Catalogue 2024

Après avoir manqué un appel tant attendu, une femme se réveille seule dans un espace vide. Par le geste et le son, elle s’adonne à un étrange rituel dans l’espoir d’une réponse qui l’aiderait à sortir de sa hantise. Sous la forme d’un huis clos somnambulique, Akousma propose une incursion dans la boîte crânienne d’un corps à l’affût, coincé entre le monde des vivants et celui des morts. Ce premier court-métrage du jeune artiste plasticien Geoffrey Badel met en scène la chorégraphe Mathilde Monnier pour laisser aux fantômes l’occasion de revenir.

Né en 1994 à Montélimar (France) Vit et travaille à Montpellier (France) Geoffrey Badel est un artiste qui explore les mondes silencieux à travers des installations immersives sous la forme de dessins, de films, d’installations et de performances. Il situe son travail dans des environnements surréalistes et leur confère des attributs magiques et analeptiques, avec une approche qui cherche à transformer les situations. Diplômé de l’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier en 2017, Geoffrey Badel a remporté la Bourse Jeune Création MAIF du Drawing Room la même année. Il participe au post-diplôme Saison 6, créé en 2018 par le MO.CO. structuré en trois temps de résidences : Cochin (Inde), Venise (Italie) et Istanbul (Turquie). En parallèle de ces expériences, en France ou à l’étranger, il intervient dans les milieux scolaires et médico-sociaux afin de proposer des ateliers et de transmettre sa pratique. Depuis 2024, dans la continuité de ses recherches sur le langage, il s’engage dans la communauté sourde dans l’intention de contribuer à l’accessibilité dans l’art. De 2022 à 2024, ses expositions récentes individuelles ou collectives incluent : le MO.CO. de Montpellier, le FRAC – Occitanie de Montpellier, le Musée d’art contemporain de Sérignan, la Fondation Bullukian de Lyon, l’Atelier Blanc de Villefranche-de-Rouergue, le 67ème Salon de Montrouge et le Centre Pompidou de Metz.

“Can we imagine the universe from which we ourselves come as something physical, but at the same time as something virtual?” To portray the social circumstances of our contemporary society, characterised by a hybrid state of physicality and virtuality, choreographer Howool Baek combines body movement with technology. In “BETWEEN_in VR”, an imaginary and deeply 'immersive' universe emerges in which our body parts such as the hands, feet or navel lead us into an unfamiliar world. Using the overwhelming 360° VR spatial experience, we discover a new type of in-between space that merges the solid boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the body and the data, the analog and the digital, and the viewer and the performer.

Choreographer Howool Baek works on discovering individual body fragments without a face and proposing a different perspective of the body by deconstructing and transforming the body. Through breaking stereotypes about the body, she wants the audience to see society from a different perspective. Lately she has expanded her stage concept towards the digital space, carrying out new artistic experiments to transplant her choreographic method to the digital stage. Her first directed film Foreign body (2022) won the Best Film at Minimalen Short Film Festival - Multiplie Dance Film (Norway) in 2024. And VR film BETWEEN (2023) was awarded the Best Virtual Reality at Digital Media Fest (Italy) in 2023.

In a house isolated from the rest of the world, Léo and Nicolas are busy creating Vivarium, a video game in which we witness the rotting of an uninhabited house. A game that strangely echoes the place where the protagonists struggle to cohabit.

Born in Paris in 1991, Nicolas Bailleul is a plastic artist and researcher, with a diploma from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (Strasbourg) and a master's degree in anthropological and documentary cinema (Université Paris-Nanterre). Through his films and other narrative devices, Nicolas Bailleul explores the terrain of the interior in the age of connected networks. In particular, he is interested in new amateur practices (designated or claimed as such), using and diverting their captat ion tools and invest iting/infiltering their spaces of dissemination and encounter. Nicolas documents, fict ionnalizes and narrates his explorat ions. Since October 2020, he has been a doctoral student in research-creation at Université Paris 8 under the direction of Patrick Nardin and the co-direction of Gwenola Wagon.

A surreal take on two people longing to bond through movement. The setting is a bygone velodrome, the Albert Richter track in Cologne. Without words, VELODROME evokes a poetic and eerie liminal space. It portrays a pursuit of communication, a permanent interruption. A moment of encounter without meeting.

Pariya Bakhshi, (they/she) born 1997 in Hiroshima, is an Iranian filmmaker and artist. Pariya lives in Germany and has been studying film at the 2019 studying film at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She grew up in Iran, Tehran and studied design at the Tehran University of Fine Arts. One of her main themes is freedom and exile, which she explores in her autobiographical essay film Displaced in Time. For her, the act of making art and film becomes political, among other things by breaking conventions and media boundaries. In her feature films, she translates the unspoken from our reality into a surreal film world, through the expression of the body, beyond language. Pariya therefore works mainly with dancers, as in Katzenbellen, L , VELODROME and ANAMORPHOSIS. Blanca Barbat : I am a multidisciplinary artist. My creative praxis can take the form of films, installations, drawings, performances, and more. I'm particularly intrigued by the concept of 'bodies,' often exploring their boundaries, especially their thresholds, and their role in the ever-evolving narrative of our transforming reality. I perceive myself as both an expression of the world and a spectator within it. I connect with concepts like the rhizome and the collective unconscious.

Inspired by the story of British serial killer Dennis Nilsen, Loverboy operates as a meditation on the dark side of human intimacy. The project’s approach rejects moral simplifications, offering a narrative that is less a linear story than an immersive dissection of isolation and obsession. Recurring dialogues, eerie distortions, and environmental shifts that envelope the viewer in a claustrophobic cycle of increasingly fractured reality. Designed to linger like an emotional imprint, Loverboy challenges viewers to exit the refuge of orderly modern life and confront the fragility of human empathy and connection.

Nicholas Baldas is a writer, director, and producer whose creative work utilises cutting-edge technology to explore the prohibited boundaries of human experience through psychological immersion. The Heraclitian principle "life is flux" is the only constant in his creative pursuits, his collaborator Michael Plumb is a writer, filmmaker and performer. He has a Phd in Econometrics from University of Oxford. His creative focus is on the art of storytelling, drawing on his background in academia and public policy to explore questions about society and humankind. Michael is fascinated by exploring different media - old and new - to bring stories to life and reach new audiences.

Aequare. The future that never was by Sammy Baloji, 2023, 21’04 The film swings between archival film clips dating from 1943 and 1957, sourced from INEAC’s colonial propaganda, and 21st century captures of the same Yangambi premises, like a pendulum that never moves time forwards. An acronym for the former National Institute for the Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, its post-colonial successor, the Institut national pour l’Etude et la Recherche Agronomique (INERA), is on film so suffused with past, colonial “coordinate systems” that the present looks inert and at a standstill, as if held hostage by frames of knowledge that refuse to abdicate. Decades after decolonization, that persistent hold is made explicit by an imposing and intact map of the Belgian Congo hung high on the wall, and by all the remaining rusty machines, labelled test tubes and rotting reports and specimens, dusty instruments of measure, and laboratories. Against the crumbling of these infrastructures, a devoted population of Congolese clerks seem to assist the preservation of the collected data and methods, in a choreography of gestures that the montage reveals to be inherited from the colonial decades. Amidst images of farmers burning trees to make the charcoal sold at surrounding markets, or those of clerks’ motivational posts proudly professing the exactitude of their pursuit, the atavism of colonial ecology seems apparent. Excerpt from: Sandrine Colard, FROM THE EQUATOR, I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE

Since 2005, Sammy Baloji has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is an ongoing research on the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as questioning the impact of the Belgian colonization. He touches upon a variety of media to translate his research into artefacts. His use of photographic archives allows him to manipulate time and space, comparing ancient colonial narratives with contemporary economic imperialism. His video works, installations, sculptures, andphotographic series highlight how identities are shaped, transformed, perverted and reinvented. His critical view of contemporary societies is a warning about how cultural cliches continue to shape collective memories and thus allow social and political power games to continue to dictate human behavior. His recent personal exhibitions include: Sammy Baloji, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2024), Unextractable: Sammy Baloji invites, Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz (2024), Style Congo: Heritage & Heresy, CIVA, Brussels (2023), K(C)ongo, Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues. Subversive Classifications, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (2022) He has recently participated in the 35th Bienal de Sao Paulo (2023), the Architecture Biennale of Venice (2023), the 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023), the Sydney Biennial (2020), documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens, 2017) Sammy Baloji co-founded in 2008 the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi. In September 2019 Sammy Baloji started a PhD in Artistic Research titled “Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: towards a Reconfiguration of Identity and Geopolitics” at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.

Anna Baranowski and Vlad Br?teanu’s collaborative piece invites the audience to experience an intimate hypnotic induction. By making use of the hypnotic methodologies of relaxation - the sound of the sea and the soft human voice; images from the seaside, and the notions of rest and recovery that vacation recalls - the artist’s voices smoothly induce into the visitors’s consciousness local stories and realities of global warming, massive migration and economic challenges inflicted by global politics and mass tourism from Radhima, Vlora, a small village at the tip of the Albanian Riviera.

Anna Baranowski was born in Bytom, Poland in 1983. Today she lives secluded in a small village surrounded by the forests of East Germany and works on her art. In 2012, she received her diploma in media art with distinction from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. After her studies, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, such as the Berlin Biennale „Forget Fear“ in 2012. She has received grants, such as the Stiftung Kunstfonds working scholarship in 2018, and in recent years has been invited to various artist residencies, such as the Greater Columbus Arts Council in Columbus, USA, to develop new artistic works. Anna Baranowski looks at historical legacies in contemporary everyday life and reflects on collective psychological phenomena of human behaviour. In the field of experimental and documentary film, she focuses on direct cinema. She always uses documentary material in her works. In addition to her own cinematic images, composed in detail, the use of archival material is a central element of her experimental films. In doing so, she uses a wide variety of sources, such as amateur recordings, NASA or military footage. By taking them out of their original context, her works release new meanings. With documentary images that depict the real world, Anna Baranowski tells fictitious stories that are irritating and contrary to obvious expectations, which is precisely why they have an inner meaning and for this very reason trigger processes - the viewer is thrown back on himself and is confronted with his own feelings. Vlad Br?teanu, born in Bac?u, in the former Socialist Republic of Romania (RSR) in 1986, currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Br?teanu holds a M.A. in Photography and Moving Image and a B.A. in Graphics from the National University of Arts in Bucharest. In 2016 he studied Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His background in graphics forms the base for theoretical and conceptual considerations in which photography functions as a primary medium. Sound/hypnotic inductions, found objects, and public interventions that use playful semiotics of imagery are found in his current practice. Navigating the boundaries between public and private spaces, and finding signifiers for (in)visibility are translated into works that raise questions on precarity, fragility and stability in neoliberal societies. Research into the concept of plasticity and the effects of language are central in his artistic practice. Vlad is the co-founder of Template, an artist initiative and exhibition project that started in Bucharest in 2018 and is an alumnus of WHW Akademija in Zagreb in 2020.

In New Mexico USA, a group confronts the environmental racism engendered by nuclear research and uranium mining. Fighting against government narratives that conceal this reality in museums and tourist sites, women refuse to be silenced.

Born in 1985 in the Paris region, Théodora Barat is a visual artist and a director. She studied at the Beaux-Arts de Nantes before joining the Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains and was a resident at the Villa Medici last year. She’s now a teacher at the Beaux-Arts de Nantes. Her work, around sculpture and video installation, has been presented at the Nuit Blanche (Paris), Cneai (Paris), the Emily Harvey Foundation and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York), the Friche de la Belle de Mai (Marseille), Mains d’Oeuvres (Paris), Glassbox (Paris), and the CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), as well as in video programming at the Palais de Tokyo. She directed two previous documentaries in 2018 (“Pay Less Monument”, shot in New Jersey, USA and winner if the Audit talent award 2016) and in 2021 (“Off Power”, shot in Hong Kong), both selected at Cinéma du réel.

CAMBIUM, the cellular stratum of trees, it’s a cambial membrane that runs along the trunk and roots, producing growth. In the Navarrese Pyrenees a community has decided to cut down a pine forest in order to recover ancient fields for cultivation and animal grazing. Structured in two parts, the film traces the change of a territory traversed by practices of violence and care for the land.After the abandonment of the villages during the 1960s in the Arce Valley, the Government of Franco planted pines in the fields that were used for grazing as part of a state programme of reforestation and forestry. More than 50 years later, in Lakabe, a village repopulated in the 1980s, they have decided to cut down the pines and recover their meadows for livestock. Through different data capture and image technologies, CAMBIUM explores, together with the inhabitants of the area, a territory in transformation.

Maddi Barber studied audiovisual communication at the University of the Basque Country and did a master's degree in visual anthropology at the University of Manchester. In 2019 she created the production company Pirenaika, with which she has produced some of her films as well as those of other artists and filmmakers from the nearby context such as Gerard Ortin, Ainhoa Gutiérrez and Irati Gorostidi. Her latest co-production, CONTADORES, by Irati Gorostidi, had its international premiere at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes. She is currently participating in Tabakalera's Ikusmira Berriak residency, where she is developing the feature-length fiction film CLAROS DE BOSQUE. Marina Lameiro is a filmmaker and producer. She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the URJC and a master's degree in Creative Documentary from IDEC-UPF and a postgraduate degree in Audiovisual Editing from the same university. She was part of the Collaborative Studio (CoLab) of UnionDocs in New York City as an artist-in-residence. In 2018 he released her first feature film YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL which, among other awards, won the Special Audience Award at the Punto de Vista Festival in 2018, was nominated for the Feroz Awards and has been screened in more than 20 countries. In 2021 she released DARDARA, her second feature film, which entered the list of the 10 most-seen films in cinemas after its premiere at the Punto de Vista Festival.

À la rencontre de voix, de visages et de paysages, le film okinawa est une traversée à la fois documentaire et onirique dans l’épaisseur spatiale et temporelle d’un archipel aux confins du Japon et de ses enjeux géopolitiques et environnementaux.

Amie Barouh défend un documentaire expérimental s’attachant à donner la parole à des personnes évoluant dans les marges à l’instar de la communauté Rom. Son travail relève ouvertement d’un journal filmé et s’inscrit dans l’idée que tout savoir est situé, que tout cinéma, aussi informatif soit-il, est forcément subjectif. Motivés plus par des affinités que par une volonté dogmatique de « faire cinéma », les films d’Amie Barouh, entre documentaires et essais visuels, visent avant tout à transmettre une expérience, prise comme telle, et partent souvent d’un événement marquant la vie de l’artiste, à l’instar d’une rencontre. Amie Barouh ne se contente pas d’observer ceux et celles qu’elle filme. Elle vit ou a tissé un lien particulier avec eux·elles. Mue par la curiosité et l’envie de rencontrer des membres de la communauté Rom, l’artiste se fait « adopter » par une famille et intégre leur camp en banlieue parisienne. C’est en vivant avec eux, et après 2 ans de vie commune, qu’elle commence à les filmer. Ne cherchant pas à masquer les marques d’expression subjectives, les vidéos d’Amie Barouh rompent complètement avec l’illusion d’objectivité documentaire. L’artiste met non seulement en jeu son histoire personnelle, mais aussi son corps dans la matière de ses documentaires. C’est particulièrement le cas dans Je peux changer mais pas à 100%, une œuvre qui retrace sa relation amoureuse échouée avec Bobby, un Rom roumain consommateur de crack et vivant dans la rue de menus larcins. Les films d’Amie Barouh sont toujours tendus par la recherche d’une juste proximité avec les personnes dont elle capture l’image. La « bonne » distance reste cependant toujours instable pour le plus grand plaisir du spectateur. La caméra, troisième œil et troisième bras de l’artiste, négocie en temps réel la nature des relations qu’elle – en tant que documentariste mais avant tout en tant que personne – entretient avec ses sujets. La mise en scène et le montage subjectif épousent ses élans du cœur, d’où le caractère tantôt impressionniste, tantôt réaliste des images, restituant toute la complexité à documenter des mondes auxquels on n’appartient pas. Elodie Royer. Élodie Royer Biographie Élodie Royer est commissaire d’exposition indépendante, doctorante en recherche-création à l'ENS au sein du laboratoire SACRe. Sous forme d!entretiens, de textes et d!expositions, ses recherches actuelles s’attachent à relier des pratiques d’artistes femmes au Japon en regard de leur ancrage dans des milieux de vie bouleversés par des désordres environnementaux, de l’histoire des catastrophes et de l’écoféminisme. Depuis sa résidence à la Villa Kujoyama à Kyoto en 2011, elle travaille de façon régulière sur et avec la scène artistique japonaise. En 2022, elle a conçu l’exposition Les Êtres Lieux à la Maison de la culture du Japon, et entre 2016 et 2020, une série d’expositions commissionnée par KADIST et le MOT Musée d’art contemporain de Tokyo en collaboration avec Che Kyongfa (Things Entangling, MOT; Les nucléaires et les choses, KADIST; Almost nothing, yet not nothing, Tokyo University of the Arts). Elle est aussi membre des comités d’acquisition de la Fondation KADIST et du FRAC Rhône-Alpes ; et des comités éditoriaux de TextWork, plateforme éditoriale de la Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard et de PALM, magazine en ligne du Jeu de Paume. Auparavant, elle a conçu des expositions au sein de nombreuses structures d’art contemporain publique et privée en France (Palais de Tokyo, Le Plateau/FRAC Ile-de-France, gb agency, DOC!, etc.) et à l’international (Mercer Union à Toronto, Tate Modern à Londres, GAMeC – Galerie d’art moderne et contemporain à Bergame, etc.). Avec le commissaire d’exposition Yoann Gourmel, elle a notamment mis en place le programme 220 jours en 2007- 2008, en dialogue avec les artistes Isabelle Cornaro, Julien Crépieux, Mark Geffriaud, Benoît Maire, Bruno Persat, Chloé Quenum ou Raphaël Zarka: http://220jours.blogspot.com/.

On Hospitality is a necromantic documentary where the Iraqi artist Layla Al-Attar returns from the dead to tell the story of how a Swedish company built a luxurious hotel in Baghdad, ordered by Saddam Hussein for the 1983 summit of the Non-Alignment Movement. War changed all the plans. Layla made a mosaic at the entrance of the hotel, depicting George Bush’s face, and her house was hit by an American missile.

Magnus Bärtås is an artist, writer and filmmaker, and has exhibited at Gwangju Biennial, Göteborgs Konsthall and Moderna Museet, Stockhom among other venues. He won the grand prize at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2010 with Madame & Little Boy. Behzad Khosravi Noori is an artist, writer and filmmaker working between Karachi and Stockholm. Bärtås and Khosravi-Noori won the 1st Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival with On Hospitality – Layla al Attar and Hotel al Rasheed in 2024.

“barrunto” is a word used in Puerto Rico to refer to a bodily unrest, an omen or a forecast sensed via signals present in the environment (such as when rain is forecast through aches and pains or when ants emerge anticipating an earthquake). “barrunto” is a way of thinking with surface and subconscious, underfoot and underground. From its deep vibration tracks to the nonlinear narrative, barrunto is a film that attempts to activate sensations and modes of being with the world and in connection beyond western frameworks of knowledge, a sensorial translation meant to be 'felt' more than 'understood'. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed; in sites of displacement, nuclear contamination, and military occupation from Scotland to Puerto Rico; from the bottom of the ocean all the way to the planet Uranus. Informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance, BARRUNTO is a speculative narrative using digital, archival, and 16mm film hand-processed in “grief tea.” . Made in collaboration with Shanti LaLita, Claude Nouk, Alicia Matthews, Harry Josephine Giles, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Sharif Elsabagh, Andrés Nieves, Ángela Ginorio, Bea Webster, Ciaran Stewart y muchxs más.

Emilia Beatriz is an artist and access worker from Puerto Rico’s diaspora, based in Glasgow. Emilia’s practice is concerned with the stories that absence and rupture tell, as experienced through entangled histories of bodies and land. Emilia engages translation across senses; moving at the pace of island time, sick time, moss time. Informed by Aurora Levins Morales’ ‘historian as healer’ methodology, Emilia’s films weave historical and speculative narratives —grounded in oral history and community archiving— centering dreaming, action, and griefwork attuned to climate and place. BARRUNTO is Emilia’s first single-screen film for cinema contexts. Emilia is co-founder of Collective Text, a disabled-led group who collaborate on creative captioning, audio description and interpretation. BARRUNTO is their first feature and first film for cinema contexts

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.

'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.

Built during British colonial rule in 1930, the Kalurghat Bridge serves as a vital connection between the north and south of the greater Chittagong district of Bangladesh, bisected by the Karnaphuli River. Historically, this bridge facilitated communication between regions in south Chittagong, bridging the gap from British India. From the circle of my family ancestors, many left the southern part of Chittagong from the British period, particularly the partition period, to the Pakistan period and settled in different parts of this subcontinent. Then, during the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, some people in Bangladesh-India border areas took shelter for some time and worked in various ways for the freedom of the country. From the post-independence period to the present, many people from this southern region migrated to other countries outside the subcontinent for different purposes and reasons, including re-settlement in Chittagong City and Dhaka. These familial and local stories are not linear. Through different layered images on the bridge, the video features a female narrator, embodying the collective familial past. The narrative within the video is a fictionalised merge drawn from different stories and correspondences, further exploring familial history and connection.

Palash Bhattachajee has undergone a shift in his artistic journey, transitioning from academically focused printmaking toward multi-media, experimental art-practice via a close encounter with performance art activism. He takes critical interest in closely reading filmic genres and their performative idioms. The photo/videographic style and the eclectic selection of objects in his works are influenced by the cerebral matrix of contrapuntal, non-narrative aspect of deconstructed storytelling adopted from global cinema. Based and born in Chittagong, Bangladesh, he received his Master’s and Bachelor's degrees from the Department of Fine Arts, Chittagong University. He was awarded the Asia Pacific Fellowship Residency from MMCA Residency Goyang in 2011 and received a grant from Seoksu Art Project of Stone & Water, South Korea, in 2010. His works have been widely exhibited in Bangladesh, including at Chobi Mela 2021, Dhaka Art Summit 2012-2020, Asian Art Biennale 2012-2022, Dhaka, and internationally, including ‘Legacies of Crossings’, Shahnaz Gallery, London, UK 2024; NOmade Biennial, Art Center Gallery Elblag, Poland, 2023; Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2022; Colomboscope, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2022; ‘The Oceans and the Interpreters’ and ‘The Deep City’, Hong-Gah Museum, Taiwan, 2020; ‘Seven Exhibitions’ at Exhibit 320, New Delhi, India, 2018; and many more.

At the cinema, all eyes converge on the same surface: the screen. Each person in his or her place pays attention to the progress of the film without disturbing the others, or else to share in the occasional burst of laughter or sign of fright. But almost all these viewers also have another screen with them, a smartphone. If, in this situation, it's de rigueur to turn them off, could we, on the contrary, ask everyone to use them, not instead of the big screen, but as a complement to it? Indeed, Swipe to Swipe to ... is a dispositif that lets you switch from one screen to another, playing the film while playing with the film, in this case George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". From now on, connecting to the dispositif means taking part in the film. In fact, the film is divided into as many parts as there are seats in the room, and continues to unfold on the audience's smartphones. Potentially, the whole film could thus be played out in a distributed manner on the audience's smartphone screens, each with a part of the image, but all broadcasting the sound. Whether it's completely emptied of its image, or only partially, the big screen won't remain so for long, as everyone can swipe their screen in either direction to put the film back where it belongs, or, on the contrary, to bring it back to themselves. This action also plays with the film's temporality: the film is slowed down when taken by the audience, who can then collectively restart the normal running of the film and move from one sequence to the next, restoring the various pieces of borrowed image to the big screen. Far from being just a technical gesture, this will take on its full meaning when the film we play with also raises questions about our relationships with others, and our individual and collective responsibilities, as did this famous horror film in its day, whose political interpretations caused so much ink to flow are perhaps still relevant today.

Samuel Bianchini is an artist and associate professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs—Paris (EnsAD) / PSL University Paris. Supporting the principle of an “operational aesthetic,” he works on the relationship between the most forward-looking technological “dispositifs”, modes of representation, new forms of aesthetic experiences, and sociopolitical organizations, often in collaboration with scientists and natural science and engineering research laboratories. His works are regularly shown in Europe and across the world: MAAT (Museum Art Architecture Technology, Lisbon), Zürcher Gallery (New York), Wood Street Galleries (Pittsburgh), Nuit Blanche Toronto, Waterfall Gallery (New York), Medialab Prado (Madrid), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Kunsthaus PasquArt (Biel), Art Basel, Institut Français of Tokyo, Stuk Art Center (Leuven), Fiac, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Dresden), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Laboratoria (Moscow), Thessaloniki Biennale, Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine (Geneva), space_imA and Duck-Won Gallery (Seoul), Museum of Contemporary Art Ateneo de Yucatán (Mexico), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, etc. After defending his PhD thesis (of The Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne) in an art center (Palais de Tokyo in Paris) with a solo exhibition, and, more recently, his accreditation to supervise research, Samuel Bianchini is now the head of the “Reflective Interaction” research group at EnsadLab, the laboratory of EnsAD, and the Co-Director of the Chaire Arts and Sciences recently founded with École Polytechnique and the Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation. He is a member of the SACRe Laboratory (Sciences Arts Création Recherche – EA 7410) of PSL University and involved in its doctoral program for which he supervise PhD in art and design. He is also member of the canadian research-creation network Hexagram and associate member of the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. In close relation to his research and artistic practice, Samuel Bianchini has undertaken theoretical work, which has led to frequent publications edited, for example, by Éditions du Centre Pompidou, MIT Press, Analogues, Media-N - Journal of the New Media Caucus, Hermes, Les Presses du Réel, Springer, etc.

The video is an AI assisted meditation on self-help through extreme sonic manipulation, in a semi-erotic plastic dreamscape of watered down and for profit thanatotherapy, where new age imagery devolves into Cronenberg-esque mutations, in complete contrast with the chaotic and unpredictable sonic experiments which may or may not be useful in your personal quest to embetter your True Self™. The music is highly processed, with just a few audible artifacts left of the original code, drum kit and modular based sources, creating sounds that hopefully escape attempts at AI classification.

Matthew Biederman, b. 1972, Chicago Heights, IL, USA. Matthew Biederman works across media and milieus, architectures and systems, communities and continents since 1990. He creates works where light, space and sound reflect on the intricacies of perception. Since 2008 he is a co-founder of Arctic Perspective Initiative, with Marko Peljhan working throughout the circumpolar region. He has served as artist-in-residence at a variety of institutions and institutes, including the Center for Experimental Television on numerous occasions, CMU’s CREATE lab, the Wave Farm, th Finnish Bioarts Society and many more. His work has been featured at: Lyon Bienniale, Istanbul Design Bienniale, The Tokyo Museum of Photography, ELEKTRA, MUTEK, Ars Electronica, Bienniale of Digital Art (CA), Artissima (IT), SCAPE Bienniale (NZ) and the Moscow Biennale (RU), among others. Pierce Warnecke is a multidisciplinary digital artist. His work, on the border between experimental music, digital arts and video art, is influenced by the observation of the effects of time on matter: modification, deterioration and disappearance. He frequently collaborates with prominent figures such as Frank Bretschneider, Matthew Biederman, Yair Elazar Glotman and Keith Fullerton Whitman among others. He has presented his work in the form of performances, concerts and installations at MUTEK, ZKM, CTM, Elektra, KW Institut, La Biennale NEMO, Sonic Acts, Martin Gropius Bau, MAC Montreal, Scopitone, LEV Festival, SXSW, FILE, etc. Between 2017 and 2019 he composed several audiovisual pieces for the Institute for Sound and Music’s Hexadome project in Berlin, San Francisco, Montreal and more. His music has been published on raster-media (DE) and Room40 (AU), and he is represented by DISK Agency in Berlin.

“Bilbao’s work revolves around the figure of the lanternfly to articulate a political discourse on ontology that goes beyond fixed meanings of self and other, of human and non-human. Instead, the lanternfly acts as both a literal and metaphorical representation of how the current capitalist, global market produces, circulates, and then alienates othered beings. (…) In all its layers, Prelude challenges the distinction between human agency, anthropomorphism, and other––animal and human-created––intelligence. (…) In his canonical work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes reminds us how cinema, unlike photography, which fastens down figures “like [preserved] butterflies,” enables beings to continue living (56–57). The cinematographic present is alive, carrying its referent without being tied to it. In their motionless movement, Bilbao’s lanternfly flutters, confronting the humanity of the anthropomorphic yet inert clown-like puppet. (…) Working with [archival images and also with the AI app DALL·E], Bilbao projects the images and films the projection with a 16mm Bolex. (…) even if digitalisation appears to dematerialise the production of images, Bilbao’s analogue camera reminds us how the digital is bound to the analogue world: kilometres of data centres and storage farms make possible the apparent immateriality of the digital visual realm.” (By Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro)

AnaMary Bilbao is a Portuguese-Spanish visual artist born in Lisbon (Portugal). In an endless play between analog and digital, Bilbao’s work challenges time’s dichotomy between beginning and end, and goes deeper into the notion of truth and the dialectics of doubt and certainty. Her work has been recently exhibited at Galeria Avenida da Índia - EGEAC (Lisbon), Photo Basel (Basel), ISCP (New York), Paris Photo / Curiosa (Paris), MAAT – The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), Opening Arco Madrid (Madrid), Leal Rios Foundation (Lisbon), PLMJ Foundation (Lisbon), among others. Bilbao's works have been screened in venues such as Anthology Film Archives (org. Mono No Aware, New York), MoMA - Museum of Modern Art (org. Mono No Aware, New York), Novo Negócio - ZDB (Lisbon), Batalha Centro de Cinema (org. Contemporânea, Porto), or MAAT (16.ª ed. Fuso, Lisbon). AnaMary Bilbao has been the recipient and/or shortlisted to various distinguished Portuguese awards such as: EDP Foundation / MAAT Acquisition Award (16.ª ed. Fuso, 2024); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Grant for studying visual arts abroad (2023/2024); Luso-American Development Foundation Artist Residency in the U.S.A. Grant (2022); FLAD Drawing Award (2021); EDP Foundation’s New Artists Award (2019); FCT PhD Fellowship (2015-19).

Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass is an audiovisual collaboration between Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons and Fabian Lanzmaier, focusing on preserved peatlands and their interpretation through various recording and 3D computing technologies. Through the use of photogrammetry, a technology that relates to satellite mapping and archiving of anthropocentric spaces and monuments, the biotope is interpreted bit by bit in an intimate, close-up interaction. The work explores specific peatlands in Finland, Norway and Canada from various perspectives, focusing on the idea of natural landscapes as sources as opposed to resources, and their capability or not to be translated to binary code.

Ingrid Bjørnaali is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oslo who records specific biotopes in various states of their ongoing world-building processes. Her works explore the omnipresence of the digital in our experience of the world as well as the inability of technology to articulate matter’s complexity. Recent exhibitions include Screen City Biennial, Berlin, Fabbrica Del Vapore, Milan, Charles Street Video, Toronto and Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). Fabian Lanzmaier is a musician and sound artist living in Vienna. In his practice he explores perception and ideas of natural / artificial sounds, fluid and ambiguous environments. He works with real-time audio synthesis utilizing digital/analog physical modeling techniques and feedback networks to explore aspects of texture and structure of sound as well as its presence within space. Recent projects include: Artist in Residency at Wave Farm – NY, composition commission through INA - grm - Paris, AV - Performance at Fridman Gallery - NYC and Artist in Residency at EMS – Stockholm. Maria Simmons is a Canadian symbiontic artist who investigates potentialized environments through the creation of hybrid sculptures and installations. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, grows yeast, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself. Recent solo exhibitions include the Visual Art Centre of Clarington, Trinity Square Video, and Centre3.

A journey through the years of counterculture and attempted revolution, through archive footage, guided by the memory of a retired revolutionary, Vittorio Alfieri, former head of the Milanese column of the Red Brigades. From factory initiatives, through armed struggle and half a life in prison, a glimpse of a forgotten history, which we still keep hidden, especially from ourselves.

Mario Blaconà is a cinema programmer at the San Fedele Cultural Center in Milan and is editor of the online magazines Lo Specchio Scuro and Filmidee. In 2018 he directed the documentary short film Which of you was not born here, winner of the Montelupo Fiorentino Film Festival, and in the same year he arrived among the finalists of the Solinas Award for documentary with the project Benq5, with which he won the Front Lab Aosta 2018 and participated in the international laboratory Balkan Documentary Center. In 2021 he directed the medium-length documentary Italia, theories for a home movie, with which he participated in the Milan Filmmaker Festival and in FIDBA at Buenos Aires. In 2022 he partecipated to the artistic residency U Stories with the project Domina. He is currently head programmer of the Bellaria Film Festival, is a member of the Sole Luna Doc pre-selection committee and collaborates with the Locarno Film Festival within the Locarno Filmmakers Academy and L'immagine e la Parola.