Catalogue 2024
Parcourez ci-dessous le catalogue 2024 des Rencontres Internationales, ou effectuez une recherche dans les archives des oeuvres présentées depuis 2004. De nouveaux extraits vidéos sont régulièrement mis en ligne, les images et les textes sont également progressivement mis à jour.
Maïder Fortuné
Boomerang
Vidéo | 4k | couleur | 13:0 | France, 0 | 2024
La cour intérieure du building Canebière, construit par Fernand Pouillon en 1952 comme vision d’un habitat populaire de qualité. La caméra suit lentement les lignes verticales et horizontales des fenêtres. Des traces d’habitation humaine ponctuent l’uniformité de la façade (linge, plantes en pots). Le rythme se syncope, s’accélère : des mouvements de balancier font suite aux panoramiques, le brouhaha des pas et des voix dans le hall amorce un crescendo. L’écran passe au noir, et la voix de James Baldwin s’exprime en français sur la place qu’accorde la société française aux Algériens. Entre le volet visuel sans paroles et le volet parlé sans images, un fil : l’héritage des luttes populaires au sein de la société française, de leur exigence de dignité et d’égalité.
Performeuse, artiste visuelle, cinéaste, autrice et enseignante française. Maïder Fortuné vit et travaille à Paris. Elle y suit une formation littéraire puis théâtrale à l’École Jacques Lecoq, avant d’intégrer le Studio des arts contemporains du Fresnoy à Tourcoing. C’est là qu’elle rencontre l’artiste canadienne Annie MacDonell (1976-), avec qui elle collabore depuis 2015, notamment sur les films Communicating Vessels (2020) et Outhere (for Lee Lozano) (2021). M. Fortuné enseigne le film et l’écriture en école supérieure d’art depuis 2007. De Totem (2001) à Outhere (for Lee Lozano), l’inquiétante étrangeté imprègne l’univers filmique de l’artiste. Le monde qui s’y invente est résolument artificiel, travaillé par l’incertitude même de la dimension spectrale et mémorielle de toute image. Ses productions ne donnent pas à voir un tout mais le signe fantôme d’autre chose, un reste, une empreinte qui persiste dans le psychisme. Les images que M. Fortuné y convoque s’inscrivent dans l’inconscient collectif, icônes occidentales du monde du merveilleux (Licorne, 2007 ; Curtain !, 2007), de l’industrie du divertissement (Once forever, 2008), du monde du théâtre (Characters, 2008) ou des premiers temps du cinéma (Totem ; Aurore, 2011), ou encore de la littérature, empruntées à Rainer Maria Rilke, Vladimir Nabokov et Virginia Woolf pour Carousel (2015), LEJ (2013), Parnassus Mnemosyne (2015), The Yellow Blind (2015), images qui se font écho les unes aux autres. Tout y est transitoire, instable, voué à de constants glissements, dédoublements, errances, qui ouvrent les représentations à de nouvelles plasticités et plongent les spectateurs et spectatrices dans une véritable expérience de l’image et des procédés que l’artiste met en jeu. C’est la circulation poreuse d’éléments qui fonde et élabore – par répétitions, variations, superpositions – des structures visuelles et narratives non linéaires.
Johannes Förster, Elkin Calderón Guevara
About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks
Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 28:30 | Allemagne | 2024
About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks is a decolonial fable of the 21st century, in which two animals are juxtaposed, sharing a similar fate but couldn't be more different. Places and times merge, identities are excluded; a non-anthropocentric perspective reflects upon the force-migrated lives of the protagonists and the recurring patterns of colonialism. The story begins with "a great exploration journey," which poetically illustrates how the resulting, mostly one-sided trade relations continue to shape all our lives till today. History continues to manifest itself and is embodied in this film through living animals. The peacocks and hippos, both mascots of former rulers, represent our complex (and at times absurd) relationship with the past and present and our inability to come to terms with it. Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks explores the connections between humans, nature, and history. It is a cinematic journey of discovery, in search of a new narrative.
Elkin Calderón Guevara is a Colombian filmmaker, artist and father. After completing his studies in art, he is pursuing a master's degree in Creative Documentary at the UAB, Spain. In his work he is interested in delving into historical gaps and generating polyhedric forms of narration. From the intense reserch and observation of selected phenomena, he seeks to create films that invite audiences into unexpected encounters with a blend of historical, fictional, political, and poetic elements. Together with Diego Piñeros García, Calderón Guevara forms the collective Calderón & Piñeros, with whom they have taken part in film festivals such as the IFFR, DOK Leipzig, Festival Biarritz Amérique Latine, Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin (2018), 20º Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2017).
Daniel Frota De Abreu
Até Onde o Mundo Alcança
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 26:50 | Brésil | 2023
A birdwatcher tries to record the scarce birdsongs in a deactivated mining area, while a team of ethnobotanists faces the challenges of storing one of the largest natural history collections in the world. Scientific practices from the past and present meet in the investigation of a 17th century catalogue of Brazilian plants and animals published in Amsterdam as a product of the Dutch expedition of artists and scientists in the country.
Daniel Frota de Abreu is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice investigates the role of fabulation in the documentation of natural and historical events. Having a background in typography, his works address the shape of discourses, how history is recorded and how documents can be read. His works have been shown at institutions and festivals such as Videobrasil Festival, Clermont- Ferrand International Short Film Festival, It’s All True Documentary Festival, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimünster, Fundação Iberê Camargo, among others. In 2021-22 he was artist-in-residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht) and in 2022-23, a research fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam). He also runs of the visual communication studio Interno Bruto based in Rio de Janeiro.
Soren Thilo Funder
Archipelago (No one is an island)
Fiction expérimentale | hdv | couleur | 37:5 | Danemark | 2023
Archipelago (No one is an island) splashes heedlessly into a fictional exploration of the high frequency trading firm Archipelago and its existence in the strange socio-political, socio-economical and psychological reality of the proliferating internet and lives lived in wireless connectivity. In this business realm, human activity, unfolding in virtual spaces and directed by algorithms, is mainly left to perform the rituals that gives the bodiless stream a body; performing the myths of human ingenuity and dominance; repeating the hierarchical patterns that represent human social activity. The dramatic structure of the two channel video work shapes an archipelago in itself. Every character inhabiting the depicted environment forms an island within herself, literally plugged into a closed circuit; AirPods in ear; screen glued to face. Islands that seem to react upon one another even across time particulars and image frames.
Soren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions insisting on new meaning forming in the thin membrane negotiating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters. Soren Thilo Funder has an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The School of Art and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of the Arts. He has been artist-in-residence at ISCP in New York, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, SOMA in Mexico City, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt and Platform Garanti in Istanbul. Previous exhibitions include solo presentations at Turku Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Tranen Contemporary Art Center, Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art and Den Frie - Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. He was furthermore represented at the 9th Bucharest Biennale, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, the 1st eva International Biennial of Visual Art, the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta 8 and the 6th International Liverpool Biennial. He recently finished his PhD in Artistic Research at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen, titled “Oceanic Horror - or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism”.
Dominic Gagnon
Space Down
Doc. expérimental | digital | couleur | 78:0 | Canada | 2023
Space Down is a feature-length collage film made with amateur footage retrieved on the Internet. It documents the bootstrap of an astronaut community here on Earth who migrates to space in the confines of their homes. The film is a detournement of the COVID-19 lockdowns that renders visible the Earth momentarily as one of the biggest space analogues in history.
In his ongoing quest to explode the film frame, Dominic Gagnon’s flurry of internet collage films not only cull the lonely, shocking margins of YouTube to captivate us with pixelated self-representations of despair, anger, and survivalism, they also challenge and question the definition of what constitutes cinema. (Text: J.P. Sniadecki)
Simon Gaillot
L'Affaire Bajazet
Fiction | hdv | couleur | 121:55 | France | 2024
L'Affaire Bajazet is an open-air, costumed adaptation of Racine's play of the same name, in which the passions of the heart and the stakes of power clash in early 17th-century Byzantium. Loving, suffering and dying are just words here.
Simon Gaillot is a young filmmaker. At the age of twenty, he decides to shoot an open-air film every summer based on a play. In keeping with Jean Cocteau's belief that that cinematographic art is above all a craft, he works, with a constant concern for to establish a relationship of proximity and necessity between a text, a face, a body and a landscape. He has thus been able to adapt, with great freedom, works by Julien Gracq (Le Roi pêcheur), Heinrich von Kleist (Penthesilea), Jean Racine (Bajazet), Robert Walser (Aschenbrödel), Oscar Wilde (Salomé), Fernando Pessoa (O Marinheiro), William Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale), Torquato Tasso (Aminta) and Charles Péguy (Ève).
Christophe Gallois
L'écoute vagabonde
Documentaire | 4k | couleur | 23:18 | France | 2024
Le monde de Dominique Petitgand est celui de l’écoute. Depuis trois décennies, l’artiste crée des pièces sonores qu’il diffuse à travers des disques, à la radio, lors de séances d’écoute se déroulant dans l’obscurité, selon le principe d’un « cinéma pour l’oreille », ou encore sous la forme d’installations déployées dans l’espace, dans des lieux d’exposition. Dans son travail de montage, des fragments de voix sont découpés, isolés, détachés de leur contexte, et associés à d’autres éléments vocaux, sonores ou musicaux. Ses œuvres portent attention au potentiel narratif que recèlent ces fragments de réel autant qu’aux « liens invisibles » qui les relient entre eux. Comment prolonger, à l’écran, l’expérience de ses œuvres ? Comment filmer l’écoute ? C’est à partir de ces interrogations que sont restitués trois moments de création et de diffusion : une séance d’écoute présentée au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy ; un temps de travail autour de la table de montage, dans l’atelier de l’artiste ; une installation sonore, Les heures creuses, créée pour les espaces du T2G – Théâtre de Gennevilliers.
Christophe Gallois est, depuis 2007, curateur au Mudam Luxembourg. Il a été le commissaire de plusieurs expositions collectives d’envergure, parmi lesquelles « The Space of Words » (2009) et « L’Image papillon » (2013), et d’expositions personnelles d’artistes tels que Guillaume Leblon (2009), John Stezaker (2011), Sanja Ivekovic (2012), Fiona Tan (2016), Su-Mei Tse (2017), Jeff Wall (2018), Katinka Bock (2018), David Wojnarowicz (2019), LaToya Ruby Frazier (2019), Zoe Leonard (2022), Tacita Dean (2022) et Dayanita Singh (2023). Un nombre important de ces projets ont été développés en collaboration avec des institutions telles que le Taipei Fine Arts Museum, le Aargauer Kunsthaus, la Whitechapel Gallery à Londres, le Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, le MCA Australia à Sydney, la Kunsthalle Mannheim ou encore le Whitney Museum of American Art à New York. Consacré au travail de Dominique Petitgand, « L’écoute vagabonde » est son premier court-métrage documentaire. Pensé comme un prolongement de sa pratique curatoriale, celui-ci poursuit un dialogue entamé avec l’artiste au milieu des années 2000 dans le cadre de plusieurs expositions de groupe et d’une exposition personnelle, ainsi que de la rédaction de textes et des entretiens.
Nicolás Garcés
Réplicas
Fiction expérimentale | hdv | couleur | 13:49 | Colombie | 2024
In a land of musical rivers and omens coming from the heart of the jungle, a young man overhears a bird's song as a message of his fate. A dream-like contemplation of a man dissolving into a large common body.
Nicolás Garcés was born in Pasto, Colombia, and holds a degree in Filmmaking from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His work focuses on ethnographic explorations and experimental practices in audiovisual media, and has been screened in festivals such as MIDBO, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montreal, FICCI, among others.
Dora García
(Revolución, cumple tu promesa) Amor Rojo
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 95:0 | Espagne, Belgique | 2024
Faites de votre amour une arme. Ce film propose une lecture des écrits de la révolutionnaire soviétique et activiste sexuelle Alexandra Kollontai sur la sexualité féminine et l'émancipation, sur l'abolition de la famille et la nécessité de « changer les cœurs et les esprits ». Cette lecture trace un réseau complexe de connexions entre le féminisme marxiste européen du XXe siècle et les transféminismes latino-américains du XXIe siècle, entre le deuil personnel et collectif, entre une myriade de façons de comprendre le féminin, et entre le regard mélancolique du désenchantement et la demande furieuse, tendre et impérieuse que la révolution, enfin, remplisse sa promesse. (Révolution, tiens ta promesse) Red Love (2024) est le film jumeau de Red Love (2023). Les sons et les images des séquences originales de Red Love ont été entièrement remontés, et un grand nombre de nouveaux documents d'archives ont été ajoutés, qui sont clairement empreints de l'urgence du militantisme tout en retraçant des généalogies historiques minutieuses. Ce film est le résultat de huit années de recherche, depuis les archives Engels-Marx-Lénine de Moscou jusqu'à de multiples archives personnelles, familières, historiques et militantes au Mexique et en Amérique latine. Il s'agit d'une œuvre collective réalisée par une équipe de chercheurs et d'artistes de différentes nationalités. Il veut s'inscrire dans l'urgence de la tradition du film militant tout en traçant des généalogies historiques minutieuses et en se projetant dans l'avenir.
Dora García vit et travaille à Oslo. Elle enseigne actuellement à l'Académie nationale des arts d'Oslo, en Norvège. Elle a représenté l'Espagne à la Biennale de Venise en 2011 et était à nouveau présente à la Biennale de Venise en 2013. Elle a participé à la 56e exposition internationale d'art de Venise, à dOCUMENTA(13) et à d'autres événements internationaux tels que Münster Sculpture Projects en 2007, la Biennale de Sydney en 2008 et la Biennale de Sao Paulo en 2010. Son travail est largement performatif et traite de questions liées à la communauté et à l'individualité dans la société contemporaine, explorant le potentiel politique des positions marginales, rendant hommage aux personnages excentriques et aux antihéros. Ces personnages excentriques ont souvent été au centre de ses projets cinématographiques, tels que The Deviant Majority (2010), The Joycean Society (2013) et Segunda Vez (2018).
Albert García-alzórriz
Die blaue Blume im Land der Technik
Documentaire | 4k | couleur | 75:0 | Espagne | 2023
‘Health is life lived in the silence of the organs’, wrote French surgeon René Leriche in an Encyclopédie Française entry from 1936. Paradoxically, the closer we have got to this metaphorical silence, the more necessary an aesthetic synthesis, through increasingly complex and precise sounds and images, has become. The current paradigm of health technology, where bodies and their representations are sometimes indistinguishable, is the core of this film: an audiovisual study on the relationship between the human body and the latest hospital technology.
ALBERT GARCÍA-ALZÓRRIZ was born in Barcelona in 1992. His work has been exhibited at international events and festivals, including the 58th Biennale di Venezia, FID Marseille, FID Buenos Aires and Documenta Madrid, as well as at public and private institutions such as IVAM (Valencia), the Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), the Louvre Museum (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris).
Philippe-aubert Gauthier, Tanya St-Pierre
Dans une sorte de rêve éveillé - L'invitation
Film expérimental | 4k | couleur | 75:0 | Canada | 2023
Une œuvre d’animation de synthèse s’inscrivant dans une série d'œuvres contemplatives et portant sur l’archéologie des intérieurs. Cette œuvre pose un regard archéologique et architectural sur une ère théâtrale de la décoration intérieure. Exposant une tension fictionnelle presque non-résolue entre, d’un côté, le confort moderne construit et édifié par l’économie tonitruante et, d’un autre, la menace sourde de la nature, du climat changeant et de leurs forces cataclysmiques sous-entendues. Une première rencontre des collages faits main de St-Pierre et des images de synthèse créées en duo avec Gauthier. Cette œuvre a été produite grâce au soutien du Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec et du Grand Théâtre de Québec (Canada) pour une présentation au Studio Telus du Grand Théâtre de Québec (commissariat : Ariane Plante).
Philippe-Aubert Gauthier est ingénieur mécanique, maître ès sciences, docteur en génie mécanique (acoustique) et professeur à l'Université du Québec à Montréal, à l'École des arts visuels et médiatiques. Il travaille à la croisée des arts, sciences et technologies. Il a produit plus d'une cinquantaine d'œuvres en arts sonores et numériques. Gauthier est actuellement directeur associé du Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology. Tanya St-Pierre est artiste en arts visuels, sonores et médiatiques. Elle explore les relations possibles entre arts visuels ou médiatiques et narration. À travers divers systèmes d'altération de la narration en propositions poétiques et conceptuelles, elle déjoue et questionne les notions de représentation et d’artefacts culturels. Détentrice d’un baccalauréat en arts plastiques de l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, (Québec). Depuis 2003, leurs démarches se rencontrent dans des projets collaboratifs. Leurs intérêts et engagements respectifs sont abordés dans des échanges découlant vers des propositions artistiques hybrides qui résultent de joutes autocritiques et d'inventions en duo. Leur travail fut présenté au Canada, aux États-Unis, au Mexique, en Europe et au Japon. Tous les deux vivent et travaillent actuellement à Montréal, au Québec (Canada).
Riccardo Giacconi
Giganti rosse
Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 69:0 | Italie | 2023
Summer 2022. Carlotta is engrossed in recording the audiobook for Walter Benjamin’s short stories. Her sister and brother come to visit her for a few days, and the three find themselves in the small town in the Marche region where they grew up. Gradually, an episode they experienced together two years earlier resurfaces: an act of violence in which each of them was, in their own way, entangled.
Riccardo Giacconi has studied fine arts at the IUAV University of Venezia. His work has been exhibited in various institutions, such as Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), ar/ge kunst (Bolzano), MAC (Belfast), WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), tranzitdisplay (Prague), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). He was artist-in- residence at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne, Switzerland), Centre international d’art et du paysage (Vassivière, France), lugar a dudas (Cali, Colombia), MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, Austria). He presented his films at several festivals, including the New York Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015. He co-founded the collective listening festival ‘Helicotrema’ and the audio storytelling studio ‘Botafuego’. He is Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston. www.riccardogiacconi.com
Mike Gibisser, Mary Helena Clark
A Common Sequence
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur et n&b | 78:0 | USA | 2023
Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fisherman attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play.
Mike Gibisser is a filmmaker and artist interested in navigating the indefinite lines between essay, narrative, experimental, and documentary work. He has presented work at numerous festivals including Sundance, Toronto, New York, Edinburgh, AFI, Oberhausen, and the Harvard Film Archive. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Johannes Gierlinger
Generationen von Bildern
Documentaire | 16mm | couleur et n&b | 102:20 | Autriche | 2024
"We sing a lullaby, not to lull to sleep, this giant baby of iron and concrete. We sing a lullaby so it grows stronger and upon it, incessantly the revolution can walk." A poem as a wake-up call for revolution, or rather a regime-compliant lullaby? GENERATIONS OF IMAGES embarks on a search for traces through the profound transformation processes of Albanian history. In the archives, forgotten places, and memories of different generations, ruptures and continuities become visible, left behind by the transition from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy. Employing an essayistic-poetic approach, the film delves into regime images and image regimes, bring- ing forth hidden narratives and depicting how deeply Albania’s history is inscribed into the texture of its present.
Johannes Gierlinger (* 1985) In his work, he deals with forms of memory, remembrance and perspectives of resistance. Thereby he explores and analyzes historical and contemporary traces as well as constellations, transformations and connections between different eras and political systems. In his examination of the past and its permeation of the present, he explores forms of representation, layers and patterns and asks to what extent their structures and effects are visible and perceptible in today's societies. His work has been showen at national as well as international film festivals & institution, among others Visions Du Réel Nyon (CH), Belvedere21 (AT), CPH: DOX (DK), IMPAKT Festival (NL), Werkleitz Centre for Media Art (DE), Filmmakers Fest Milano (IT), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (AT), EMAF Osnabrück (DE), Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago (CL), Dokufest (KOS), FIC Valdivia (CL), Edinburgh IFF (GB), Antimatter [Media Art] (CA), das weisse haus (AT), rotor Graz (AT), Salzburger Kunstverein (AT), Diagonale Graz (AT). Lives and works in Vienna.
Eva Giolo
Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose
Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 16:0 | Belgique | 2024
Part of the YOURS project, an assemblage of five short films dedicated to Chantal Akerman, STONE, HAT, RIBBON AND ROSE offers a strictly personal and decidedly fragmented guide to Brussels; this idiosyncratic city symphony takes us across different urban terrains and unveils each location’s visual and sonic wonders. Amplifying the film’s elusive, drifting quality are a series of one-person performances involving disparate objects in the city. Playful and sombre, quotidian and fantastic, Eva Giolo’s film is a tender love letter to Akerman’s work. (Hyun Jin Cho)
Eva Giolo is an artist working across film, video, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at Sadie Coles HQ, Harlan Levey Project, WIELS centre for Contemporary Art , MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, and major film festivals like International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, FIDMarseille and Vision du Réel among others. She is a founding member of the production and distribution platform elephy.
Eva Giolo, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Katja Mater, Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat, Maaike Neuville
Yours,
Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur et n&b | 82:0 | Belgique | 2023
A group of artists are invited to be inspired by the work of the well-known, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, specifically her film News from Home (1976). The busy city of New York serves as the film’s main character. Meanwhile, we hear Akerman’s voice reading letters from her mother in Brussels. She recounts daily anecdotes from the home front and increasingly urgent requests for news from New York. A group of artists are asked to make one film together: each with their own voice, style, and starting point. During the working process, questions arose such as: how do you as an artist relate to another film practice, how do you create a collective work while maintaining your individuality? You’ll see no less than five different films within one kaleidoscopic film: Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose by Eva Giolo, Barefoot Birthdays on Unbreakable Glass by Rebecca Jane Arthur, When Things Fall Apart by Katja Mater, Un Âne by the artistic duo Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, and The possibility of being sea by Maaike Neuville. Details such as letters and metros, and themes such as dislocation, detached city life, alienation versus feeling at home, distance versus proximity, and the mother-daughter relationship echo Akerman’s films. Unfortunately, the artists are no longer able to engage directly with the filmmaker, who passed away in 2015. However, this joint work attests to a way of engaging in dialogue with her work.
Eva GIOLO (1991, Belgium) is an audio-visual artist and filmmaker from Brussels. She obtained an MA in Fine Arts at KASK, Ghent and her musical education at the Institute of Contemporary Music in London. In her work Giolo tries to capture familial stories using documentary strategies to make portraits of usually private and unseen interior worlds. Her work has been exhibited all over the worl, and in 2016 she won the VAF Wildcard for experimental film. She is a founding member of elephy, a Brussels-based production and distribution platform for film and media art. Rebecca Jane Arthur is a visual artist working predominantly with the moving image and writing. Her works often revolve around portraits of people and places, and her interest lies in personal stories that depict a socio-political context and history. Arthur obtained her MA in Fine Arts at KASK, Ghent, in 2017. She completed her BA in Fine Arts at Sint-Lukas Brussels in 2015, after spending one year at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Arthur recently exhibited her work at Tallinn Photomonth 2017: Contemporary Art Biennial; ARGOS Centre for Art and Media, Brussels; Convent, Ghent; and Courtisane Festival, Notes on Cinema 2017, Ghent, among others. Recent texts on Arthur’s work have been published in Metropolis M and KORTFILM.be. Arthur works in Brussels as a freelance writer, proofreader, copy-editor, translator (NL-EN) and moving image producer. She is co-founder of the film and media art platform elephy, together with Chloë Delanghe, Eva Giolo and Christina Stuhlberger. In 2017-18, she is working as a researcher on the art-based research project Six Formats on the chapter ‘Screening’, which is run by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein and Ingrid Cogne, funded by FWF-Peek and hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Katja Mater’s (*1979 in Hoorn/The Netherlands, lives and works in Brussels and Amsterdam) practice focuses on the parameters of photography and film from a meta-perspective, using them as non-transparent media. By creating hybrids between different optical media, installation and performance she documents something that often is positioned beyond our human ability to see. Interested in revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye, Mater mediates between time, space, perception and our understanding of them, she records events that simultaneously can and cannot be – holding midway between information and interpretation. Sirah and Eitan are working in collaboration, creating works in the audiovisual field, installation and performance. They live and work in Brussels. Sirah and Eitan’s practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image. In their work they aim to mark the spatial and durational potentialities of reading of images – moving or still; the relations between spectatorship and history; the temporality of narratives and memory and the material surfaces of image production. Their works have been shown in duo exhibitions in Kunsthalle Basel (CH); Argos, Brussels (BE) and CAC Delme (FR); at group exhibitions in Argos (BE); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg (DE); Portikus, Frankfurt (DE); Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR) and STUK, Leuven (BE). In film festivals such as EMAF, Osnabrück (DE); Atonal, Berlin (DE); Doc Lisboa (PT); Oberhausen Film Festival (DE); Rotterdam Film Festival (NL); Les Rencontres International, Paris and Berlin (FR/DE); New Horizons, Wroc?aw (PL); Images, Toronto (CA); 25FPS, Zagreb (HR). Sirah and Eitan are currently teaching at ERG, Brussels. Maaike Neuville (°1983) is a Belgian actress and director. Maaike graduated in 2005 from Studio Herman Teirlinck in Antwerp.
Mathilde Girard
Que quelque chose vienne
Doc. expérimental | mov | couleur | 70:33 | France | 2023
“In Paris, at curfew time, people linger and hurry down the street before going home. In the morning, a person wakes up alone and listens to the messages left for her. At night, a woman recounts the symptoms of a strange illness to a cab driver. The stories unfold and touch, waiting for something to come.”
Mathilde Girard is a philosopher, psychoanalyst and writer and a member of the Lignes Committee. She has contributed to Chroniques Purple, Diacritik and AOC. She is the author of the books: Proprement dit, entretien sur le mythe, avec Jean-Luc Nancy (Lignes, 2015); L’Art de la faute – selon Georges Bataille (Lignes, 2017); Défense d’écrire – entretiens, avec Michel Surya (Encre Marine, 2018); La Besogne des images, avec Léa Bismuth (Filigranes, 2019), Un personnage en quête de sublimation (Gallimard, 2019). She writes for the cinema since 2017 and make her first films: MON PERSONNAGE (2020), LES ÉPISODES - PRINTEMPS 2018. (2020).
Christoph Girardet
Jishin
Film expérimental | hdv | noir et blanc | 8:0 | Allemagne | 2022
Jishin (Japanese: earthquake) shows an archaic-looking special effect for a Hollywood film of the 1940s: a house begins to sway, stone lanterns fall over, an actor loses his grip. Finally, mountains of debris fill the screen. The drama is repeated in five successive, slightly varied camera perspectives. The uncut raw material allows an analytical view of the clichéd and scenery-like setting: the disaster is not due to a natural event but to a precalculated performance.
born in Langenhagen, Germany, in 1966, studied Visual Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). 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 – 2022). He lives and works in Hanover, Germany.
Gabriela Golder
Los Ojos Desiertos (de la série Arrancar los ojos)
Installation vidéo | 4k | noir et blanc | 33:0 | Argentine | 2023
Tear out the eyes is a project that proposes a constellation of works around the gaze, and its political dimension, focusing on the pattern of eye attacks by State security forces. This project arises from the shock of the tragic events that took place in Chile and Colombia in recent years and that have left hundreds of people with eye trauma due to the pellets fred by the police during the demonstrations. It was not only in Chile, it was not only in Colombia. It also happened in Palestine, in Catalonia, in France, in Hong Kong, in Colombia, in Brazil, in Kashmir. Where else? Since when? This method has been evolving since the Israeli- Palestinian confict: bullets aimed to the eyes of protesters to blind them, to mutilate them. At the same time that the devices of police repression increase and are perfected worldwide, the unresolved conficts in each country are strengthened and violence re-emerges, as if it had never gone away. Tear out the eyes, stop seeing, hide, cover, blind, make invisible, disappear. Tear out the eyes question about the immediately preceded moment of mutilation and about what remains after the tragedy. Inquires about the causes, about that violent purpose of generate a blind gaze. At the same time seeks to understand the possible ways to stop the loss of the memory of what the eyes saw: In turn for the possible ways to stop the loss of the memory of what the eyes saw: we imagine the possibility that the eyes return , let the images emerge from the ruins. The eyes return to the bodies, they return with the memory of their marks and their struggles, they return in a gesture of resistance, they return as a possible act of reparation.
Visual artist, curator and professor of Experimental Video and New Media in Argentina and abroad. She is the director of the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (BIM) in Buenos Aires and CONTINENTE, Research Centre for Audiovisual Arts, National University of Tres de Febrero, Argentina. She is also the curator of “El Cine es otra cosa”, the experimental film and video programme at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. She is professor in the Electronic Arts career and in the Master in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts at the National University of Tres de Febrero and in the University of Cinema. She works in video, installations and site-specific interventions. His works fundamentally raise questions related to memory, identity, institutional violence and the world of labour.
Dzhovani Gospodinov
Meadows wait, mist diffuses
Film expérimental | hdv | couleur | 17:10 | Luxembourg | 2023
In Meadows Wait, Mist Diffuses, Dzhovani Gospodinov captures the enigmatic energies of Hosbësch. Ruminating on the encroaching influence of civilisation in its woodlands and the ways in which humans disrupt and alter the intimacies between animals, the film queries the ethics of our intrusion into the natural world. Shot over four years with motion activated cameras and interlaced with Gospodinov’s own fragmented recollections of the woods, the film poeticises the protracted rupturing of a landscape. Moving between the visual and affective modalities of the voyeuristic and introspective, the film is at once a portrait of—and elegy to—Hosbësch.
Dzhovani Gospodinov is a Luxembourgish filmmaker whose work experiments with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Interested in the power of observational filmmaking and its ability to conjure both exteriorised and reflexive modes of storytelling, Gospodinov’s projects have illustrated the poetics of ancient pagan rituals, the erosion of intimacies between humankind and the natural world, and hermetic, monastic orders, amongst other things.
Yaela Gottlieb
¿Dónde está Marie Anne?
Film expérimental | 35mm | couleur | 5:56 | Pérou, Argentine | 2023
Marie Anne escapes from a world that seems to promise her a perfect life. At that moment her trace is lost forever. Foundfootage made from advertisements recovered by the Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires from the years 1976-1983.
Yaela is a Peruvian filmmaker based in Hamburg. Her works explore photography, film and video from montages containing affects, in tension with fiction. Her films have been showcased at the film festivals including Punto de Vista, Berlin Critics' Week, FICValdivia, Lima FilmFestival, BAFICI, Torino Film Festival, among others as well as in museums such as MAR Museum of Contemporary Art, Proa21, and MACBA. She has also curated film programs for museums in Peru and Argentina. She's received awards such as the Juan Downey for Latin American creation (2022), Bienal Arte Joven (2019), CineAr (2023), Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2019, 2022). In 2021, she released her first feature film "No hay regreso a casa".