rural landscapes of her captivity, the video documents geographies of disappearance at the threshold of detectability.

Victor Arroyo is a video artist working in the crossfield between cinema and contemporary art. His films are informed by various modes of listening and seeing, emerging from long periods of observation and documentation. His practice is situated at the intersection between aesthetics, knowledge production and community-based research, often concerned with the encounters and tensions between lived experiences, knowledge regimes and the politics of display. His work is regularly programmed in museums and festivals internationally, including Kasseler Dokfest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM, Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA, BIENALSUR, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinémathèque Pacific, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, among others. Born in Mexico in 1977, and based in Montréal, Canada.

In Barefoot Birthdays on Unbreakable Glass, three women reflect on art creation, immigration, and their own mother-daughter relationships: relationships cut short, relationships evolving, relationships to treasure. Following insights of independent experiences of love and loss, they unite in one space to celebrate a new chapter of life and friendship.

Rebecca Jane Arthur (b.1984, Edinburgh) is a visual artist working predominantly with the moving image and text. Her works often transpire as experimental film portraits of people and places, and her interest lies in how personal stories depict a socio-political context and history, giving particular attention to class politics, education and women’s experiences. She is co-founder of the Brussels-based, artist-run production and distribution platform elephy, contributor to the online film criticism platform Sabzian, and a PhD in the Arts candidate at KASK & Conservatorium/School of Arts Ghent where she teaches in the visual arts department and lectures on art and feminist theory.

“Machine Boys” is a short film which explores the informal economy of motorcycle taxis; colloquially known as “Okada”, in the mega city of Lagos. Banned due to the government’s inability to regulate it, “Machine Boys” portrays a hardy group of bikers who continue this work, seeking to attain financial autonomy and independence. “Machine Boys” dwells on the consequences of this ban, meanwhile portraying the daily rituals and challenges faced by Okada riders. The riders embody though their stylish attire, and self-assured, powerful behavior, a particular branch of masculinity, and in this performance a beautiful vulnerability emerges, questioning Nigeria’s patriarchal culture. Through this exploration of Nigerian patriarchal ideals, Ashadu relates its performance of masculinity to the vulnerability of a precarious class of workers. With its innovative, cutting-edge style and sartorial references, it engages in a dialogue around post-colonial informal economy structures in Nigeria, as well as opening a window into the socio-cultural nuances of its most populated city.

Karimah Ashadu (b. London 1985) is a British-born Nigerian Artist and Film Director living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s work is concerned with labour, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora. Her work has exhibited and screened at institutions internationally, including the 60th Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition. She has shown at Kunsthalle Bremen, Tate Modern, London, Secession, Vienna, Kunstverein in Hamburg, South London Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Ashadu is the recipient of other awards such as the Prize of the Bötterstraße in Bremen (2022) and the ars viva prize (2020). Public collections include MoMA, the City of Geneva Contemporary Art Collection and the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Germany. She was named Abigail R. Cohen 2021 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris. In 2020, Ashadu established her film production company Golddust by Ashadu, specialising in Artists’ films on black culture and African discourses.

A couple in an apartment, antiquated interior. She suffers from a mysterious disease, sapping her strength and will. He takes care of her. As their fight against the inevitable seems increasingly futile, they resign themselves to the final measure. The film reflects on power dynamics, feeling of apathy and the quest to find one's place in the reality of impending societal catastrophe. This film was shot in the brief interlude between two profound catastrophes: the coronavirus pandemic and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In January 2022, Asya and I got COVID-19 during a winter vacation in St. Petersburg, in the antique apartment where her grandmother, who passed away before Asya was born, once lived. A pervading sense of fatigue, ghostly echoes of past generations’ life, disturbing news that heralded the imminent outbreak of war, and a desire to find some way out of it all came together in a very strange foreboding atmosphere that we decided to capture. A few weeks post-shooting, as war erupted, we left Russia for Germany. The footage was edited in Berlin a year after filming.

Asya Ashman - dance artist and performer as well as a facilitator and creator of educational programs for young people. She was born in Moscow, Russia, 1994. She studied fine arts at BHSAD Moscow, and later focused on performance and dance. She is currently completing her degree in Dance, Context, Choreography at HZT Berlin. Since 2015, she has been creating her own artistic work, presenting it in various spaces (museums, theaters, parks, apartments) and working for other choreographers and artists. In her works, she explores artistic strategies to interact with personal and social issues, and question them through dance and spoken word, using humor, pop culture, magic, and collaboration. Konstantin Koryagin - independent researcher, video editor and filmmaker. He was born in Moscow, Russia, 1994. MA in philosophy, BA in political science. Since 2018 he is an editor of syg.ma – community-run media on philosophy, society and contemporary art. In 2021 he graduated the Moscow School of New Cinema, film directing laboratory. In 2023 he was a student at the Art and Media program at the Berlin University of the Arts (prof. Thomas Arslan). Currently based in Berlin.

C’est suite à la description du voyage de Magellan en 1520 qu'est nommé Tierra del fuego, l’archipel de l’extrême sud de l'Amérique. Les feux observés par les colons à la surface de l'eau étaient ceux des Yámanas, peuple indigène et nomades marins de ce bout du monde au climat très hostile. Leurs feux ont aujourd'hui totalement disparu avec eux, mais des lueurs de bateaux persistent toujours au milieu des fjords : les ferries qui transportent des milliers de touristes chaque année de Punta Arenas au Cap Horn ou d'Ushuaïa vers un nouvel el Dorado : l’Antarctique.

Guillaume Aubry est architecte (co-fondateur de l'agence Freaks), artiste-plasticien (Beaux-Arts de Paris) et docteur en art (programme Radian). Sa thèse "Courser le soleil" porte sur l’expérience esthétique du coucher de soleil, spectacle quotidien de l’embrasement de l’horizon. Il poursuit aujourd’hui ses recherches en interrogeant notre fascination collective pour la fin du monde.

I wanted to know what it was like to turn around on people we loved, and to remember our absent parts. This film is the first part of a series of short films in super8 that I start, between the newspaper, travelogue and film-poem, on fragments of my life between 2009 and 2020. I also compose the music, under my stage name Marie Delta.

Mariette Auvray (born in Mâcon, 1986) is a French filmmaker and musician based in Montreuil. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and the University of Toronto (Innis College), as well as a Master’s degree from the University of Strasbourg in documentary filmmaking. She is also a graduate of the ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in Paris. Since 2004, her artistic practice has focused on creating documentary films, experimental super8 film-poems, and music videos. Her films depict the contemporary world from an intersectional feminist perspective. She is also interested in memory, cultural heritage, and specifically, matrimoines. Her works often emerge from a process of documentation and encounters, drawing inspiration from cinema, visual arts, choreography, and music. She views her work as a form of human ecology, collaborating with other artists and exploring art as a therapeutic process. She currently hosts the quarterly radio show « Après la fin » on Station Station radio, which focuses on contemporary creation. Her films have won several awards, including the Les Etoiles de la Scam Award, the Best Short Film Award at the Créteil Women’s Film Festival, the Gautier-Delaye Award, the Audience Award at the Lille International Film Festival, the Best Short Film Award, and the Best Documentary Award at the University of Toronto Film Festival. Her film « Goodbye Jerusalem » received the Brouillon d’un Rêve grant from Scam and the Louis Lumière grant from the Institut Français. She has had residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Tokyo Wonder Site in Tokyo, and Residencia Sao Joao in Brazil. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions and exhibitions, including Tokyo Arts and Space in Japan, MAMC in Saint-Etienne, Centquatre in Paris, Centre Pompidou (part of the « Mon Oeil » program), and on Arte. Her documentaries have been featured in Courrier International, Pan African Music, LCP, and BBC Arabic. Her films are distributed by Beliane and the Collectif Jeune Cinéma, and her « Goodbye Jerusalem » is available on the Tënk platform. She also participated in a performance titled « Galop » at the Musée de Saint-Etienne alongside the Franco-Gabonese artist Myriam Mihindou (Venice Biennale), who practices transperformance. From 2016 to 2019, Mariette was in charge of the video studio at ENSCI-Les Ateliers, and between 2021 and 2022, she was part of the audiovisual team at Sciences Po as a filmmaker. She now teaches a course in interactive documentary (video integrated in rich media format) at Gustave Eiffel University in Marne-la-Vallée and occasional workshops focused on new audiovisual forms related to the theme of the living (social media, 360°). In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Mariette has also written columns and interviews for various magazines (Vice, ONORIENT). As a former member of the post-punk bands Pussy Patrol, Eyes Behind, and BCBG, she toured in Europe, China, Korea, Australia, the United States, and Brazil with her various groups. She now performs solo under the moniker Marie Delta.

The video is set in Karakam, an Achuar indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Oriente. The Achuar have been nomadic in this area since ancient times. Following the construction of an airstrip, several families settled permanently in the surrounding area. Using documentary strategies, Landing Strip immerses the viewer in the temporality of Karakam, inviting them to participate in moments of communal gathering and work. The montage of the work is determined by the gaze of each viewer, who has to choose between one screen and the other. The sound reflects the atmosphere of the place and is also the starting point for the imaginary and the unexpected. Landing Strip blurs the boundaries between past/present/future and nature/culture.

José María Avilés (1988, Cuenca, Ecuador), is a filmmaker and artist based in Barcelona. He studied Film Directing in Buenos Aires and holds a Master's Degree in Filmmaking from the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastian. He wrote and directed the feature film Al Oriente (Venice International Film Festival 2021) and La muerte del maestro (Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018) and the short films La enorme presencia de los muertos (San Sebastian Film Festival 2019), Speed Paradise (BAFICI, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, 2015), Conversaciones en el jardín (BAFICI, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, 2014) and Ricchieri (Ciudades reveladas, Buenos Aires, 2013).