Catalogue 2025

A pre-apocalyptic midnight walk takes you through a burning forest to witness a looming destruction. A fire in the forest either marks an impending doom or serves as a metaphysical gateway between realities.

Helsinki based duo Pink Twins, Juha and Vesa Vehviläinen, have worked in the fields of media art, moving image and electronic music since 1997. The boundaries of human perception, immersion and physicality are central to their works. Pink Twins implement their complex animations through parametric design and programming. Their works are performed not only in exhibitions and festival screenings but also as live performances combining music and video projections. Pink Twins have been seen on all continents, and in all kinds of venues from concert halls, festivals, theaters to churches. In recent years, Pink Twins have also made audio and video works directly online, e.g. the sound piece Infinity for Kiasma’s online art collection.

Tales from the Source offers a gaze on the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo to translate a sense of its unfathomable power, diversity and knowledge. The scenery is presented as a character acting as a living entity and inhabited by the symbolism of Congolese traditions. The visual approach borrows techniques from multispectral imaging, resulting in an otherworldly experience with surreal lights and colour. Combined with an original musical composition by Bear Bones, Lay Low, we enter into a sensory dialogue with the landscape, an intelligent, ageless being in constant transformation that challenges our perception.

Léonard Pongo (b. 1988, Liège, Belgium) is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Pongo's work explores the complexities of perception, and representation while challenging conventional portrayals of the DRC with a focus on traditional narratives and symbols, and their connection to the land. Initially trained as a photojournalist, Pongo's artistic journey began in 2011 when he traveled to the DRC to cover the presidential elections. This experience profoundly transformed his approach to photography, shifting from objective documentation to a more subjective and experiential mode of expression. His family and local communities challenged his initial perspective, encouraging him to develop a more nuanced and intimate portrayal of Congolese life. Pongo is renowned for his mixed-media installations that integrate textiles, photography, diverse printing techniques, and moving images. His work draws deeply from Congolese cosmologies and oral traditions, particularly embracing the concept that "not everything is visible." Using specialized techniques including full-spectrum photography that captures wavelengths beyond human vision, he reveals aspects of landscapes and experiences typically hidden from view. His long-term project "The Uncanny" (2011-2017) explores daily life in the DRC through evocative black-and-white imagery that creates a dreamlike atmosphere, while "Primordial Earth" (2017-ongoing) focuses on the land using color photography, textiles, and video installations to evoke a sense of spirituality and interconnectedness. His latest film, "Tales from the Source" (2021-2024), extends his focus on traditional narratives, focusing on the luba cultures and highlighting the intertwined nature of culture and environment. Pongo's collaborative approach involves working closely with communities across the DRC, drawing inspiration from their knowledge, stories, and traditions and creating visuals that align with the lineage of Luba traditions by creating contemporary forms connected to ancestral concepts and visions. His work has been exhibited internationally at prestigious venues including the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, the Tate Modern in London, the Dakar biennale in Senegal, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. In 2023, his first monograph "The Uncanny" was published by Gostbooks, and in 2025 he was selected as one of ArtReview's "Future Greats" by photographer Roger Ballen.

Do you remember the scene in Killer of Sheep (1978) where the kids are playing on abandoned railroad tracks? The scene is set in the Watts neighborhood in California. Director Charles Burnett took the artist Lúcia Prancha to several filming locations from his works around Los Angeles.

Lúcia Prancha (1985, Lisboa) is an artist who lives and works in Barcelona. Lúcia graduated in Painting from FBAUL (2009, PT) and obtained her Masters in Arts from CalArts–California Institute of the Arts (2015, USA). Her work was exhibited at Pavilhão Branco, Museu da Cidade, Lisbon; 19 Crac de Montbéliard; Centro de Arte Oliva; Sesc-Pompeia, Sao Paulo; LACA – Los Angeles Contemporary Archives; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen; Serralves Foundation, Porto; Galeria Dynamo, Porto; Galeria Leme, São Paulo; Berardo Museum and São Paulo Biennial. Her videos were screened at the Cinemateca Portuguesa; INTERSECCIÓN, Coruña; Curtas Vila do Conde; Rencontres Internationales Nouveau Cinéma et Art Contemporain de Paris and, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Currently, she is part of "El vértigo de las imágenes", XVIII Bienal Internacional de Fotografía–Fotonoviembre at TEA–Tenerife Espacio de las Artes and Centro de Fotografía Isla de Tenerife, ES. From September to November, she will be in artistic residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

The Chornobyl Zone - the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history - had been occupied by the Russian troops on February 24, 2022, in the very first hours of their all-out invasion of Ukraine. The Russians had turned the territory of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant into a military base for their troops in an attempt to occupy the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, located just a hundred miles away. They had captured the personnel of the nuclear plant who were forced to perform their duties without proper rest or sleep. The Russian plan was to stay in Chornobyl for just three days: this was their imagined time span for Ukraine’s downfall. Instead, the Russians were stuck at the radioactive site for five weeks, only to see their army collapse in the battle for Kyiv. Most of their illegal activities during these five weeks had been captured by the nuclear plant’s CCTV system, which the Russians had failed to prevent from filming. Special Operation is entirely based on these recordings. This film offers a unique perspective into the inner workings of the Russian military machine in Ukraine - and into one of its most grandiose failures. The CCTV cameras have recorded every aspect of Russian criminal presence at the contaminated Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant - from the gross violations of nuclear safety to the staged visits by the Russian TV propagandists. We have obtained these unique materials - which had never been disclosed to the public before - from the Ukrainian law enforcement as part of our team’s long-term effort to document Russian war crimes in Chornobyl, and to help bring their perpetrators to justice. Each shot of this film is a piece of evidence representing a war crime of nuclear terror. With this film, we wish to make this evidence visible - and by doing so, to expose the profound, and frightening, incompetence of the Russian army.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films experiment with documentary forms and practices of political cinema. They have been screened at film festivals and exhibitions worldwide including Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Doclisboa, Thessaloniki IFF, Dokufest, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), Taipei Biennial, Docudays (Kyiv), Sheffield Doc Fest, Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig etc. His films received multiple awards, including the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for Chornobyl 22. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has collaborated with The Reckoning Project.

Under the butterfly effect triggered by the second wave of reform and opening up of China, a small family found itself caught in a continuous hurricane in life. Many years later, Yang Xiaolong received four letters from his long-unseen father. As a result, the textual clue of "country grows and family broke " unlocked the suppressed childhood memories within him...

Renjie ZHU, director and cinematographer, born in 1992, has lived in the ancient city of Anyang and the metropolis of Shenzhen due to family reasons since childhood. He currently resides in Hangzhou. He graduated from the China Academy of Art with both his bachelor's and master's degrees, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in film creation at the same institution. His work has won the New Wings Promotion Award in Golden Rooster Youth Short Film Season, and won the Qilin Outstanding short film in In Moment Film Festival, and has been selected for the Beijing International Short Film Festival and Light My Fire Youth Film Festival and so on.

“We dream of travelling through the universe… is the universe, however, not within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads inwards. Eternity, with its worlds of past and future, is in us or nowhere. The outward world is the world of shadow; it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present, it indeed appears so dark, lonely, formless inside; but how completely different it will seem to us when this eclipse has passed, and the body and shadow have moved away. We will enjoy more than ever, because our spirit has been deprived.” — Novalis, ‘Pollen’ (1798). Translated and adapted from the original German publication, with assistance from W. Hastie’s English translation in ‘Hymns and Thoughts on Religion’ (1888).

Louis Rizzo Naudi is a British-Maltese filmmaker. His practice explores the experience of the sublime and the constructed nature of visual perception, with his camera often focussed on natural phenomena, landscapes, and technology. He holds a B.A. in Film Studies from King’s College London, where he was awarded the Film Studies dissertation prize for his essay on the sublime in footage of the International Space Station, and an M.Sc. in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where he researched how sublime experiences may lead to increased prosocial behaviours, such as generosity. His films have screened across Europe, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the British Film Institute, and the Tate St. Ives, and have also been used as relaxation aids in hospitals for patients undergoing medical procedures.

A woman performs Butoh alone in her bedroom; a foreigner wanders the buzzing streets of Tokyo; a poet speaks of rivers, pity and ghosts.

Clément Roussier was born in 1984. He is the author of two poetry collections (Now It Is Always Three O’Clock and Fondane), published in 2025 by Derrière la salle de bain, as well as a novel, Sullivan and the Fiery Skies of the Savannah Evenings, published in 2020 by L’École des Loisirs. In Silence and clamour, his first film, won the Grand Prize of the French Competition at FID Marseille 2023.

Kamikaze bird that has embarked on a journey to a savage place of no return. A representation of the state of overflowing violence brought from drug trafficking through the oneiric vision of a marginal teenager recruited by a cartel.

Mauricio Sáenz (b. 1977, Matamoros, Mexico) is a visual artist with a practice spanning installation, sculpture, and video. His work explores the limits of impossibility as an active drive for transformation represented through notions as isolation, confinement, uncertainty and historical memory. He received a master’s degree from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and has displayed his work at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City, Galerie Art Virus in Frankfurt, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, as well as in video art festivals such as Proyector and MADATAC in Spain, Traverse and Instants Vidéo in France, and FIVA in Argentina, among others.

The Spirit Level meditates on the trauma and violence in the troubled Thailand reflected through the artist’s road trips across the northeastern region of Thailand along the Mekong River. The film begins with a downstream river that descends from Than Thong waterfall and flows into the Mekong River and explores the mythic underground cave that according to legend was a subterranean kingdom below the Mekong River where the divine Naga resides in the netherworld. At the heart of The Spirit Level is a frantic sequence of a spirit medium in the midst of possession. This epileptic episode emulates the optic feedback eliciting the trancelike revenant images as the spirited entity registers the medium’s body. Gradually the hallucinatory double images are disrupted by a freeze frame. This suspension of time occurs to commemorate the dislocated spirits of the three anti-government activists whose mutilated bodies were found in Mekong River in December 2019. The three men had been in exile since the 2014 coup d'état, until they were kidnapped by an officially sanctioned death squad. Their bodies were found handcuffed, disemboweled and stuffed with concrete blocks, wrapped in brown rice sacks and dumped into the Mekong River. It is one of countless forced disappearances and assassinations of political dissidents by the state since the 1970s and still ongoing and unresolved. The Spirit Level alludes to the undercurrents of darkness that ripple beneath the surface of problematic Thailand.

Taiki Sakpisit (???? ?????????????) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Bangkok, renowned for his innovative approach to storytelling and his profound exploration of Thailand’s complex history. Through the lens of cinema, Sakpisit unpacks the nation's turbulent past, infusing his experimental films with a subtle yet resounding political commitment. His works delve into the underlying tensions, conflicts, and anticipations of contemporary Thailand, meticulously crafted through precise and sensorially overwhelming audio-visual assemblage. Utilizing a diverse array of sounds and images, Sakpisit creates immersive experiences that challenge conventional narratives and provoke thought. His feature-length film The Edge of Daybreak won the FIPRESCI award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam for its for its “Mysterious atmosphere and rich imagery in depicting trauma and violence, for its capacity of dealing with 40 years of political turmoil through a powerful and hypnotic cinematic journey, and for its compromise with the past in order to confront the present and the next future.” His recent works have been showcased at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, the 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale, the 14th Mercosul Biennial and Thailand Biennale.

Kung ang Makagiginhawa ay Matingnan ng Ating mga Mata (Should the Source of Fulfillment Be Seen with Our Eyes) 2024 Exploring the ethno-ecologies of Mt. Banahaw—how the surrounding more-than-human world shapes and are shaped by cultural imaginations. It weaves together Salvatus’s ongoing research on the vernacular histories of Mt. Banahaw and Lucban, convened from family archives, popular history, and mythical motifs. It looks at several trajectories of millenarian renewal that converge in Mt. Banahaw as mystical and ethno-ecological topos: from a revolution that aimed to encourage the native folk to find their own idiom of religious discernment, a history of marching bands and musicians and their place in a postcolonial regional modernity, to Salvatus’s very own practice of assembly and salvaging that situates us in this shared mystical world, animates in us a planetary political spirit.

Mark Salvatus, a Filipino artist hailing from Lucban and residing in Manila, defines his extensive artistic approach as ‘Salvage Projects.’ This concept, echoing his surname, serves as a framework for his diverse investigations into the remnants of urban politics, the layered narratives of national history, and the ceaseless motion of contemporary life. Working across various disciplines—from objects and photography to video, installations, and participatory art—Salvatus crafts direct and indirect engagements that illuminate the multifaceted outcomes of energies, meanings, and experiences.

Amazon is Elsewhere is a short film that mediates on the unknowability and power of the Amazon for those who do not live within it. For many, the Amazon symbolizes “the lungs of the earth” or “nature” itself. For the indigenous people of the region, many of whom have no separate word for jungle or forest, it is simply home. The film centers around a building on the edge of the jungle: a mélange of architectural styles where trees break through the concrete floors; plants grow in the faux Corinthian columns; and jaguars made from ceramic tiles guard the entrance. AI-generated images express forces at play in both the building and the jungle that are difficult to parse as being malevolent or redemptive. The film is part of a body of work that considers how to represent the Amazon in light of its multiplicity of refracted meanings.

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) work with video, photography and installation to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their work is often place-based and focused on historical research. They have been awarded numerous fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023) New York Artist Fellowship (2016), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2014), the Center for Art and Environment Research Fellowship (2013), and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2008). Their work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Belvedere Museum, and the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art. Sayler currently teaches in the Film and Media Arts Department at Syracuse University, while Morris is Executive Director of Marble House Project. Their archives are collected by the Nevada Museum of Art / Reno, Center for Art and Environment. In 2006, Sayler/Morris co-founded The Canary Project, a studio that produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change. In 2021, they founded Toolshed, a platform for connecting ecological thought and action.

The Italian Alpine region of South Tyrol is not known for its tuning scene, but it does exist. A small group of young men have found each other to express their love of their home in their own way. Their Japanese sports cars glide oddly through historic villages, along the Alpine slopes and through breathtaking nature. GOODBYE REGINA is a farewell letter from the director to his grandmother, who grew up in these mountains. It explores the connection between the old and the new, without juxtaposing the two. In a landscape where seemingly nothing changes, the machines seem to be part of the creatures that emerge from this nature. The result is some kind of nature documentary, a collection of impressions away from the tourist postcard images.

Kevin Sepp is a director and editor based in Berlin. Coming from a humanities background, he is a self-taught filmmaker whose interest in short, visually rich storytelling led him to work in commercial film. Alongside commissioned projects, he continues to explore new possibilities through independent work. Collaborations with musicians and other artists strongly influence his sense of sound on screen and shape the atmosphere of his work. His films have been featured at festivals such as the Berlin Commercial and Berlin Music Video Awards, as well as on platforms like Directors’ Library, Sleek Magazine and Crack Magazine.

"Nii tuli lõpp / And Then Came The End" is based on the experiences of a German Catholic priest, Magnus Frey, in prisoner of war camps in Narva, Estonia from 1945 to 1946. In this film, Siib depicts the locations of the story in Narva in their current state and without people, i.e. dilapidated buildings and winter landscapes. The soundtrack includes everyday life snippets from Frey’s memoirs, such as how prisoners of war were not paid the few rubles they had been promised and had their warm blankets taken away before winter came. And how religious prisoners managed to make communion bread despite the difficult conditions. And how hungry prisoners entertained themselves and each other by remembering their favourite dishes and writing down their favourite recipes. The excerpts of Frey’s diary are arranged on screen with a picture and on a soundtrack with music to create a prose poem of documentary material. The value of such micro-history, both as text and film, is not in revealing major developments or in interpreting historical turning points. Instead, the value is that individual anecdotes and fragments can be evidence that bring history to life and help us to take seriously the suffering and existence of others — past and present. By Teemu Mäki

Liina Siib is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. The topic of her works ranges from femininity and social space to different manifestations of people’s everyday practices. She combines field observations with archival sources, historical accounts and various narratives circulating in the society as well as with psychoanalytic approaches and contemporary art and film theories. The characters, spaces and situations in her works tend to go unnoticed due to their ordinariness or are silenced or ignored. In her multidisciplinary approach she uses the means of film, video, photography, installation, performance, ready-mades, print media and artist’s books. Her experimental documentary videos and staged short films have been shown both at festivals of artists' films and at art exhibitions in the galleries, often using the format of expanded cinema. In 2011, the project A Woman Takes Little Space by Liina Siib represented Estonia at the 54th Venice Art Biennale. Her work has been included in several public and private collections (e.g., the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn, Neues Museum in Nürnberg and Moderna Museet in Stockholm).

The abandoned spaces of a Wild West theme-park, a love hotel, and a billionaire's mansion are brought to life with plant overgrowth and animals, late-summer rain, and the haunting remnants of past human habitation.

Adam James Smith is a British-American filmmaker based in New York. His filmmaking practice spans rural and urban environments across China, Japan, and the United States. Adam was educated in film at Stanford and anthropology at Cambridge, the latter of which he is currently affiliated with the university’s Visual Anthropology Lab.

In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Iran's first-ever women’s newspaper. While they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film. Using citations and image intervention, Razeh-del journeys through parallel histories of war on images of women.

Maryam Tafakory, born and raised in Iran, works with film and performance. Solo screenings of her work include MoMA, BOZAR, NGA, Washington DC, and Academy Museum, among others. Selected group events include Tate Modern, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival. She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago Int’l Film Festival, Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFFR, and Best Experimental Film at the 70th and 71st MIFF. She was the 2024 winner of the Film London Jarman Award.

An old man awakens in a deforested rubber estate and finds himself in the colonial past. A distant old folk song ripples as he falls into the eternal loop of rubber tapping.

Wey Yinn Teo is a Kuala Lumpur based filmmaker. Her works often drift away from realms of reality and truth, exploring grief, alienation and the spectrum of the human experience. Aside from her work in sound and music, Yinn’s debut short ‘Enflightenment’ (2023) won the Audience Award in the Short Waves Festival in Poland, and has continued to screen in festivals including Leiden Shorts, EXPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin and more. 'Latex Labyrinth' has recently internationally premiered at the Ji.hlava IDFF and won 'Best Dance Video' at Eye Catcher Global 2025, Hong Kong.

"I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies. On second thought, maybe it's better to start like this: I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies."

Nicolas THOMÉ ZETUNE (1993, Brazil) is a film director based in São Paulo. In 2012, he founded the production company FILMES DE AMOR. Nicolas' short films have been screened at some of the biggest film festivals, such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nicolas' first feature film, “O Pequeno Mal”, was presented at FID Marseille in 2018. The second film, “O Tubérculo”, had its world premiere at the 27th Tiradentes Film Festival. In 2025, Nicolas was one of the selected participants for Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires, an international forum for discussion and project development organized in partnership with the Berlin Film Festival and BAFICI – Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. He is currently preparing his third feature film, "Invisible Tunnel," a project selected for FIDLab (Marseille, France). Filming is scheduled for November 2026. Felipe ANDRÉ SILVA (1991, Recife) is a filmmaker and poet. His film credits include the features Santa Mônica (2015) and Passado (2020), and the short Cinema Contemporâneo (2019). He regularly works as a curator for the Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife festival. In literature, he has published the chapbooks o escritor Xerxenesky and o autocad de Britney Spears, and currently runs &legal edições, a digital micro-publishing house dedicated to contemporary poetry.

From the Campidoglio to the Zoo is a film and sound work that examines the bridging of coloniality into a postwar Italy drawing upon the Ponte Flaminio, a bridge projected to celebrate fascist aspirations and to provide a ceremonious entry to the city, constructed based on the original proposal of Armando Brasini after WWII. The work borrows its title from an unpublished essay by author William Demby, written as a critique of the 1959 Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers which he attended. The congress, dedicated to the development of vision and solidarity amongst Afro-diasporic cultural producers existed in contrast to its hosting by the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa. The film is activated through a live sound performance recorded inside the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, by Dudu Kouate and Justin Randolph Thompson drawing upon the essence of negritude advanced in relation to the congress and the fragmentary nature of global Black unity. The sound was performed using a range of instruments that are part of the ethnographic collection of the Pigorini Museum in Rome housed by the Museo delle Civiltà. This was the first time that these instruments have been played since their placement in the collection in some cases over one hundred years ago. The work was supported by the British School at Rome and the Museo delle Civiltà.

Justin Randolph Thompson is an artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Based between Italy and the US since 1999. Thompson is a recipient of a 2024 MAP Fund Award, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Italian Council Research Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park amongst others. His work and performances have been exhibited widely in institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and The American Academy in Rome and are part of numerous collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museo MADRE. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.

Looking back on the footage of a hijacking at the Dutch national news broadcast, back in 2015. Aidan Timmer, who now shares the age of the culprit, reflects on the incident. While watching the young man struggle to recite a letter on live television, Aidan gets emotionally closer to the boy who took his father hostage.

Aidan Timmer (b. Amsterdam, The Netherlands) his work is mainly based in the audio-visual field. He has increasingly immersed himself in documentary, essayistic and hybrid filmmaking. Most of his films or works arise from this obsessive fascination for all that attempts to convey truth or verity. He sees his films as essayistic explorations of objectivity and the illusion of impartiality. ‘Tarik en Ik' portrays the emotional and obsessive relationship with a fear from the past.

Project Strings is an audio-visual live performance and a video essay by TraumaZone art duo. The project is based on the book Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway, where the author reflects on how ideas, beings, and worlds are connected together like strings in the game of Cat’s cradle. Taking the string games as the main idea, the Strings talk about the concepts of human and non-human co-existing together in a social system. As the narrative moves forward, the audience sees the solid grid of connections gradually dissolving, and fluidity emerging as the core cooperation principle. The performance consists of reactive live and prerecorded visuals, and the live sound set, that includes a 20-second loop of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a solar panel, combined with fragments of AM broadcasts recorded during an art residency in rural Bavaria. The video essay also includes the shortened version of the material with more energetic pace of narration. Project Strings invites the audience into a meditative landscape where sound and visuals work together, destroying rigid structures and embracing a more fluid, interconnected modes of existence.

TraumaZone is a live-coding duo based in Berlin, consisting of Ksenia Sova, a video artist and Fyodor Stepanov, a sound designer. Their main focus is to politicize the art community by bringing to the spotlight important questions and creating a safe space for discussion. Ksenia Sova (they/them) is a media artist based in Germany. They studied media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany. They work are especially interested in exploring topics connected with alienation, isolation and anxiety of a queer body in digital environments. They use an expanded cinema approach to create time-based art-pieces for personal and group exhibitions. Fyodor Stepanov (he/they) is a sound artist and composer based in Berlin, Germany. He specialises on electro-acoustic works for interactive installations, audio-visual performances and video art. His creative output is driven by notions of transience, non-linearity, and ambiguity intrinsic to sound. The approach he has developed over the past decade combines generative algorithms with bits of radio broadcasts, field recordings, and electromagnetic listening to produce eerie acousmatic soundscapes that slowly develop over long periods of time.

I dreamed that I turned into an animal. I could cross the border freely, through the forest. I entered that land unnoticed — the land I miss and fear at the same time. I met my grandmother, whom I haven’t seen for several years. She didn’t recognize me, but we stood very close to each other, in silence. In the Animal’s Skin explores the Belarus-Poland border cutting through the ancient Bia?owie?a Forest — a protected sanctuary turned into a place of walls, detentions, and fear. The wall not only blocks refugees, but also divides animal habitats and disrupts ancient migration routes. In Bohoniki, a Tatar village near the border, the local tatar community buries refugees found in the forest with quiet dignity — a stark contrast to political neglect.The film reflects on borders, violence, and the fragile connections between humans, animals, and the forest that bears silent witness.

Yuliya Tsviatkova (b. 1993, Belarus) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Germany. With a background in microbiology and fine arts, she approaches moving image as a space where scientific observation meets poetics. Her work explores ecology, memory, and political trauma through non-linear narratives, often centering on exile, environmental violence, and the entanglement of human and non-human lives.