Sara Bonaventura, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, SD, 2019, 4:10 min
Sountrack: Handplant, by EVN (Oh Cruel Science, Enklav label)
“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death… like hands joined together” Ursula K. Le Guin, The left hand of darkness
This is a drawing exercise, recording in real time my left hand and a white paper, the right hand
was not holding a pencil but rather adjusting knobs and patching oscillators, of a Jones Raster Scan,
similar to the Rutt Etra Scan Processor, but one of a kind built by Dave Jones for Sara Hornbacher.
It looks easy, but it is not so comfortable, rather a process of prosthetization in which a very familiar
part of the body becomes alien, sucked by the uncanny vortex of the machines, in which we believe to see a glimpse of creation, when two index fingers touch each others, but the triangulation ends up
with a unsettling unity. see an idiom I love, in Mandarin: 孤掌难鸣 meaning something like It’s hard to clap with only one hand. The piece is inspired by a novel, The left hand of darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, and by the Vasulkas’ Scan Processor studies.
BIO
Sara Bonaventura is atelierista and visual artist, with a MA degree in contemporary art and gender studies, diverse experiences of teaching, didactics, curatorial, pr, archive, in several Cultural Institutions. Sara intertwines frame by frame drawn/cut-out animation or stop motion, video synthesis, analog/digi shot, found-footage, embracing a DIY ethic and aesthetic. If the surface cracks, the crack becomes the surface; that break means intensity.Points of intensity rather than sutures. Her works have been screened worldwide, at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC, at Other Cinema in San Francisco, at the Miami New Media Festival, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Derya Durmaz, Circumcision, HD, 2022, 2 min
The joys of sexual freedom in the western context… The people we can meet on dating apps… The kinks and everything we can do with them. So we are through with all those gender inequality issues, right? They are just a problem of the East, the global South… Or all that exhilarating freedom, is it mostly easy access to things that would not be talked about openly before, but it’s still based on the same foundation of binary, male gaze assumptions on gender roles and relations?
BIO
Derya Durmaz is an actress, film maker, storyteller, voice and speech & acting coach. Her first short film ZIAZAN received 11 awards and full coverage in Washington Post and Monocle magazine. Her second short Mother Virgin No More premiered at the Berlinale Generations. She is BERLINALE TALENTS, Toronto TIFF FILMMAKER LAB, FIRST FILMS FIRST and Film Independent GLOBAL MEDIA MAKERS alumna. Her first feature film project won Berlinale Talent Project Market TALENT HIGHLIGHT AWARD.
Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh, The Islands, digitised 16 mm, 2016, 10 min
The Islands is an experimental documentary which consists of 35mm film photographs Hsieh took in three islands: Inishimore (Ireland), Staten Island (United States) and Tsushima Island (Japan). By constructing, re-filming and hand animating the photographs, island is no longer a geographical term, but a state of mind, in which the film as a process to re-examine the relationship among land, nation and identity.
BIO
Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh is a Taiwanese multimedia artist and filmmaker, who is currently based in Los Angeles. The dislocation from her homeland deeply influences the narrative of her work. While rediscovering her roots in Taiwanese heritage and history, her work explores the complexity of a multicultural identity, with a particular attention to land as a source of identity. Hsieh’s practice includes experimental film, projection art, photography and video installation.
Kheshia Hadda Boutera, CAPTURA, HD, 2021, 13:02 min
CAPTURA is an experimental and sound film that explores the notion of photographic memory. Inside a blue room, images-memories appear, transform themselves. A hundred video sequences found on the hard drive of my computer unfold on a fixed plane of the room and guide us towards intimate filmed moments (walks in nature and danced gestures). Family photos and fragmented voices weave the visual writing of my images-thought.
BIO
Kheshia Hadda Boutera is a video artist based in Marseille, France. She received a Master degree in Research Studies in Plastic Art and thus graduated with a Fine Arts specialization in Performative Art and Video in Brussels, Belgium. Since 2017, she has been making short films in which she inserts excerpts from home videos. Her Video-Poems, as she calls her films, are situated on the edge between documentary and fiction. Inspired by the experimental cinema of the late 1960s, filmed with a camcorder, cell phone or digital camera, she likes to glean and find images often forgotten in her hard drives.
Nina Sumarac, E:SCOPE, HD, 2019, short version 5 min (original 17:09 min)
This video is a recording of a computer processing the internal view of the human intestinal tract filmed originally by a luminous fibre-optic camera. This abstracted imagery seen through the machine’s eye offers us a new vision of unexpected insight by revealing the unseen yet experienced aspects of our being, at the same time questioning the degree to which our perception of reality and its physicality is monitored by what we see.
BIO
Nina Sumarac is a Serbian-Cypriot multidisciplinary social visual artist based in Cyprus. Sumarac studied mechanical engineering and computer numerical control systems in New Belgrade and fine arts at Buckinghamshire New University (UK) and Cyprus College of Art in Larnaca. Since 2001 Sumarac has had 10 solo exhibitions and participated in international exhibitions. For more than fifteen years Sumarac worked on experimental films and animation production at the Toonachunks animation studio with which she collaborates today. Her woks are part of the permanent collections of the State Gallery of Contemporary Cyprus Art, the Municipal Gallery Limassol, the Byzantium Museum in Nicosia, and many private collections.
Dagie Brundert, Muttitelefon, digitised Super 8, 2022, 5:12 min
There are mushrooms below me, there’ are microbes below me, it’s vibrating, it’s crazy! Look, light or mushroom thunderstorm? And I have the same inside me: legions of benevolent, working microbes, spores, vitamins, bacteria, and critters that fuel my daily desliming, that keep me going. Without them there would only be a hollow ego. Here. Small companies in me, and my ego is entwined around it. Nothing but the mushrooms here underground. The tendrils for communication. And the mast stands alone and tells a story to itself and no one listens. Or maybe yes? I think I have to make a phone call to Mutti / Mom.
BIO
I was born in a small town in the middle of West Germany. In my twenties I moved to Berlin and studied visual arts / experimental film. Fell in love with my super 8 camera (Nizo) in 1988. Since then I try to be a particle-finder, a wave-catcher and a good story-teller. I carry my super 8 camera with me travelling, walking around, eyes open and antennas upright. I try to absorb weird beautiful things from this world. Chew them and spit them out again.
Chiara De Marchis Garofalo, IMPREVISTX, SD, 2022, 4:55 min
The project IMPREVISTX creates a non-binary dramaturgy realized by editing and composing participatory videos of non-gendered body parts. The aim is to find visual and embodied strategies to challenge the gender binary as a social construct and to explore the role of the body as a space for social interactions. The project focuses on the distortion and confusion created by images coming from personal points of view, on perception and exploration of the body. The decision to sew the shoots together comes from the idea of creating a patchwork of body parts inspired by Frankenstein’s monster, as discussed in the textual adaptation of My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (Stryker, 2018). Continuously, the aim is to create a visual space in which the body becomes our first territory (Lenius, 2021) for rethinking and deconstructing the hegemonic eurocentric understanding of gender.
BIO
Chiara De Marchis Garofalo is an interdisciplinary and transfeminist artist, working in the field of performance and video art. Their background is in social design and visual communication, they designed projects, co-created, and worked with different NGOs in Italy and Belgium. They graduated in June 2022 in the Performing Public Space MA program-Fontys, University of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg, The Netherlands. Their work is based on sensory auto-ethnographic research on the nonbinary body and identity. It aims to transform performative practices of self- determination into rituals through decolonial, queer, and transfeminist lenses. Their artistic interest lies in the interconnectedness between the oppression of gender non-conforming identities and the exploitation of colonised and occupied lands through a communitarian and visual approach.
Visto Desde El Zaguán, Dead End, digitised Lo-Fi/Dated video, 2019, 9:11 min
Given the circumstances, it is highly unlikely that any headway will be made.
BIO
Visto Desde El Zaguán is Jacqueline Heeley & Philippe Faujas. The themes we explore are usually concerned with memory, uncertainty, place and loss.We shoot mostly in black and white using what could probably termed Lo-Fi/Dated video equipment. Our films are self-funded and, consequently, avail of next-to-no budget. We value the freedom this self-inflicted situation provides to develop the stories we want to tell by drawing together the threads of writing, filming, editing, grading and sound construction, although very rarely in this order as each story imposes its particular requirements. Our 15 films have been shown in festivals, galleries and special screenings in Mexico, Cuba, USA, Japan, Russia, England, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Greece, Egypt, Croatia and on numerous online platforms. Two of our films were published on DVD by Ob’Art, (Barcelona, Spain) and the Journal of Short Film (Ohio State University, USA) Our film Nearly All Your Unknown Poems was broadcast on US cable access stations as part of the Here Comes Everybody programme.