Catalogue 2025

In 1939, a second unit with a double and extras filmed scenes for the Hollywood classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in the Lincoln Memorial. The succession of the long, sorted-out plan sequences undermines the classic cinematic narration; the plot does not seem to progress. The neoclassical architecture remains the setting for a recurring and questionable ritual, in which the protagonist is lost.

Christoph Girardet, born in 1966, is a German video artist and filmmaker. Girardet makes both the accidentally found and the extensively researched found footage from the archives of film history the subject of his art. Montage, omissions, and repetitions reveal the actual structures and inner mechanism of the depicted cinematic reality. Beyond the analysis of the material and its clichés, his work deals in essence with a melancholic state of absence, thus creating an individual pictorial world. From 1988 to 1994, Girardet studied Visual Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in the film class of Birgit Hein. Since 1989 he has produced films, videos and video installations, some of them in collaboration with video artist Volker Schreiner (1994 – 2004), and, more frequently, in collaboration with filmmaker Matthias Müller (1999 – ongoing). Girardet has participated in group shows at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, MoMA PS1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, among others. He had solo exhibitions at institutions such as FACT, Liverpool, Kunstverein Hannover and West, The Hague. He has taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Oberhausen and Rotterdam. His work is included in public and private collections. He has received numerous awards, among them a stipend for the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2000) and a scholarship at Villa Massimo in Rome (2004). He lives and works in Hanover, Germany.

In the Garden of Hesperides, a fruit, capable of granting immortality to whoever ate it, once grew. This garden, located somewhere off the coast of West Africa, was guarded by a dragon with one hundred heads. Through the use of bio-sonification of banana trees, a monoculture crop in the Canary Islands, we discover a tale of eternal life where this mythical garden used to exist.

Their work investigates the relationship between mythology, history and materialism. Their first feature film, Eles transportan a morte (2021), premiered at the Venice and San Sebastian festivals winning awards at both. It has subsequently been shown at international festivals such as Rotterdam, Cairo, Mar del Plata, Viennale, Hamburg and Sao Paulo. Their short films have been shown at festivals like Toronto, Locarno, New York, Ann Arbor and many others. They have made installations and performances in art centers like CCCB (Barcelona), BAM (New York), TEA (Tenerife) or Solar (Vila do Conde).

A young woman wanders around a business district at night and at dawn meets seven lonely strangers, who each fall under the thrall of her energy. Inspired by the imagery of the Flemish Primitives and made in collaboration with a real-life quantum-healer, the film is a musing on the longing for connection in a neoliberal urban context.

In short narrative films, documentary and installation work, Bart Groenendaal (Amsterdam, 1975) explores how the cinema shapes our social subjectivity and the world around us as an ever fluctuating expression of ideology.

Miraculous Accident is a transtemporal film that narrates the love story between Nadir, a Moroccan student at the ?ód? Film School in 1968, his Jewish editing teacher Edyta, and their shared relationship with Jarek, Nadir’s best friend and Edyta’s protégé. Nadir is among a group of North African students sent to study communist filmmaking techniques as part of the Eastern Bloc’s support for anti-imperialist struggles. Despite her opposition to Zionism, Edyta is forced to leave Poland due to the political rift between Poland and Israel following the Six-Day War or the Naksa (The Setback). In 2024, Nadir returns to the school to make a film after discovering a forgotten letter Edyta wrote to him from Haifa in 1989. The film mourns the cruelty of nations, birthing rare miracles—accidental loves—only to crush them before they breathe. Inspired by the life of former Moroccan student, poet, and filmmaker Abdelkader Lagtaâ, who also plays Nadir in the film, Miraculous Accident weaves its plot through original footage and extracts from 1960s student films by Lagtaâ and his peers.

Assaf Gruber (b. Jerusalem, 1980) is a sculptor and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. The dynamic relationship between individuals and institutions is at the center of his practice, which aims to explore both how the political orientation of legacy establishments impact the lives of individuals and how these organizations choose to represent and communicate facts and their attendant artifacts. The absurd biographies of the protagonists in his projects simultaneously reveal and obscure the reasons and motives that lead people to obey or rebel against their inner world or the society in which they live. His photography, sculpture, and installations place the materiality of objects in relation to narrative dimensions, which in turn create fictional spaces where movement and non-movement function as a medium. Gruber’s solo exhibitions include the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018) and the Muzeum Sztuki,Assaf Gruber (b. Jerusalem, 1980) is a sculptor and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. The dynamic relationship between individuals and institutions is at the center of his practice, which aims to explore both how the political orientation of legacy establishments impact the lives of individuals and how these organizations choose to represent and communicate facts and their attendant artifacts. The absurd biographies of the protagonists in his projects simultaneously reveal and obscure the reasons and motives that lead people to obey or rebel against their inner world or the society in which they live. His photography, sculpture, and installations place the materiality of objects in relation to narrative dimensions, which in turn create fictional spaces where movement and non-movement function as a medium. Gruber’s solo exhibitions include the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018) and the Muzeum Sztuki, ?ód? (2015). His films have been featured in festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023) and FID Marseille (2022). He studied at Cooper Union in New York and is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. (2015). His films have been featured in festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023) and FID Marseille (2022). He studied at Cooper Union in New York and is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent.

Roma Talismano, seventh instalment of the ‘Superfictional World Atlas’, explores Rome as the moral and aesthetic talisman of the West. To the sound of opera hymns and arias, the allegorical animals the she-wolf, the eagle and the lamb narrate the endless recycling of Roman aesthetics to create an artificial and pale classical universality, from the Renaissance to fascism to the present day: Roma Talismano, eternal volcano of visual and spiritual bleach.

Guerreiro do Divino Amor holds a master’s degree in architecture from the School of Architecture of Grenoble (France). His since 20 years ongoing research “Superfictional world Atlas” explore the historical, media-related, religious and corporative mythologies that make up the collective imaginary of nations. He creates an universe of science fiction from fragments of reality in the shape of films, publications, and large-scale installations. Divino Amor represented Switzerland in the 2024 Venice biennial, was a fellow of the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program in 2021-2022, was awarded the PIPA Prize 2019. In 2022 he presented the retrospective solo show “Superficitional Sanctuaries” at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. His work has been presented at the Frestas Trienal in Sorocaba (Brazil) Bangkok Biennale 2024, CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), Pinacoteca de São Paulo, among other institutions. His award-winning films have been screened at various national and international venues and festivals. Guerreiro do Divino Amor lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

‘Midville’ was the pseudonymous name given to a Midlands Art School in the United Kingdom when it was studied over a period of three years from 1967 by two sociologists. The resulting book, ‘Art Students Observed’, published in 1973 has become a classic document within art teaching literature, the place where “romantic” and “conceptual” art first collided. 58 years later I traced the students in the book and interviewed them about their recollections and (sometimes traumatic) experiences. We have recreated ‘Midville’ as a 13-minute AI supported mini collage ‘opera’, where the students as they were then and now, pronounce their testimonies via AI voices, choirs, avatars, and real-world original footage.

Steve Hawley is a Ljubljana based artist who has been since 1981 part of the second wave of British video artists. His work deals with language, humour, and the nature of memory through archive film and video, and has been shown at video festivals and broadcast worldwide. Work on myth and the city includes Ghost made in Hong Kong, screened at the 2000 Cannes Director's Fortnight. War Memorial 2017 was nominated for best short documentary at the Sheffield DocFest and his book, Men, War and Film, about the Calling Blighty message films of WWII was published in 2022. Steve Dutton is an artist and occasional curator based in the South West of England. His practice spans drawing, sound, moving image and text, with a focus on exploring the intersections and overlaps of language, space, and time. He is currently developing a new solo body of work titled "The Phantom Industry." His work engages with the acts of reading, drawing, painting, speaking and writing and might be best described as a language-based practice.

Night. The moon is a rock. The ears are stopped. A chair balances on the roof of a house. A silver box composes itself: a mysterious instrument. A marble rolls around in somebody’s head. Two rocks spin. Is it possible to stop the mind?

Nelson Henricks graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1986. He moved to Montréal in 1991 and received a BFA from Concordia University. He recently completed a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal. Henricks has taught art history and studio art at Concordia University, McGill University, UQAM and Université de Montréal. A curator and artist, Henricks is best known for his videotapes and video installations, which have been exhibited worldwide. A focus on his video work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the Video Viewpoints series in 2000. Henricks was the recipient of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2002, the Prix Giverny Capital in 2015, and the Prix Louis-Comtois in 2023. An exhibition of his work was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2023. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and others. He is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

The Flood reframes a historic 1960s flooding event—one that submerged and partially destroyed a greenhouse nursery and adjacent property—within contemporary urban infrastructure and its ongoing debt to land intervention. As internal and external imagery collide, flooding takes on a double meaning: both physical inundation and psychic surfacing.

Ruth Höflich is a visual artist working in moving image and photography born in Munich and currently based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work as been screened and exhibited internationally including at National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Images Festival, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival and Art Gallery of NSW. She is currently a research fellow at Powerhouse Museum Sydney where she is developing a new film. She holds an MFA from Bard College, New York.

In the houses, after parting, Mothers were made up of tears. Sons were transformed into empty glass cups. And the lullabies became a curse. The film examines the suffering and resilience of the Burmese people by using the distinct political elements that have floated for several years on the ocean of political opera under repetitive military dictatorships in Myanmar. The visual composition draws on the colors of Myanmar’s national flag, adopted in 2010 during the country’s so-called transition period. This flag, rooted in the 2008 Constitution forced upon the country by a former military dictator, contrasts sharply with the earlier 1974 State Flag Law, as it includes a formal definition of the flag. The film deconstructs and questions the existing definition of the flag by playing with the colors, objects, and sequences, by using a form of Government Propaganda Television Footage showing different generations under repetitive military dictatorships, by mixing the chilling voice of the current dictator, Min Aung Hlaing, narrating haunting lullabies through AI technology. The film also revisits the song which was sung from the last footage of actual footage of a birthday party celebration for Myanmar’s former dictator, General Ne Win, held at Sedona Hotel in Yangon on March 21, 2001, one year before his death.

Lin Htet Aung (b. 1998) is a filmmaker from Myanmar. He began with avant-garde poetry before transitioning to filmmaking in 2017. His short films have been selected at several international film festivals, including New York Film Festival, Vancouver, Tirana, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and won several awards, including the TIGER SHORT AWARD at International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR. An alumnus of TIFF Directors’ Lab, Berlinale Talents, Locarno Filmmakers Academy, Asian Film Academy, and a Prince Claus Seed Awardee 2023, he is now developing his debut feature, Making A Sea, which received the Asian Cinema Fund and Red Sea Award at Asian Project Market (APM). After the coup in 2021, he joined the CDM (Civil Disobedience Movement) for his Engineering study in Myanmar, and currently studying at Städelschule art School, Germany.

Wanderers is a film centered in the way that matter (and our bodies as a result) are driven by magnetism, pulse or rhythm carried by the earths inertia. A primal movement of mineral origin, pre-life and pre-human. To do so, the film casts a universal perspective on the dynamics of birds, migration of bodies, and humans fascination with flying as a challenge for those laws. The film covers this abstract notion with two different contemporary phenomena, modern falconry flown on commercial airplanes and the passion of RC Replica airliner pilots, depicting the dichotomy between natural evolution, our physical materiality and the detachment from mundane reality and general force and gravity, those.

Carlos Irijalba Pamplona (SP) 1979 Resident at the Rijksacademie Van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam) in 2013/2014, and Graduated at the UDK University with Professor Lothat Baumgarten, Irijalba has been awarded multiple art prizes like in 2023 the NYC Culture Pair Program with the Department of Design and Construction DDC, the Mondriaan Fonds 2022 in Amsterdam, the Sifting Foundation Art Grant 2015 in San Francisco y Marcelino Botin 2007/08 among others. He exhibited internationally in the Shanghai Biennale 2021, CAB Art Center Brussels, Guangzhou Triennale 2017 or MUMA Melbourne in Australia. To the question “Does the world need this new object?”, most of the times the answer would be “no”. Therefor the work of Irijalba moves by the principle of pertinence, trying to remain context responsive. In projects like Skins (2013), Hiatus (2022) and Pannotia (2016-ongoing) he works with geology and industrial time sensitive materials that give us perspective on the dominant narratives in Western history. His work is present in public collections as Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, The Netherlands National Collection, Sammlung Wemhoener Foundation in Germany, the Taviloglu Art Collection in Istambul and Acciona Foundation in Spain. His presence on private collections internationally is extensive in both North and South America, Europe and Asia like collection Pilar Citoler, Kells Collection, David Breskin Collection among many others.

A lone airplane flies high over a dark landscape. Amid fields of untouched snow a rover is scanning both the ground and the stars, and is beginning to be troubled by the history it was once fed. People isolated inside the plane try to interpret the rover’s increasingly complex messages, while attempting to uncover the past and the future.

Appu Jasu (b.1987) is an artist living in Helsinki working with video, sound, photography and text. In his works fiction, documentary and the absurd meet and exchange ideas about life and society. His practice involves thinking through all the included mediums – picture, text and sound – each taking their turn leading the artwork into a new direction. Jasu’s video works can be found from the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Helsinki Art Museum, and they have been shown e.g. in WNDX, Canada and in doclisboa, Portugal.

Set against the impending closure of Duke University’s century-old herbarium—home to over 825,000 dried plant specimens—The Ferns weaves together personal, political, and scientific narratives to explore the entangled histories of botany, identity, and resistance. At the film’s center are Kathleen Pryer, the herbarium’s director, and feminist theorist Banu Subramaniam. As one recounts naming a group of ferns after pop icon Lady Gaga—a decision rooted in queer identification—she opens deeper conversations about naming and categorization. The other traces how colonial sexual norms have long shaped botanical science, imposing binary gender onto plants and erasing more fluid, diverse reproductive systems. Woven between the two are drag performers who animate the herbarium’s archive, lip-syncing to Poker Face in glittering Gaga-inspired costumes among the rows of dried specimens. They become the Gaga ferns—blurring science and fantasy, taxonomy and play. Shot in North Carolina, where anti-LGBTQ+ legislation continues to threaten queer and trans lives, The Ferns situates the herbarium not just as a site of preservation, but as a stage for contesting dominant narratives. Special thanks to Dr. Banu Subramaniam and Dr. Kathleen Pryer for sharing their work, as well as performers Lotus Lolita, Portia Foxx, and Poison. Thank you to Assistant Director Vida Zamora and editor Rafe Scobey-tahl.

Erin Johnson is an artist and filmmaker based in New York, NY. Johnson received an MFA and a Certificate in New Media from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and has participated in residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY), among others. She was a 2024 Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). Her work has been exhibited or screened at venues including e-flux (New York, NY), BOAN1942 ARTSPACE (Seoul, KR), BOFFO (Fire Island, NY), Rencontres Internationales (Paris, FR / Berlin, DE), BIENALSUR (Buenos Aires, AR), MOCA (Toronto, CA), Munchmuseet (Oslo, NO), Sanatorium (Istanbul, TR), Times Square Arts (New York, NY), etc. galerie (Prague, CZ), Cinalfama (Lisbon, PT), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), Billytown (The Hague, NL), Galleria Eugenia Delfini (Rome, IT), and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA). Johnson is the Undergraduate Director and faculty member of the Studio Art Program at New York University.

Misdirected Impulse shows deserted natural and park landscapes in long, static shots. Picturesque arrangements of trees and bushes unfold quietly, until the sudden appearance of a smoking light ruptures the calm. The following staccato of short shots, in which the light is directed equally at the camera and the viewer, is an attack on gaze and perspective, dissolving romanticized notions of nature.

Eginhartz Kanter (*1984, Leipzig) studied Fine Arts, Cultural Studies and Photography at the University of Arts and Design Linz, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the E?cole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. In his artistic approach he questions the boundaries and conventions of everyday life and living environments. His (sub)urban interventions negotiate aspects of the public and often have a direct relation to architecture. Previous films: Conveyor (2025); Prelude (2022); Taking Away (2018); Aufstieg (2016); Transient II (2013) Downloads

African Union responds to 2018 reports of Chinese surveillance at the African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa. Made with generative AI, commercial stock imagery, and documentary footage, the film explores digital imperialism, data extraction, and the ideological entanglements of AI within the evolving dynamics of China–Africa political and technological relations.

David Kelley’s work traces the hidden ecologies of global infrastructure—from deep-sea mining and the Silk Road to Alberta’s oil sands and the extraction of rare earth elements in China. Working across film, photography, installation, and sculpture, he explores how technology, modernity, ecology, and memory operate as interwoven systems of mediation. His practice draws on essay film, experimental ethnography, and experimental theater, using form as a site for affective experience, ambiguity, and transgression. Kelley approaches research as an aesthetic process, privileging sensorial and speculative modes over purely discursive ones. His projects often involve site-specific production, archival research, and the integration of everyday objects and theatrical constructions within immersive environments. Scientific specimens—borrowed from natural history collections or reimagined in glass, ceramic, and stone—anchor his installations in material history while opening space for surreal and speculative encounters. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; and The Bank, Shanghai. Upcoming presentations include LACMA in Los Angeles and the Global Visions FotoFest Biennial 2026 in Houston. Kelley holds an MFA from UC Irvine and was a 2010–11 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow.

Where I'm calling from was an exhibition of new work by Netherlands-based artist Minne Kersten. Working with the architecture of David Dale Gallery, Minne constructed a detailed and evocative environment exploring the narrative capacity of inanimate objects, and their role in triggering memory in a transportative way. Minne takes a literary approach to her work, blending installation, video, sculpture and drawing to craft the backdrop of a fictional world. Through her immersive installations, she reveals buildings to be receptive to stories and traumas, as she stages situations subjected to chaos, decay, and deconstruction. Minne explores the traces of events left behind and exposes them as witnesses of private stories retained by the walls that surround us. Her work considers the relationship between the real and imagined, the ordinary and the uncanny, and poses questions about memory and its reconstruction. Working across a range of media, she interweaves personal themes such as mourning, loss and memory with the collective domain of fiction, fables, and symbols.

Minne Kersten (1993, NL) is an artist based in Paris and Amsterdam, working with video, installation and paintings. Underneath these media lies a literary approach in which she combines several techniques to construct a world where objects and scenes hold traces of both facts and fiction. She speculates on how we can recall events, memories and stories, by tracing what is lost in what remains. Her work considers the relationship between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the ephemeral, and poses questions about memory and reconstruction. By drawing attention to the act of construction in both our shared real and imagined world, her work offers a connection between intimate themes such as mourning, loss and desire, and the collective domain of fiction, fables and symbol making. Painting and drawings are continuously made during a process of introspection and research. They serve as a form of visual note taking, made alongside her spatial approaches. In recent years, she has used the method of crafting an architectural environment, which reveals itself as a scenography, a film set, and subsequent sculpture. Often informed by personal encounters with spaces, these sculptures provide a tangible terrain to explore how a space can witness or distort stories and events. By staging situations that embed symbolic elements such as the appearance of animals or phantom presences, she refers to ways of how the past can leave impressions on the present. Subjecting her scenes to chaos, decay and disruption, she suggests different outcomes of the familiar circumstance of feeling unstable, losing control and reaching a state of transition.

The Zeppelin Grandstand on the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg is one of the most well-known architectural remnants of the Nazi era. Where the masses once gathered to cheer Hitler, today car races and various leisure activities take place. The film explores the tension between remembrance and neglect, use and responsibility - and poses the question: in a time of rising right-wing extremism, how do we engage with a place built for a criminal ideology that nonetheless remains woven into the fabric of daily life?

Saskia Kessler studied European Studies at Maastricht University and Sociology at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg before discovering her passion for filmmaking. Since October 2022, she has been studying documentary film directing at the University of Television and Film Munich.

Watch with the Weary Ones is a short documentary that looks at the American urban landscape while the filmmaker quietly drifts back to memories of Iran. It places the surfaces of U.S. cities next to the feelings of someone living far from home, caught between two places. The film reflects on the sorrow carried by those who left Iran searching for another life, and those who stayed and continue to fight for theirs. It’s about holding two worlds at once, the one in front of you and the one that never leaves you, and trying to make sense of that weight

Sina Khani (aka Sina Ahmadkhani) is a Tehran-born, Los Angeles–based filmmaker, writer, and editor. His feature debut won Best International Experimental Feature at the Portoviejo Film Festival and earned awards, nominations, and selections at Regina IFF, Toronto International Nollywood FF, New York City Indie FF, and many other international festivals. He recently completed his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and continues to create bold, character-driven stories.

For Filipino migrant workers employed in factories on the outskirts of Seoul, home is both a place they have left behind and a paradoxical space of longing and fear—one that has been swept away by floods yet still haunts their memory. They are constantly being displaced, resettled, and set in motion, their sense of home inseparable from the movement of their own bodies.The sounds of factory machines, fragments of horror films, and mobile phone images intertwine into a narrative that unfolds within the migrant worker’s body itself. I began to imagine a home for those who are always drifting.

Woong Yong Kim studied film directing and contemporary art at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève), Switzerland, and works across video installation and film. He has participated in several artist-in-residence programs, including the Digital Arts Studios in Belfast, CEEAC in Strasbourg, MMCA Goyang Residency, SeMA Nanji Studio, ACC, and as a visiting artist at the Rijksakademie. He completed the doctoral coursework in Film and Media Theory at Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science. He also translated and published in Korean, Exhibiting the Moving Image (JRP|Ringier)

Within the haunting cycle of coffin mass production, human labor contrasts with the never-ending factory stock of coffins. In light of computer-aided manufacturing and the excessive overexploitation of natural resources, Unsold Copies longs for a moment of rest from the assembly line, while mankind continually buries itself in the remnants of a material world.

Stefan Koutzev is a Bulgarian filmmaker working and living in Cologne. His work focuses on narrative storytelling born between screenwriting and documentary practices, as well as the production of experimental films and sound design. His short films including RESTBESTAND (2025), HAUSPAUSEN (2024) or SCHWÄRMEN (2020), have been screened at DOK Leipzig, Odense International Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Stockholm International Film Festival or Rencontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin. In 2026, he's about to present the world premier of his feature debut WHY HASN’T EVERYTHING DISAPPEARED YET, a hybrid, multilingual exploration of belonging, origin and migration.

Gold and Ashes is erected upon internal and external — ontological-epistemological — scaling dualities reflected in the characters but also in the time and space where the action is set or in the world they inhabit. It is structured around a concrete plane and an abstract plane as a reference to, human subjectivity. The project features two female actresses. The concrete plane plot is set in filming locations that provide a backdrop for the narrative with direct dialogues and action — mother-and-daughter, placed in the present time. It conveys a social sphere outlined by complex communication models and conventions — such as kinship and existential quests while underlining the artificiality of a constructed reality — an inhabited drawing. The abstract plane plot is set in a film studio that provides a backdrop for the para-philosophical narrative with monologues and no action — two disconnected entities (not sure if aware, of each other), placed in an unknown time. It conveys a mental labyrinth outlined by relational power dynamics and conflicting human emotions — such as humanity’s history and its relation to planet Earth while underlining the speculation of symbolic and imaginary articulations damaged by the loss of the social, political, and spiritual. Overall, the project unfolds around cognitive systems, societal models, and civilizational paradigms, and uses an approach that acknowledges human evolution, simultaneously outlining human limitations to follow the poetics and relational politics of two grand narratives — [a]naturalism, [anti]eco/[geo] constructivism — which usher the mythology of the human impact on Earth (Anthropocene); compelled by two timeless perspectives: progress and apocalypse — questioning our ability to rebuild and pilot the Earth away from the socio-ecological disasters and showing what it means to appreciate the Earth (but also humanity) as an irreplaceable becoming — a trajectory that cannot be replicated, remade or mastered. Gold and Ashes is a powerful exploration of the human condition in the face of devastation, reflecting Lamas’s ongoing commitment to addressing difficult and urgent themes through innovative techniques that often disrupt traditional narrative structures, creating films that are non-linear, fragmented, or that deliberately withhold key information. This technique enhances the parafictional quality of her work, as it mirrors the complexity and uncertainty of real-life events, where truth is often elusive. In the project she explores the idea of subjective memory and how personal and collective histories are constructed. By using parafiction, she highlights the fluidity of memory and the ways in which stories are shaped by the storyteller’s perspective, as well as by political and social contexts. Gold and Ashes symbolizes the duality of destruction and resilience—the “ashes” represent the remnants of war and loss, while the “gold” signifies the hope and strength that survivors cling to in their efforts to rebuild their lives. Lamas uses her distinctive style to blur the lines between reality and fiction, creating a layered and immersive experience that challenges viewers to question their understanding of truth and memory and its impact in both the private and public spheres.

Salomé Lamas has produced over thirty projects, which have been installed and screened internationally, both in cinema auditoriums and contemporary art galleries, and museums. Each of them gives way to a different social reality, usually characterized by its geographical and political inaccessibility. The artist’s interest in impenetrable, politically ambiguous contexts is guided by concerns and the need to problematize reality that otherwise would not be possible. The web of relations making up the socio-political fabric of her projects is made visible through representational strategies, for which she adopted the term parafiction. Rather than complying with a shapeless meaning of parafiction — for which there is no established terminology — she proposes its expansion and resignification. In her artistic practice, parafiction can be read in the light of its prefix “para-”, in which we encounter various disruptive effects that are vital for its comprehension. Derived from the Latin, “para-” indicates “alongside, adjacent to, beyond or distinct from, but analogous to”; in certain word combinations, it can also mean “wrong, irregular,” pointing towards an “alteration” or “modification”; further, “para-” implies “separate, defective, irregular, disordered, improper, incorrect, perversion or simulation.” In this way, parafiction would be something in which fiction has been perverted, altered, modified, or pushed beyond its point of reference, as opposed to remaining within the boundaries of the category of fiction. It can also be understood as a “simulation” of fiction, pointing to a distortion of the border around what is considered fiction, thus reaching what is on the other side of that border: that is, the world of non-fiction or seeking the “real” world. Thus, instead of fiction being used to blur the border with non-fiction, it is used as a way of expanding and transcending those boundaries. Salomé Lamas departs from the principle that we do not have access to a stable reality. Instead, we have an excess of meanings, interpretations, explanations, manipulations, (de)constructions, and evaluations that go into narratives and systems that sustain and occupy us. Consequently, the need for appropriating the idea of parafiction stems from the questioning of how human subjectivity is formed, drawing on psychoanalysis, with the aim of clarifying and expanding concepts such as real (something that is out of reach), reality, symbolic, and imaginary. Thus, she is led to operate at the border between fiction and non-fiction, employing representation and hypothesis generation through certain meditative criteria and a deontological code relative to what is plausible, assuming consciously the “task of the translator” —comparable to illusionism — and pushing its boundaries. In this context, she draws on distinct non-fictional strategies that include ethnographic research, as well as thought experiments, reflexivity, restaging and performativity, among others, to explore the limits of fiction. This is visible in the development of her working methodology, where we find various manifestations of parafiction, such as scenarios where characters and fictional stories intersect with the world as we are experiencing it. The combination of these strategies, to the detriment of other speculative aspects, forms a sort of hypothesis that maintains a level of accuracy with reality but also questions its authority. Through parafiction it is possible to take a convention and deconstruct it, distort it, expose the impossibility of providing evidence for the truth, to the point where doubts are raised about its validity, yet still producing reasons for understanding it as plausible. Salomé Lamas problematizes both sides of the border between historical and imaginary worlds, and records how they have changed over time, by understanding parafiction as a fundamental translation tool for defining identity, language and culture. Intensifying, exaggerating and speculating on how the world is made sensible, by triggering moments that reveal their fabrication, in a post-truth context heightened by the technological and globalized nature of our times. To reveal this transformation is a continuous and thorough undertaking, but also spiritual, having the ability to relate the individual sphere (private) with the social sphere (public) and so introducing new information and perspectives on our past, present and future. Thus, although conscious of its limits and apparent contradictions, parafiction helps give form to the chaos of life and endow it with significance, in a compromise between reality and its fictionalization.

Through a hypnotic single-shot sequence, we are transported to the heart of a house, where negative black and white unveil an indefinite space between memory and bewilderment. Fluctuating beneath the social veneer, the gaze undergoes a metamorphosis as the house reveals its secrets; the walls themselves seem to whisper forgotten tales and unspeakable truths.

Claire Lance (born in 1987, France) is an artist who uses mediums closely related to human optics. Her projects explore cognition and the persistence of cultural images in perception through video, installation, and photography. Evolving over time, Lance's works often operate in a manner reminiscent of Rorschach tests, revealing what is generally invisible or described as intangible or non-objective. The global city, where scales and dimensions intersect in successive layers, creates virtual, intangible spaces accessible only to the eye. These indeterminate yet familiar places invoke the metaphor and persistence of images that we individually and culturally carry within us as viewers. Her works have been exhibited at the Ofr gallery in Paris, at the 39th FIFA in Montreal, Kurzfilmvoche Regesnburg, Germany, and have been featured multiple times in the British magazine Carpark. In 2023, she was invited by the CIRM (Centre International de Recherche Mathématiques) for a workshop titled 'Maths and Art: Common Creation'. She holds a master's degree in Practice and Theory of Contemporary Art from the Université Paris 8 Sorbonne. She has collaborated with various film directors as cinematographer on set, and commissioned works with press titles such as L’Obs, Trax, Technikart.