Collectif Faire-Part. L’escale / The stopover (2022) Mary Sullivan. The Fine Line, (2023) Milica Rakić. Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you, (2021)
Argos, Centre for Audio Visual Arts, Brussels
Crawford ArtGallery, Cork, Ireland
Cultural Centre Of Belgrade, Belgrade Serbia
Nadeem Din-Gabisi. MASS, (2020) Caterina Erica Shanta. En ausencia (2023)
Forma, London, Reino Unido
Lihuel González. Dos personas (Two people), 2018
Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy
Cassils. Etched in Light Rana Nazzal Hamadeh. we would be freer Aarti Sunder. Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes (2023)
LACE, Los Angeles, USA
MMAG Foundation, Jordania
Project 88, Mumbai, India
Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas. filled up, torn open, 2022/2024 Maud Saulter. No Oxbridge Spires, Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons & Fabian Lanzmaier. Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass, 2023 Pınar Öğrenci. Inventory 2021, 2021
Sapieha Palace, Branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC)
Tramway, Glasgow, Escocia
Tromso Kunstforening, Tromso, Norway
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, Alemania
Collectif Faire-Part. L’escale / The stopover (2022)
Argos, Centre for Audio Visual Arts, Brussels
Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they're stopped at the airport because the airline doesn't trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel, where they would stay until their flight back home , they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center.
The filmmakers' testimony - which offers an eye-opening insight into the impossibility of safe and carefree travel for Congolese artists - stands in stark contrast with the seemingly peaceful images of cloud formations passing by an airplane window.
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Collectif faire-part is an ensemble of Belgian & Congolese artists. Together they aim at telling new stories about Kinshasa, about Brussels, and the many complex relations in between. Next to their shared practice, they try to support each other in their personal artistic projects. The group was founded by filmmakers Anne Reijniers, Paul Shemisi, Nizar Saleh en Rob Jacobs when they first started working together in 2016. Over recent years the collective of four has shape-shifted into a larger group of regular collaborators between in Belgium and DR Congo, in which team composition changes with each project. Next to filmmaking take pictures, curate programs, give workshops and organize a biennial performance festival called SOKL.
Interview Collectif Faire-Part
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
Artists are often drawn to the moving image because of its dynamic ability to combine visuals, sound, narrative, and emotion, creating a powerful and immersive experience. This medium allows for a unique form of storytelling that can engage audiences deeply, provoke thought, and evoke a wide range of emotions.
My own interest in the moving image began with an early fascination for film and animation, where I saw the potential to bring stories to life in ways that static images and text alone could not. The magic of film—its ability to transport viewers to different worlds, to see through others' eyes, and to experience complex emotions—was captivating. Experimenting with video cameras and editing software further solidified my passion, as I began to explore the endless possibilities of expressing ideas and emotions through this versatile and impactful medium.
What inspired you to make this work?
Bad political, economic, social situation... My country inspired me to create this work, especially the bad situation of women in my land who are victims of political and production violence today.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment working on a new project related to "immigration” and let me remind you that it is not separate from this film, it is another part of my project.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
In my art practice, there is a strong sense of solidarity that comes through the dramatic use of orange to highlight themes of oppression and captivity. As its name suggests, this choice of color connects common global experiences and calls the viewer to sympathize with millions of women who are in a similar fate, especially Afghan women who make up more than twenty millions of their country. They give, and I, who am one of these 100 million and have experienced the depth of these miseries, have performed this performance with my heart. This feeling of sympathy, without a doubt, calls the viewers to complicity against these injustices and the oppressed of the century.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
As an artist, a democratic international platform like AFI represents an invaluable opportunity to engage with a global audience and exchange creative ideas across diverse cultures. It provides a space where artistic expression is celebrated free from geographical and cultural boundaries, fostering a sense of unity and shared human experience. Moreover, it allows for the exploration of universal themes through various artistic lenses, enriching both the creator and the viewer by highlighting the interconnectedness of our world. Such platforms not only amplify diverse voices but also encourage a deeper understanding and appreciation of different perspectives, which is crucial in a globalized society.
Mary Sullivan. The Fine Line, (2023)
Crawford ArtGallery, Cork, Ireland
This film is a subtle yet powerful meditation on women’s vital but so often unseen, unacknowledged and unpaid work. In solidarity with the work and livelihoods of generations of women of island nations, Mary Sullivan’s cinematic postcard aesthetic setting creates an unsettling antedote to the precarious reality of so many women’s living and working conditions.
“At a time when women’s rights are being attacked from various political quarters and island life is being threatened from climate change, Mary Sullivan’s film underscores the importance of recognising the continual solidarity that generations of women have quietly helped and supported not only their communities but each other both physically and psychologically, and continue to do so’. Dawn Williams.
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Mary Sullivan is a visual / performance artist living on Bere Island, Co. Cork. Born 1968, Sullivan works with a variety of mediums including film, installation, performance and sculpture. Her most recent work, The Hold, exhibited on Bere Island June 2022, documents the lives of twenty-four Bere Island residents throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
A graduate of TU Dublin BA (Hons) Visual Art (Sherkin Island), Mary Sullivan received the RDS Taylor Art Award for her work At Home, At War in 2018. She has exhibited in National Botanic Gardens of Ireland; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Leyden Gallery, London and Uillin, West Cork Arts Centre and Bere Island.
Interview Mary Sullivan
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
I live on Bere Island in West Cork. I went to college on Sherkin Island and one of our lecturers from Dublin had a huge influence on me, the amazing performance artist Amanda Coogan. Performance art (and the recording of these performances) now plays a big part in my work.
What inspired you to make this work?
It is no secret that fishing and foraging has a long-standing tradition in island culture, with many islanders continuing the work of their parents, fishing for income, food and for enjoyment. This reliance on nature and the sea has seen island women take on additional roles to their mainland counterparts. This was something I learnt when This film is a subtle yet powerful meditation on women’s vital but so often unseen, unacknowledged and unpaid work. In solidarity with the work and livelihoods of generations of women of island nations, Mary Sullivan’s cinematic postcard aesthetic setting creates an unsettling antedote to the precarious reality of so many women’s living and working conditions. “At a time when women’s rights are being attacked from various political quarters and island life is being threatened from climate change, Mary Sullivan’s film underscores the importance of recognising the continual solidarity that generations of women have quietly helped and supported not only their communities but each other both physically and psychologically, and continue to do so’. Dawn Williams
Items highlighted are to be completed and overwritten. I first moved to Bere Island and saw the work of my mother-in-law, not only at home and on the land, but also by the sea. Capturing this experience, the performance video, The Fine Line depicts the resilient work of island women that often goes unnoticed while also taking into consideration what goes unseen behind closed doors and in one’s head.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
Solidarity is present in every aspect of the film. It is no secret that fishing and foraging have a long-standing connection to island culture, passing from generation to generation up until the present day. While its origins are in sustenance and livelihood, today they carry a deeper significance, intertwining with the essence of island life and its communal bonds.
Observing the multifaceted roles shouldered by island women, particularly through my own experience upon moving to Bere Island three decades ago, has been a profound source of inspiration. Witnessing my mother-in-law's labour not only on land but also at sea underscored the resilience inherent in island women throughout history and into the contemporary era.
My performance, The Fine Line, serves as a testament to the enduring spirit of island women and their resilience throughout time, shedding light on their often unseen contributions to society and the complexities of their lives. This performance explores the hidden narratives behind closed doors, offering a glimpse into the inner worlds of these resilient individuals.
Collaboration has been instrumental in honing in on my practice. In 2022, my project The Hold saw the coming together of twenty-four island women to rewrite the narrative of what it means to be an island woman. This collaboration illuminated diverse perspectives on island living, deepening my understanding and enhancing the scope of my artistic exploration.
Literature forms an interesting part of my practice in learning about what solidarity means to different cultures and communities. I was particularly inspired by Gender and Island Communities, edited by Firouz Gaini and Helene Pristed Nielsen, which delves into the nuanced dynamics of gender within insular contexts. While this text has provided invaluable insights that have informed and framed my work, to experience solidarity is to learn about solidarity. My most important learnings about the topic come from the small island community in which I live, which has taught me the importance of community and the strength in isolation.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am currently creating a publication from my recent exhibition From the Inside Out and the Outside In which featured The Fine Line. The film was also screened at the Los Angeles Irish Film Festival in March 2024.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
As an artist, a democratic international platform like AFI holds huge significance for me, aligning closely with the message I strive to convey through my work. My work centres around portraying the lived experiences of women and domestic labour, shedding a light on the isolation, militarism and mental toll that’s not only relevant to living on a island, but also to living as a woman generally thus fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities inherent in domestic life.
By participating in AFI, I not only gain exposure as an artist but also contribute to a larger dialogue on gender, isolation, and mental health. AFI represents more than just a platform for artistic expression; it serves as a conduit for advocacy. Through my participation, I aim to spark meaningful conversations, challenge prevailing narratives, and inspire action towards a more inclusive and equitable society.
Milica Rakić. Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you, (2021)
Cultural Centre Of Belgrade, Belgrade Serbia
Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you deals with historical facts and stories that, regardless of their local context, touch on issues such as women's rights, gender issues, participation and visibility of women in public life. Through the leftist-utopian narrative of women's emancipation, the artist develops her own model of criticism, pointing to revolutionary action and the creation of a new utopia, without which there is no art.
The film introduces the character of a heroine, fighter and activist, who personifies the character of the new woman, developed in the struggle. By combining feature and documentary film scenes, along with the off-screen narration, a narrative treats the national liberation struggle and the socialist revolution as something unfinished. The film by Milica Rakić is focused on the issue of female emancipation in post-war Yugoslavia, and on the critique of patriarchal coded interpretations - both in the historical and contemporary context. The observations of the artist's alter ego friend Rakič, which she performs in tandem with the art historian and performer Vladimir Bjeličić, are contrasted with archival materials related to the activities of the Anti-Fascist Women's Front.
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Milica Rakić was born in 1972 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She has presented her work in 30 solo and more than 400 group exhibitions in the country and abroad (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Mexico, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, USA). She is a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and Association of Fine Artists of Serbia, and holds independent artist status. In her work, she examines the way in which language and culture form personal identity.
Interview Milica Rakić
What compels you to work in moving images, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
Milica Rakić: I base my artistic production on a quasi-archival logic that is founded on the opposites such as found-constructed, factual-fictive and public-private, by using the procedure of appropriating objects, texts and photographs. I seek to preserve in the present what has passed, to (re)shape and establish a possible motion towards the future. I don’t comprehend socialist history as something that has simply passed and is preserved in an unalterable form. It does exist, for the purposes of my work, as a construct that is being built and transformed. By virtue of being transferred into the art context, each acquired or found archival document becomes a new document in which I inscribe both universal and personal experience in relation to political events then and now.
The experimental film entitled Red, if you did not exist, we would have to invent you was made precisely according to such a logic, i.e. by combining archival documents of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia (1947/49) and archival photographs, with a constructed experience of COMRADEss Rakič and her alter-ego (Vladimir Bjeličić). It paints a documentary simplified picture the meaning of which is created through connecting the film shots and establishing their interrelations. It focuses on the issue of female emancipation in the post-war Yugoslavia, and criticises the interpretations and codes of the socialist ideology in the historical, as well as contemporary context.
What inspired you to make this work?
The once won women’s struggle for suffrage cannot be perceived outside the context of the most numerous socio-political organisation of the Women’s Antifascist Front. The presence of women in the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia sparked the first radical revolution in the region. With their participation in the war, women ceased to be merely anonymous accessories, companions, fellow activists, associates and contemporaries of historical events, so before winning their suffrage or voice, in 1946 they entered the field of public action, acquiring responsibilities and positions that had not been available to women before. The found archival documentation of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia from 1947‒1949 testifies of women’s activity at the time. These unauthorised records were written as field reports signed with Death to Fascism – Freedom to the People. This was a famous message or slogan in the era of socialist realism, where a difference was visible in the post-war emancipation of women represented as companions, victims or witnesses of historical events. The new ideology allowed women to transgress the defined divisions and limitations, but would soon relegate them to the old ways, though with a changed form and content of their freedom. Women have ruled the domain of the private, and men of the public agency, the fact that feminists were first to address with their slogan Private Is Public, stating that Capitalism had delegated the private sphere to women, and Socialism inherited this pattern. Though the fundamental aspects of Feminism are western, promotion of women’s rights is not an entirely western product, since it incorporates the struggle for a more equal position of women in one’s own society. The feminist emphasis on women’s writing, speech and agency is not popular even today, since the society has been adjusted to men’s art, where every overstepping of the expected boundaries reminds one of the communist past which is not only hard to take, but indeed must (not) be accepted. Majority of women/artists do not feel subjugated in the rule of the democratic patriarchy (they are not aware of their subjugation), even though the new politics and ideology impose their own rules, implying that Marxism and Feminism – as the foundational projects of the Modernist era that we live in – are out of fashion.
In what way is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, or personal lived experiences that feed into and frame your thinking and production?
Milica Rakić: The script for Red, if you did not exist, we would have to invent you, as well as the leftist-utopian narrative on women’s freedom and emancipation, have been partially inspired by essay “Poljubac za drugaricu parolu” (A Kiss for the Comradess Slogan), as well as film WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Dušan Makavejev, a member of the generation of the Yugoslav film directors who were developing so-called auteur modern cinematic language. These auteurs’ films represented a reflection of the social and ideological reality of the time. They were dealing with ideological questions, moral dilemmas of the socialist revolution, the murky daily existence of the Yugoslav working class, dire poverty on the social margins, patriarchal family life, which proclaimed the working class’ rule and liberation of women and the victims of oppression. Makavejev’s critical perspective on the ideologies of Stalinism, Communism, Nazism, Capitalism and Consumerism were influenced by Dr Wilhelm Reich, an Austro-American Marxist psychoanalyst. Makavejev interweaves Reich’s with the Marxist ideas of a constant class struggle in society, as well as with psychosocial analyses of the political specificities of the Yugoslav Socialism.
Nadeem Din-Gabisi. MASS, (2020)
Forma, London, Reino Unido
Nadeem Din-Gabisi’s film MASS departs from Tina Campt’s concept ‘Black visual frequency’ to imagine how a sense of belonging might be found within the alienating urban environment. The film follows a woman seeking connection as she wanders through a grey cityscape and retreats to an inner sanctuary. Contrasting these internal and external worlds, Din-Gabisi explores how collectivity, allegiances and bonds materialise from an individual’s experiences, both seen and unseen.
Whilst on the street, the film’s protagonist tunes into the invisible waves emitted from radios and satellite dishes; when she takes refuge, solitary reflection cultivates a deeper connection with herself and fosters an empathetic relationship with others. Antennas, speakers and transmitters - the physical devices that emit frequencies and share voices - form a visual backbone for the film and symbolise the unseen ‘signals' that characterises various aspects of contemporary Black experience around which people identify and congregate.
Featuring contributions from musician Coby Sey, artist-filmmaker Rhea Storr, and Director of Photography Shivani Hassard, and shot on 16mm, 8mm, and digital video, the film poetically reminds us that belonging resides within, not without and that connection stems from individuals, who together form a mass - a testament to the power of solidarity, collectivity and equilibrium.
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Nadeem Din-Gabisi is an award winning, poet-songwriter and visual artist. Nadeem’s work seeks to reimagine and investigate blackness as it pertains to his experiences as a British born, second generation immigrant of Sierra Leonean descent. Nadeem also looks to examine blackness as it pertains to the unknown, where he explores the depths of human experience to better understand his life and living. Nadeem’s debut album POOL (2022) was selected by Clash Magazine as one of the most slept on albums in 2022 and Jamz Supernova selected him as one of her Class of Supernova 2023. Nadeem is the Winner of the Fred Perry x Nicholas Daley Music Award 2021 and former resident of Somerset House Studios 2018/19. His 2020 short film MASS made in collaboration with FVU has screened at Glasgow Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival and Bali International Short Film Festival. Nadeem’s short blk boy flight (me and my cousins) (2015) was screened at Somerset House and London Short Film Festival in 2019
Interview Nadeem Din-Gabisi
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
I first became seriously interested in the medium when I took a course at South Thames College (Wandsworth Campus) in 2012/13.
It was ostensibly a media course but thankfully it was much more, it was really a film course. We learnt to shoot 16mm film, cut film, and make a found footage film on a Steenbeck. I made my my first films (none which will see the light of day ) and learnt a lot about cinema, from French New Wave to Italian Neo Realism to Andrei Tarkovsky, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Agnes Varda and many others!
Spurred on by those lessons and a recommendation from tutor and filmmaker Anthea Kennedy I got a membership to Close Up Film Library in Shoreditch and started delving deeper into directors who’s centre was not the west. Directors such as Ousmane Sembene, Djibril Diop Mabempty and Alejandro Jodrowsky. I began to see how film can be used as an effective way to communicate complex and nuanced thoughts, feelings, ideas and ideals.
What inspired you to make this work?
The genesis of this work was less inspiration and more conversation. Cynthia Silveria, who had won a curatorial practice award with FVU had spoken to me about being part of a group show she was curating, the working title of the show was, ‘The Time is Now’.
The idea for the show morphed into a film that I would write and direct, Cynthia brought to me the idea of a ‘black visual frequency, how that registers sonically, haptically and effectively’.
I thought about this in tangible ways related to my own experiences of radio (presenting and listening) and how sound, speech, music can be a clarion call to awaken parts of oneself.
How it’s oen through sound, whether that’s external or internal sound I’ve gained profound insights and new understandings of myself.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice?
Solidarity has to come from the inside out. Having a clear purpose and understanding of oneself is profoundly necessary in building external solidarity. I must be clear about what I want and require of myself before asking that of anybody else and that’s something I’ve had to learn. Perhaps the greatest act of solidarity when it comes to making work is knowing when it’s time to bring it to the table. Knowing when it’s the right time to turn a solitary vision into a collaborative one.
Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
There are seminal moments in my life that have changed the way I see the world and in turn affected how/why/what/if I make and think. They have oen been moments of trauma and rupture and maybe because of that I seek to make work that illuminates those moments and seeks resolution.
What are you working on at the moment?
Survival! And a follow up to my debut album POOL, titled Offshore. Offshore is an expansive exploration of my sense of belonging as a second generation immigrant with parents born in Sierra Leone, myself being born in England. What is England to me and what does it owe me ? Can it ever be home, and if not here or there (Sierra Leone) then where is home? I’ve started working on something visually very recently, felt inspired, genuinely inspired in that realm for the first time in a long time so something will come of it sooner rather than later!
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
It means a lot! First of all I’m grateful that my work is being platformed and given another life through a platform like AFI. It means that people can see and engage with my work in the flesh, commune with it in different ways in different environments and ideally find a piece of themselves in the work, that brings them some comfort and peace.
Lihuel González. Dos personas (Two people), 2018
Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Dos personas is an audiovisual project that brings two people together to have a conversation. Zhang Jing and Renaud have never met each other, they only know that their conversation partner does not share the same language, just their need to emigrate to a different country. The conversations that arise are spontaneous, they craft a catalog of gestures, voice tones and linguistic similarities that help decode what the other person is saying and thus try to create a new code to make themselves understood.
Dos personas is a project that proposes a viewpoint to the feeling of uprooting, the difficulties that come up when we try to understand another and what happens in the process of adapting to a new culture. Subtle gestures and attempts at connection reflect a process of empathy and active listening, where each action seeks to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers. This project invites the viewer to reflect on the importance of solidarity and mutual understanding in a diverse and changing world.
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Lihuel González (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1986) is a photographer and audiovisual producer trained at the Universidad del Cine. In addition, she participated in art clinics with Gabriel Valansi, Hernán Marina and Alberto Goldenstein, and was part of the FNA - CONTI Training Program (2013), the ABC Program of the Pan y Arte Foundation (2013), and the Artists Program of the Torcuato Di Tella University in its 2014-2015 edition. She has held national and international exhibitions at Galería Gachi Prieto (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019 and 2024); Dallas Museum of Art (Texas, United States, 2018); Povvera (Berlin, Germany, 2018); UNLP Art Center (La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018) and Espacio Pira ADM (Mexico, 2016), among others. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, among which the following stand out: first prize in the UADE National Visual Arts Competition (2021), Mention of the Itaú Award for Visual Arts (2020), third prize in the 108 National Hall of Visual Arts in Argentina (2019), third prize in the National Visual Arts UADE Competition (2018), honorable mention from the Klemm Foundation Prize Jury (2016) and second Prize National Visual Arts Hall - MACA Museo Junín (2016). Likewise, in 2014 and 2018, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her the Creation Scholarship to fund future projects.
Interview Lihuel González
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
I became interested in moving images when I was a teenager. My dad gave me a HI8 video camera with which I recorded everything that arose curiosity in me, what surrounded me including my everyday life and even my friends. Later, at the Vocational Art Institute (IVA), in the city of Buenos Aires, I began to film animated shorts and fictional situations with my classmates.
It was the perfect ambiance to explore film with others. I continued my studies at the University of Cinema (Buenos Aires) where I discovered that video and photography truly enabled me to create images that could in turn help me visualise, understand and express things that I could not in other ways. Video is a medium that allows me to re-experience things I go through every day in a truly transformative way.
What inspired you to make this work?
Every time I have to present my work in a foreign country or simply meet someone who does not speak my native language, I find myself with the difficulty of not being able to express myself fluently.When I try to let someone know about my experiences, my feelings and even my thoughts in a foreign language, the meaning of it all loses its true force. As a friend told me a while ago, “you become a worse version of yourself.” I've had that feeling for years without being able to overcome it. With this project I try once more to grow closer to all those moments where language and cultural barriers triumph in their attempt to be understood and the words don't end up in a language shipwreck.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
I like to work collaboratively both on my projects and with the works of other artists. My work is almost always based on shared conversations or experiences that can then be expressed in different ways. One example is the project A landscape does not cease to exist even if we turn our backs on it. This work stems from a book of collective poetry where each participant shared their words. Those words were then transformed into a performance and photography exhibit. I am also part of an artist collective called Matriz Utera that works together with pregnant women, generating a support network by the collective creation of clay pieces and audiovisual projects.
What are you working on at the moment?
Right now I am putting together a project called “The beginning and ending of things.” It is a photographic archive that tries to find, through the recollection and observation of discarded objects, new forms in what is generally considered waste.
Through long walks through the city I collect objects, small enough to be able to carry them in my bag, and then photograph them in the studio. Portraits of diminutive materials ranging from industrial remains to domestic and organic utensils. To find something, to retrieve it and to look at it once more. On these tours of the city I also collect words and anecdotes that are part of the archive through written captions that accompany the images.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
For me, a democratic international platform like AFI represents an opportunity to connect and share diverse artistic perspectives. It is a space for cultural exchange, which not only allows me to show my work, but also learn from other artists and their contexts. It is an honour to be able to participate in a space that promotes inclusion through art.
Caterina Erica Shanta. En ausencia (2023)
Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy
Some voices tell of water dreams, wonderful and terrifying omens.
In Central America, water is often contaminated and potable water is a private, monopolized commodity. But it has not always been so. Water is thus a political subject one would like to see shared and accessible, implying an overhaul of the entire urban fabric of Mexico City. The marshes of Xochimilco are the last reminder of the immense Lake Texcoco, which disappeared after the 1960s.
En Ausencia means “in absence". The film was designed and filmed during Caterina Erica Shanta’s research residency in Mexico City in June 2023, at Lingue Sorelle curated by Nina Fiocco for the Italian Cultural Institute of Mexico City, director Gianni Vinciguerra.
In Mexico, potable water is a private good, so its access is governed by market laws like any other commodity. Access to water becomes, in this context, even more a political discourse when it is not guaranteed in an equitable and sustainable manner.
En Ausencia - in absence - is built on the narrative voices of a number of people who joined an open call published by Caterina while she was in Mexico City, in which she asked to recount dreams in which water was the main and recurring element.
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Born in 1986 in Germany, Caterina Erica Shanta is a visual artist and film director. She works primarily on moving images and contemporary art with different media output, and she makes movies based on private archives and collective film-making practices. Her works have been exhibited in art institutions such as Ca'Pesaro, GaMEC, Careof - non profit for contemporary art, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, MAMBO, and screened in many film festivals such as Oberhausen Film Festival, Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Filmmakers Film Festival, Trento Film Festival.
She was awarded with many prizes, among which the MUFOCO "L’Italia è un desiderio", and the Italian Council talent support.
Interview Caterina Erica Shanta
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
I have always had a passion for video editing. During my university studies in art at IUAV in Venice, I worked as a video editor and simultaneously in a youth center that provided computer training and after-school programs for minors. During my studies, I began to realize that I had an editor's approach to the experimental use of archives, especially photographic and family ones. From my personal family photo archive, I began to look at other archives, collecting stories, some removed by time and never told again. Collecting testimonies and talking to people came naturally to me because I was interested in understanding a more social and shared dimension of stories. I thus became interested in the methods of transmitting oral culture, especially trying to learn through dialogues with people and the exchange of views and interests. I launched my first open call for an artistic project related to an ancient ritual in southern Italy. Hundreds of people participated in the project in various ways, and I condensed their stories into a film, "Il cielo stellato" (The Starry Sky). I consider this film to be the first participatory project I realized. For it, I stayed for more than three months in Matera (southern Italy), conducting interviews, collecting images, and figuring out how to recount the ritual that animated the city, documented through smartphones and cameras.
Since then, I have started collaborating more actively with various personalities, even outside of art, such as architects, philosophers, historians, and people who simply want to participate in my work. In 2020, I launched a second open call aimed at people with a migratory background in the city of Turin, with the idea of creating a collective film titled "Talking About Visibility." I asked each participant the same thing: which film do you identify with the most? Would you like to recreate a scene from it in the city of Turin? This project led to reflections on the privilege of imagining different solutions and uses of urban space, sometimes dismantling monolithic meanings and symbols. Since 2022, I have started collaborating more closely with Rawsht Twana, who filmed all the footage for "Talking About Visibility." Rawsht owns the Twana Abdullah archive, his father's, which contains almost 20,000 photographs taken in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1974 and 1992. Together, we have catalogued part of the archive thanks to research funding supported by the Italian Council. We are currently working on a feature-length documentary film project. Parallel to these activities, I have become interested in the topic of climate change, particularly climate justice and the possible generation of new oral culture. A few years ago, I survived a disastrous climate event that hit northern Italy, where I live. Experiencing it firsthand, I realized that the change is already here and now and is affecting everyone. The theme of water, in its broadest sense—from industrial management to the cultural relationship with it—has thus forcefully entered my research with the production of new works: the films "Terre Emerse," "La Tempesta," and "Calante". In various ways, these three works highlight new unconventional archives generated from the debris of climate upheaval. In 2023, I was invited to Mexico City by the Italian Institute of Culture in Mexico City with the project "Lingue Sorelle" curated by Nina Fiocco. With this residency, I believe I have combined various existing tensions in my work in the latest film "En Ausencia," involving the generation and creation of archives, the collective collaboration and realization of the work, and a multidisciplinary perspective on different themes.
What inspired you to make this work?
When I arrived in Mexico City, I had the idea of working on the theme of water, but I didn't know how I could relate to the political struggle that has been going on in the country on this issue for many years. In that context, I didn't feel comfortable making statements, also because I am not in a position to make them and I would never allow myself to delve into such a delicate issue without spending months and months researching it. So, I thought it was better to ask those who live with this kind of water, and I launched the open call. I didn't want to talk about water management directly; instead, it seemed more interesting to do it indirectly, trying to bring out how the mind processes the relationship with this element during dream journeys. Imagine 25 million inhabitants—it is quite complicated to reconcile an open call with the commitment and schedules of all the participants,perhaps only some of them... So, I asked the people who wanted to participate to send me a voice message via WhatsApp, and thus I built the audio track at the base of the work. Even during the pandemic, I had worked in a similar way for two video projects built on audio tracks received via messages, so this technique was not new to me.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
I consider solidarity on different levels, and I would like to describe some that I believe are part of my practice: I think art can be a place of sharing and especially a moment that fosters the exchange of thought and dialogue. Creating these kinds of situations is fundamental for me, even though it is not always easy or feasible. This is also one of the reasons why I work with moving images.
Participation in open calls is obviously on a voluntary basis. For example, for "talking about visibility," I created a schedule of activities that accommodated the needs of each participant, considering work, commitments, and children. From an economic point of view, I aim to pay all operational people as much as possible; otherwise, I personally cover the necessary skills. The operational people are sometimes also involved through open calls, and I therefore seek to obtain adequate work budgets to pursue this goal. Furthermore, when I conduct workshops or labs, each participant is actively involved in creating the work (there is always a contribution from each person), so it is the structure of the workshop that defines the resulting work. At the base of my operations, there is a varied network of people that is always expanding and fluid, to make the projects as shared as possible. I try to spend long periods in the places where I work. For example, with Rawsht Twana, for the cataloguing of the Twana archive, I worked with him in Turin, where I temporarily moved, for almost a year every day. For "Terre Emerse," I collaborated with architect Antonio Angelucci, with whom we explored some aquatic territories for several months, culminating in a workshop with middle schools. For a work on an audio track "Intersections: for a film without images," I involved the association Save the Children, active in the northern outskirts of Milan, etc.
Thus, my works, depending on the context and contingency of the project, are realized in different media outputs: video, writing, photography, audio tracks, drawing, etc.
What are you working on at the moment?
In progress: currently, I am working on parallel projects: I am writing a workshop for an high school in my city, Pordenone, about the figure of Alberto Basaglia (who in Italy enabled the reform of the psychiatric system with the closure of internment structures in 1970s); I am following and developing the dissemination of the open call Water Dreams, which continues the idea behind En Ausencia, with the creation of the archive of water dreams (info here: http://www.caterinaericashanta.it/projects/open-call-waterdreams). I am accompanying the archive with a constantly growing modular draw that incorporates some recurring elements of the dreams. I started sketching this draw upon my return from Mexico: a modular graphite drawing, rendered literally as a mirror image, which can potentially grow “infinitely" (cf. a similar technique here: http://www.caterinaericashanta.it/works/calante); thanks to the open call Water Dreams, I am creating and activating a network of collaborations with other artists on the theme of dreams with the aim of creating a community of dreamers. The project of archiving oral memories in the areas of the UNESCO Dolomites, curated and supported by Dolomiti Contemporanee, Gianluca D'Incà Levis, will last for two years.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
As an artist who also works with moving images, I often notice, perhaps especially in my country, that this medium is somewhat undervalued or underestimated. Let me explain further: I appreciate when particular attention is given to the professionalism surrounding the design, production, and exhibition of a moving image work. I also particularly value the emphasis on exhibition details; for example, displaying a video is not simple, it's not just a matter of setting up a projector and two speakers, but it requires conceptualization and planning.
Sometimes, ideal conditions are rare. Therefore, I believe it's important to create a network of individuals interested in valorizing this type of artwork, who want to draw attention to moving images, even by hybridizing different types of exhibitions, including festivals, especially in an attempt to attract diverse audiences. To me, it's an excellent challenge, the idea of taking a moving image work, originating from one context and conceived in a certain way, adapting it to be shown elsewhere and understanding how relationships change. I find it extremely enriching, almost magical, because moving images are a fluid medium. Personally, I experienced this strong sensation when I screened "The Starry Sky" at the National Cinematheque in Mexico City, for an audience distant from the one depicted in the film's popular festival scene. Yet, connections were forged, and likeminded sensibilities reacted, leading to conversations even after the screening. Short Artist Biography (including place and date of birth) with exhibition history: Born in 1986 in Germany, Caterina Erica Shanta is a visual artist and film director. She works primarily on moving images and contemporary art with different media output, and she makes movies based on private archives and collective film-making practices. Her works have been exhibited in art institutions such as Ca’Pesaro, Cineteca National de CDMX, MART, GaMEC, Careof - non profit for contemporary art, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, MAMBO, and screened in many film festivals such as Oberhausen Film Festival, 30-70 International Short Film Festival, Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Filmmakers Film Festival, Trento Film Festival. She was awarded with many prizes, among which the recent MUFOCO "L’Italia è un desiderio", and the Italian Council talent support.
Cassils. Etched in Light
LACE, Los Angeles, USA
Audiences of Etched Light encounter the ongoing political realities of transgender rights in America. Through the vision and direction of Cassils, a Transgender artist, viewers are guided through a visual and sonic performance that aims to combat these oppressive systems through the creation of a large-scale cyanotype. The performance took place on Trans Day of Visibility (March 31, 2024) at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Cassils chose this location to engage with the history of the site as a platform for countless past activists. Over 100 performers gathered together and were instructed to lie down on four large canvases in choreographed positions. These canvases were then subsequently transformed into cyanotypes with the imprints of the performers’ bodies left behind. The use of cyanotypes provided Cassils space to elaborate on the history and impact of photography whilst commenting on the power to deny the voyeuristic gaze often imposed on Trans bodies. By including performers from across the country and around the world, this project cultivated community and networks that will endure through times of systemic failure. By lying down together, the performers embraced their strength and care for one another, creating a powerful symbol of solidarity.
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CASSILS (Los Angeles/ NYC) is a Canadian transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils' art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, and empowerment. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils' work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.
Cassils currently has a solo exhibitions at Walter Phillips Gallery Banff Center for Arts and Creativity (AB) and an upcoming solo at SITE Santa Fe (NM). Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester (UK); Station Museum of Contemporary Art (TX);, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts(AU); Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (NYC); Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PA); School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA); Bemis Center (OH); MU Eindhoven, (NL).
Cassils’s work has been featured at the Marina Abramović Institute Takeover at Southbank Centre, London, UK; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, AZ; Oakland Museum of California, CA; Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany; MUCEM, Marseille, France; Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany; MUCA Roma, Mexico City, Mexico; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; and Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica. Cassils’s performances have been featured at The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; The National Theatre, London, UK; ANTI Contemporary Performance Festival, Kuopio, Finland; Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria; Dark Mofo, MONA, Hobart, Tasmania; and Queer Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia. Cassils’s films have premiered at Sundance International Film Festival, Park City, UT; OUTFest, Los Angeles, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art, London, UK; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; M+, at West Kowloon, Hong Kong, China; and Outsider Festival, Austin, TX for Early Career Retrospective: Cassils.
Cassils is the recipient of the USA Artist Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist, a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, Creative Capital Award, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, the National Creation Fund and Visual Artist Fellowship from the Canada Council of the Arts. Cassils’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired, The Guardian, Art Forum, and academic journals such as Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Places Journal, and October. Cassils is the subject of the monograph Cassils, published by MU Eindhoven in 2015; and is the subject of a new catalog published by The Station Museum of Contemporary Art.
Cassils is an Associate Professor in Sculpture and Integrated Practices at PRATT Institute.
Interview Cassils
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
I am a visual artist who works in live performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and film. I choose mediums based on their capacity to best communicate the message at hand. Film can expand the ephemeral nature of performance to a larger audience. I have always been fascinated with how moving image can be used alongside performance art to enhance the message of the live act through the use of framing, sound design, and light quality.
What inspired you to make this work?
I believe art can be used as a tool for social change. In a moment of heightened global violence against the trans community, I wanted to create a work for and by the community to bolster us and show that our assertion and presence is powerful and beautiful.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
Trans people are part of a continuum of disenfranchised and oppressed communities who work in solidarity to liberate ourselves from systems and regimes that deny us our humanity. We know true liberation requires the liberation of all people. My work is created by a queer, trans, and non-binary-led team whose members’ subjectivities cut across race and ethnic lines. This work is an act of solidarity where artists from across the nation, from a variety of disciplines (film, photography, contemporary dance, music), come together to focus their attention on trans liberation.
Globally LGBTQI+ lives are at stake. Being queer is still a crime in over 67 countries. I express collective solidarity and liberation for all people currently fighting oppression, including those in Palestine, Iran, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Nagorno-Karabakh.
What are you working on at the moment?
A major solo exhibition opening November 15th at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico.
Artists have a gift to manifest change on a subconscious level. In a moment of heightened polarization and when words fail us, showing and sharing art internationally provides an urgent and much-needed form to share and proliferate artistic tactics and give inspiration to each other.
Rana Nazzal Hamadeh. we would be freer
MMAG Foundation, Jordania
we would be freer (بنكون اكتر احرار) is a short film reflecting on the relationship between native plants and peoples living under settler-colonialism. Through storytelling, the film looks at the sumac plant as a medicine, a spice, a dye, and more. Known for its zesty taste and bright colour, different varieties of sumac are found around the world. In particular, staghorn sumac is native to parts of Turtle Island, and tanner’s sumac to the eastern Mediterranean. Weaving between the voices of two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, we would be freer invites you to contemplate the role of the sumac plant in two occupied lands that lie far apart. Mimicking the progression of the plant’s flowers from yellow to green to red, the short film is a cyclical reflection on connection to land, sustainability, and wild plants.
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Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, memory, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework. Rana holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and finds herself between Ramallah and Ottawa.
Aarti Sunder. Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes (2023)
Project 88, Mumbai, India
Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes se basa en conversaciones con trabajadores de Amazon MTurk y su relación con la política de la plataforma Mechanical Turk, explorando los diversos niveles de transparencia y opacidad que configuran su funcionamiento. Centrado en los procesos de backend de la inteligencia artificial y el aprendizaje automático, en esta obra Aarti Sunder investiga las relaciones entre lo analógico, lo digital y lo terrestre. ¿Qué tipo de trabajo (humano) es necesario para el funcionamiento fluido de una automatización? ¿Quién realiza este trabajo en el backend, dónde tiene lugar y qué implica? Un enfoque secundario es la exploración de la naturaleza subjetiva de la recopilación, procesamiento y anotación de datos, junto con las infraestructuras materiales de las que depende. En ausencia de constantes fijas y redes de seguridad, la abstracción emerge como una herramienta importante y necesaria.
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Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India (Chennai). She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded plaftorm politics. Aarti published Pla$orm Politics - Within, Above and Under, a short set of contributions that considered different readings into the idea of the pla$orm. Ideas ranged from contemporary philosophy to online niche spaces, to education, AI/labour, and the future of gig work. Currently she is working on technology and its relationship with the spiritual, where those overlaps become a mode of governance and what kinds of visuals are born out of that relationship.
Aarti has exhibited her work at Hayy Jameel, the Singapore Biennale 22, 1ShanthiRoad, Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Insitute, Kunstverein Leipzig, BauhausImaginista, Alserkal Avenue, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj, Akademie Der Kunstand Sharjah Art Foundation amongst others. Recent screenings of her work include the 67th BFI London Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2023. Currently her work is being shown at the Albertinum - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany.
Interview Aarti Sunder
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
My entire research about scalable online marketplace labor has had many forms to it until now – two films (of which you are seeing one), a series of prints. I am putting together a book on expanded platform politics, a workshop on crowdsourcing and a series of short conversations in the coming year as a commission for the Singapore Biennale. The reason I mention this is because I am well aware that the film medium (for this particular project) can only do so much, and that a lot of the nuances of my research will not be seen here. In so far as you will see Ghost Cut (only), the moving-image medium was the most effective way to tell this particular part of the story. Since I was already working with recording interviews, placing high paying audiovisual HITs and forming an oral narrative, a lot of the creative choices I made in the film follow a scalar logic of some kind (often recursive). For instance, in the opening of the film you will hear a woman speak in Hindi, describing her room while taking a 360-degree video of it, which was then converted into a GAN video. It would not be very far-fetched to suggest that perhaps she played a part in training the algorithm that allowed for that to take place. Similarly, we see the usage of predictive text applications that are often wildly incorrect/not (yet) well trained, which is in fact learning as it ‘hears’ (also probably trained on platforms like Mturk). When we get to the bureaucratic interface of Mturk, I was lucky to have someone allow me to view their screen and record it, and even do HITs together. For the film, I chose to show a few HITs that best show the nature of work, the abstraction of it, how opaque as well as transparent as it can be at times. The audioscape is also an important part of the film where animal, mechanical, human, underground and skyscapes are woven into forming a narrative of a repetitive and rhythmical abstract machine. In general, the moving image as a medium has a lot to offer that other kinds of image cannot (or maybe can do differently). The intricacies of crafting at the edit table, moving second by second and shaping an entire story within those cumulative seconds is something I cherish and spend much time over. I first came to film in 2017 in a work called How Would we Known It If We Couldn't Feel It where it was exactly this process during the edit that intrigued me. Through the edit, I tried playing with emerging see-sawing patterns, moving in and out of spirals of acute self-affirmation and negation: the cut of the film, the stitching together and the overlaying of precise sound allowed for a dance that I had not known till then and have since carried with me through all my moving image projects.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
In my own practice, I have a keen interest in looking at how individuals use, understand and live with technologies, platforms, and digital tools. So, I spend a lot of time talking to people embedded in different economies and spaces. One aim is to work with subjective evidence at the individual scale: how does someone feel about something? Why do they think that? What can be gleaned from this?
Another aim to is try and constantly re-construct the idea that site-specificity does not negate globalized networked economics. And the third aim is to remember to keep listening, care and engage with people and other living things as a form of practice. This method of working has helped me become cognizant of how people who live in contexts and with a different set of priorities work, live, dream and think. That in turn has help learn immensely about methods of care, listening and empathizing with people.
What are you working on at the moment?
From Infra Earth To Extra Sky is a project that revolves around an investigation of the organism, the machine and their environments that lie at the center of infrastructures of technology. The work will feature an extensive soundscape led by three stories - one of an elephant, the other of a snail and the third of a coconut - and will be punctuated by video, drawings, paintings, archival footage and text. It is an installation that we would like the audience to walk though. The work will investigate what it means to ‘view exponentially’, and experience 'reverse vertigo' so that we can consider ‘falling upwards’ and ‘a view from outside’. The premise of the project rests on communication that already takes place between the layers that exist within the earth (underwater, underground, terrestrial, the sky) and outside of it (into the cosmos). The nature of this communication is partly human-made and intentional, partly accidental and partly inevitable. The work will become a map that tries to chart out these routes of communication. This map is also partly intentional, partly accidental and partly inevitable and exists like a plan. A plan is an architectural drawing, a future telling and a method for action.
The movement from Infra Earth to Extra Sky it is also an announcement of sound and time in motion, a proto-animation of what is to come through re- contextualising words like invisibility and infinity through the lens of technology and its apparatus. These investigations will center itself around the organism within capital - the fully governed organism, the partially governed organism, and the organism refusing to be governed. To begin with we will consider render, pixel, gravity, short circuit, navigation and explore what kinds of soundscapes they generate. A long scroll-like painting will be at the center of the install, where the horizontal roll imitates a time-line for both image and sonic movement. What sound accompanies a still but scrolling image on paper that has a progression and directs the movement of the viewer?
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
The fact that there is a platform like AFI that allows for moving image work to be disseminated across the world is of great importance and needs to be held on to. Any work that is made, needs to be viewed and the lack of that can be extremely despairing for the artist. AFI feels like a space where this can be bridged so that artists can continue working with rigor and precision.
Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas. filled up, torn open, 2022/2024
Sapieha Palace, Branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC)
filled up, torn open stands at the intersection of the familiar and the taboo. The familiar is highlighted through repeated references to pop culture, contemporaneity in both its physical and online forms, and religious iconography. The taboo appears in the way these disparate yet corresponding elements converge - through the sensual, intimate, and sometimes violent bodily proximity of the characters that occupy the mise en scène. Nameless and discontinuous, they glide through the narrative with an obscureness that mirrors the fragmentary nature of the film itself. What unites them is the force of desire, the search for limit experiences that would surpass, even if for a brief moment, the constraints of their physical bodies. In the resulting fever dream-like narrative, the status quo of the rational world breaks apart and, in its stead, new radical imaginaries emerge.
Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas’ work has long captivated us with its intricate narrative structures, a characteristic clearly demonstrated in filled up, torn open (2022/2024). The film pulsates with a rich tapestry of imagery, ranging from 3D renders to AI animation and found footage, while also drawing on themes of religious mythology, contemporary culture, internet trends, and pop music. Its algorithmic structure resonates in today’s visually saturated context, yet rather than promoting passive engagement, this blend of diverse sources elicits an active sensory reaction. The carnal and sensual motifs, expressed through performances that anchor the story, further amplify this response, and is precisely how the film aligns with this year’s theme of solidarity. That is, by highlighting the necessity of active engagement in collective worldbuilding, specifically proposing sensory unification as a compelling method to achieve this goal.
Povilas Gumbis, curator, Sapieha Palace:
As a newly established branch of Vilnius’ Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Sapieha Palace is thrilled to join the AFI programme. We selected Deividas’ film due to its embrace of discomfort and the exploration of possibilities beyond it. With Sapieha Palace being at the intersection of cultural heritage and contemporary art, we must recognize the comfortable and the uncomfortable aspects both history and contemporaneity bring, and dare to venture into discomfort to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the whole.
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Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas (b. 1996, Chicago, USA) is a Lithuanian visual artist living and working between Berlin and Vilnius. Aukščiūnas received his MA in contemporary art practice from the Royal College of Art (UK) in 2022 and a BA in film from the University of Westminster (UK) in 2017. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Todestrieb at Generation & Display, London (2024), Escapismus at Kunstpunkt, Berlin (2024), Surface Tension at Des Bains, London (2024), Shells of the Self at Crash Club, Warsaw (2024), Flashbang at Vilnius Higher Education Institution (2023), Collective Healing Youth Club (ACT I) at Meno Parkas Gallery, Kaunas (2023), Audra at Mykolas ilinskas Art Gallery, Kaunas (2023), Soft When Warm at Guts Gallery, London (2023), Spaces at Composers House, Vilnius (2021), Everything Forever at Sissy Club, Marseille (2021). Aukščiūnas was selected as one of the CIRCA PRIZE class of 2023 finalists with the video piece Collective Healing Youth Club (2023). In 2021 he received the JCDecaux award from the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) for his film tight grip, it makes me feel safe (2021).
Interview Deividas Vytautas Auksciunas
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
My initial attraction to the medium, as is likely the case for many, is fairly mundane, yet deceptively so. I remember when I was still in high school, I watched Dogtooth (2009), a film by Yorgos Lanthimos. At the time, I don’t think I fully grasped what the film was about, but regardless, it deeply affected me – somehow shifting the way I felt, the way I perceived the world around me. This powerful experience, through which a work of art has the potential to open up and alter one's sense of reality, initiated my interest in filmmaking and later art.
What inspired you to make this work?
There wasn't a singular moment of inspiration that sparked the creation of this film. My intention was to construct a sculptural object through the medium of film, gathering a variety of seemingly disconnected elements as the materials for my construction process. Key inspirations included global political events, personal experiences of intimacy, the contemporary reality of social life and its online extension, everyday conversations, novels, poetry, pop culture, and, of course, religion.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice?
Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
Solidarity in my artistic practice is enacted through the recognition of the undeniable power of collective energy—a transgressive and transcendental force with the potential to shatter the linearity of the socially constructed present. During the production of filled up, torn open, I delved into the parallels between collective religious experiences and hedonistic pursuits. Church sermons and rave culture serve as prime examples of these experiences, illustrating how in both collective spirituality, violence, and desire can become reality altering forces. A key text that has influenced my research and practice is Georges Bataille's Eroticism.
What are you working on at the moment?
Earlier this year, my long-time collaborator Gloria Viktoria Regotz and I initiated a duo practice focused on performance art. We have been busy presenting performances in Berlin and London over the past few months and are developing new works for shows throughout Europe this summer. In my individual practice, I have been researching and developing a new film piece, as well as preparing for an upcoming solo show in Vilnius, scheduled for December 2024.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
A democratic international platform like AFI offers a crucial space for artists to connect, share, and develop beyond geographical and cultural barriers. For me, it means engaging with a diverse array of perspectives and artistic practices, enriching my own work, and nurturing a global artistic community. It also provides an opportunity to showcase my work to a broader audience, gain exposure, and collaborate with other creatives dedicated to artistic innovation and expression. Ultimately, AFI embodies the spirit of inclusivity and dialogue, which are essential for the evolution of contemporary art.
Maud Saulter. No Oxbridge Spires,
Tramway, Glasgow, Escocia
In No Oxbridge Spires, the artist Maud Sulter follows her mother, her aunt and her daughters on a meander through the Gorbels an area in south Glasgow, on the edge of the Clyde river estuary that threads through the city and its history as a major shipping and shipbuilding port. The figures linger on their way, the adults moving slowly with age through long-familiar spaces, the children inquisitive as they encounter the neighbourhood where their mother grew up. The film offers a geography and memory map of an area imbued with history and recollection.
The small group move through an urban landscape marked by housing in decline, shuttered shops, constant traffic, long roads lead interminably into the distance. The film comes to rest at the tenement block (apartment house) once home to the artist, her mother, and her grandfather, scheduled for demolition in plans to transform an area long-known for its poverty and deprivation, far from the elite education and historic buildings of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. After a short passage focused on the act of walking, on footprints on broken sidewalks, the soundtrack becomes the artist’s voiceover of her short story, “No Oxbridge Spires” (1989). The film offers a journey through complex layers of (auto) biography, history, story, family connections, and diaspora that situate black female experience within the politics of place and reflections on working class solidarity, the voiceover concluding, “And it made me wonder about how communities are lost. No Oxbridge Spires for us, no ancient relics carved in stone. No permanence”.
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Maud Sulter Born Glasgow, Scotland, UK (1960–2008) was an award-winning artist and writer, cultural historian, curator and gallerist of Ghanaian and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in the UK.
Throughout her career and across different media, Maud Sulter interrogated the representation of black women in the histories of art, the media and photography, investigating the complex experiences of the African diaspora in European history and culture over the past six hundred years
"This whole notion of the disappeared, I think, is something that runs through my work. I’m very interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly black women’s experience and black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalized. So that it’s important for me as an individual, and obviously as a black woman artist, to put black women back in the centre of the frame – both literally within the photographic image, but also within the cultural institutions where our work operates."
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
Maud Sulter first began to work with moving image in the late 80s, at first a series of unproduced screenplays such as Hysteria 1990, before creating a number of video works, including No Oxbridge Spires), and Plantation (1994). And My Father’s House (date tbc). She continued to rite screen plays and afounded the production company Gallus Pictures.
What inspired you to make this work?
Maud was inspired by her personal history and biography exploring an expanded notion of what defines a community, and an ancestry. One that in Sulter’s case was already in a state of erasure, at threat both through the forgetting and rewriting of history, with its tendency to ignore and leave unwritten the story of working class and POC experience, and from the bulldozer, the dreaded arc of the town planner, and their ‘reshaping’ of Glasgow’s Gorbals area where Sulter and her maternal family grew up.
Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons & Fabian Lanzmaier. Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass, 2023
Tromso Kunstforening, Tromso, Norway
Maria Simmons and Fabian Lanzmaier, focusing on peatlands and their interpretation through various recording and 3D computing technologies. Through the use of photogrammetry, a technology that relates to satellite mapping and archiving of anthropocentric spaces and monuments, the biotope is interpreted bit by bit in an intimate, close-up interaction. The work explores specific peatlands in Finland, Norway and Canada from various perspectives, decentralizing the human experience and focusing on the idea of natural landscapes as sources as opposed to resources.
The text in the voice over is based on research, myths and field notes from encounters with peatlands. It is inspired by texts written by Anna Tsing, Karen Barad and Espen Sommer Eide, from the books ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ and 'Spectres 1: Composing Listening/Composer L'ecoute'.
The audio consists of edited field recordings from the physical peatlands as well as sounds produced by synthesizers. The audio is done by Lanzmaier, the voice over by Simmons, text written by Simmons and Bjørnaali, the photogrammetry, animation and editing by Bjørnaali, including some footage captured by Simmons.
In the video, the bog is referred to as a ‘mire’, echoing its Norwegian name ‘myr’.
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Fabian Lanzmaier is a musician and sound artist living in Vienna. In his often collaborative works, he mixes sound and other media such as performance, sculptural elements, light, and video. In his live performances and compositions he uses audio synthesis to explore aspects of texture and structure of sound as well as its presence within space. In his recent work he is experimenting with perception and ideas of natural / artificial sounds, fluid and ambiguous environments.
Maria Simmons is a Canadian symbiontic artist who investigates potentialized environments through the creation of hybrid sculptures and installations. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, grows yeast, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself.
Interview Maria Simmons & Fabian Lanzmaier
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
IB: Through an interest in sound and live experience based works, I started going into VJing and making video works. I like how video opens up for combining several types of waves in one medium, the way it translates reality and the range of possibilities within the medium.
MS: Personally, I work in a wide variety of media, but the moving image can express things in unique ways. I’m particularly drawn to the built-in duration of the moving image - especially when making work about such ancient, slow growing ecosystems such as mires. Being required to sit with the work for a duration makes sense in a very physical way.
FL: Sight is the human sense often referred to as the most prominent or most graspable sense. Working with the moving image is a great opportunity to guide this powerful sense. For me, coming from the field of sound, I only work with the moving image in collaborations. I enjoy the dialogue in which the image and sound influence each other and change how we see/hear what we observe. In this video we built a sound world around the images that seems familiar at first, but on a second listen you begin to feel the hyper real elements and it becomes more alienating.
What inspired you to make this work?
IB: First and foremost, the mires I grew up playing in every summer in Northern Norway, and the myths and stories surrounding mires in general, as both places of magical and horrifying encounters and experiences. Fabian and I met in the soaking wet terrains of west Norway, both of us recording sites in various ways through sound and image, and Maria and I met in the mires just outside of the ‘Paljakka Strict Nature Reserve’ in Finland, in the Mustarinda residency, sharing our experiences of the place. In those vast Finnish mires, we spent whole days interacting with crane birds, piper birds, sphagnum moss and sundew, getting lost, stuck, but also sleeping on top of snow covered mires, waiting for everything to melt, and swimming in its water pits when the spring came. In editing and animating, I’m inspired by Finnish video games like ‘Sauna 2000’ and ‘My Summer Car’, liminal spaces, and books like ‘Volumetric Regimes’ by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting++.
MS: When working on this video, Ingrid and I had spent a lot of time in mires in Finland together which served as a mutual grounding point. My father was a geologist and often had to wade through the thick mires or “muskegs” as they are often called in Canada and take samples of them - the mires actively push humans out by making it difficult to traverse. This sort of push and pull of the tension of the mire along with its deep mythological and historical presence keeps drawing me in to make more work about it - we are looking to re-mystify the bog as opposed to just trying to explain it.
FL: It was really interesting to give a soundscape to this landscape that got reinterpreted through photogrammetrical processes. I have not experienced these land/soundscapes myself so all the sound got shaped through interpretations of fieldnotes and stories from Maria and Ingrid. Based on the mood that was transferred through these notes, the sound of this new landscape was created based on site-specific audio-recordings in addition to synthesised sounds, which add a layer of abstraction and a shift of perspective.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
IB: I take part in a voluntary mapping group of dedicated amateur mycologists and biologists where we register species in an official databank; a method towards preserving nature areas where we crawl on the ground with technologies like gps, lupe, microscopy and one's own senses to determine species of wood-growing fungi. This approach inspires my way of interacting with and recording the sites that I visit in my art practice, and amplifies the importance of preserving biodiversity. The level of nature protection we found in the Paljakkan Reserve, where humans aren’t even allowed to enter the area, was truly inspiring, making the natural site monumental in a way. Many types of mires are endangered and I think this level of protection should be practised in more places.
MS: My approach to solidarity is based on identifying natural phenomena that can be used as a framework for understanding our relationships with humans and more-than-humans within the context of our current environmental crisis. We have entered into a time in which ecological changes are happening on a scale beyond comprehension. Due to this, we need to figure out new ways to think about environmentalism and our role within extractivism. In Mararena Gómez-Barris’ book The Extractive Zone, she speaks to the interconnectedness of social and ecological exploitation. The destruction of mires has significant environmental consequences, such as habitat destruction, water pollution, and the release of carbon which disproportionately affects marginalised communities. Solidarity with mires is also solidarity with those most affected by environmental change.
FL: In making this video, we have made use of different scales and perspectives, in an attempt to decentralise the human experience. This shift helps to relate to non-human species on a sensory level. Feeling a connection out of one’s self is one of the basic requirements for solidarity. As an extension of this in everyday life, a lot of my practice is based on collaborative processes and networks which are sustained primarily through forms of community solidarity such as mutual aid.
What are you working on at the moment?
IB: I’ve been seeking out other exceptional terrain types and sites recently, more toxic and hostile, but that create their own specialised habitats and ecosystems, and at the moment I’m editing various recordings of those to become video installations and sculptural works. I’m intrigued by the notion of natural disruptions/disturbance, and in the process I’m focusing on collaborations between microorganisms and macroscopic processes of and within Earth.
Together, we are also working on a more extensive exhibition of the LBDM work, including sculptures, new video works, sounds and printed matter.
MS: In addition to furthering our LBDM work, I’m beginning my PhD research on a specific peatland region in Northern Ontario called the Ring of Fire. The Ring of Fire is a controversial area in which the existence of large mineral deposits is widely disputed. Since the potential deposits were identified in 2007, the area has been under constant threat of mining. The result of which would trigger a massive carbon release and the destruction of this critical ecosystem. My upcoming artistic research will be a deep dive into the relationship between extraction, queerness, subterranean mystery, and ecological anti-capitalism within peatland ecologies.
FL: I’m working on another collaboration: an outdoor sound installation located in a meadow, surrounded by a forest and ponds. The sounds it will produce are meant to fuse with its surrounding soundscape and mimic its inhabitants. The sounds are created in real time by synthesizers and photo sensitive components within the circuits. Depending on daytime and light situations the sound of the installation changes, creating a never-repeating composition influenced by daily and seasonal cycles over a 3-month duration.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
IBMSFL: To get connected to and show together with such a professional and wide spanning international pool of video artists means a great deal to us. It’s an opportunity to see works of other people which were thinking inside similar topics and thematics and opens other perspectives for oneself. Perspectives from people in different parts of the world, living inside different circumstances. In a way, it also feels like the mires we have spent time with found a way to travel on their own, mediating their stories further.
Pınar Öğrenci. Inventory 2021, 2021
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, Germany
Inventory 2021 is a remake of Yugoslavian director ŽelimirŽilnik’s original Inventur –Metzstraße 11 from1975. In the 1970s, repression by the Yugoslav government drove Zilnikinto exile in West Germany, where he shone a light on the living conditions of the so-called“guest workers”. Similarly, artist andfilmmaker PınarÖğrenci had to migrate to Germany in2018 due to repressions of the current regime in Turkey. For bothŽilnik andÖğrenci thestairs of a building with multiple apartments are a collective space where tenants meet.WhereasŽilnikfilmed the residents of a house in Munich,Öğrenci’s work is set in Chemnitzand depicts the anti-racist struggles of people living there. In the originalfilm, where most ofthe interviewees had arrived under West German“recruitment agreements” as‘guests’, theyare seen coming down the stairs.Öğrenci’s version shows the protagonists walking up,going to their apartments. It turns out thatÖğrenci depicts Chemnitz as a permanent spacerather than a temporary home for the migrants. They talk about their life histories, theirconnections to the region and their commitment against racism as well as the everydayexperience of discrimination in its structural and its individual forms.
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Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Through various mediums, such as photography, video, film, performance, and installation, she explores themes such as migration, war, state violence, assimilation, collective movements, and natural disasters.
Her works have been exhibited widely at museums and art institutions including 60thVenice Biennial 2024), documenta fifteen 2022 in Kassel, Berlinische Galerie (2023), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018), Sharjah Biennial13 (2017), Survival Kit (2019), Tensta Konsthall Stockholm (2018), Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) Stuttgart (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome ( 2016), SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-16). Her first solo exhibition abroad was realized at Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna, “A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us” in 2017.
Interview Pınar Öğrenci
What compels you to work in moving image, and how did you first become interested in the medium?
I must say that I’m a storyteller. I like the communicative, performative, activist but also the poetic potentials when using moving image as a tool for storytelling. I wanted to make films ever since I saw a film on the big screen at the cinema salon in Istanbul for the first time in my life when I was 17 years old. I was amazed, and I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker since then.
What inspired you to make this work?
I was inspired by the original Inventory directed by Yugoslow film director Zelimir Zilnik in 1975. After watching and reading about his film I had the idea of remaking it with today's migrant communities and using stairs as a stage to discuss the city, migration, and racism.
How is solidarity present and enacted in your artistic practice? Are there books, artworks, collaborative networks, personal lived experiences, that feed into and frame your thinking and making?
Solidarity is a very important part of my artistic practice. Almost all of my works start with the idea of solidarity with migrants, refugees, women, workers, protestors, students, etc., I mean people who face state violence, war, and oppression and who struggle against it. I’m also interested in how solidarity practices shape communities and their struggles. On the other hand, I’m coming from an architectural and restoration background. Restoration is, per se, an attribute to someone else’s achievement. There are always books, poems, songs and personal lived experiences that inspire me. That’s why I collaborated with many researchers, writers, musicians, poets, as well as individuals for my projects.
What are you working on at the moment?
I have just finished my new film, 'Glück auf in Deutschland' (Good luck in Germany) which speaks about the mining industry, migration and racism in the Ruhr region of Germany. Now, I’m writing a script for my new film, which explores the relationship between the ecological crisis and violence in my hometown Van and its environment.
What does a democratic international platform like AFI mean to you, as an artist?
Platforms like AFI bring many artists together and create alternative networks outside of the mainstream art system. The best thing about it is being represented in different cities and institutions within the same framework.