VISIO 13th EDITION
European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images
Lo schermo dell’arte presents the thirteenth edition of the VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, a research, residency and production programme dedicated to artists who use moving images in their artistic practice.
The project, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi, will be held in Florence as part of the 17th Lo schermo dell’arte – Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival (November 13 – 17, 2024). The 8 participants will be young European-based artists who work with moving images; they will be selected through an open call promoted in collaboration with some of Europe’s leading art academies and artist residencies.
The deadline to apply is Tuesday, July 9th, 2024.
VISIO includes the VISIO Production Fund, a €35,000 production fund conceived in partnership with Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome), and FRAC Bretagne (Rennes).
Thanks to the support of Human Company, a historic enterprise and reference point in Italy for open air hospitality, the VISIO Production Fund 2024 has been increased by €5,000 and, for the first time, reimbursement of participating artists’ travel expenses will be provided.
Eight artists will be selected and invited to Florence and will have the opportunity to develop their own original project in dialogue with international curators and producers. Sharing and exchange between participants and professionals are facilitated by an intensive programme of mentoring sessions, round tables and individual meetings. Funds will eventually be awarded to three artists who will work with Leonardo Bigazzi, and Lo schermo dell’arte team, to produce the works and premiere them at the Festival in 2025. An artist’s edition of each of the works produced will become part of the permanent collection of the project’s partner institutions, which are committed to promote and exhibit them in the following years.
The artists honoured in the previous editions are: Gerard Ortín Castellví, Andro Eradze, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Simon Liu, Valentin Noujaïm, Maryam Tafakory, Yuyan Wang.
Structure
VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images has a four-part structure:
1. Mentoring Sessions
Critical sessions and one-to-one meetings will be organised with the aim of developing the projects presented by the participating artists. The invited curators will have the opportunity to study the proposals in depth before the start of the programme and then discuss the various aspects of the productions with the artists. The mentors for this edition are: Fernanda Brenner, artistic director Pivô (São Paulo) and lead advisor Kadist (Paris); Valentine Umansky, curator Tate Modern (London).
In these sessions the artists will also meet representatives of the project partner institutions with which the winning films will be co-produced: Etienne Bernard, director FRAC Bretagne (Rennes); Stefano Collicelli Cagol, director Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato); Alessandro Rabottini, artistic director Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome).
2. Conversation Room
In this space participants will be able to meet artists, curators, critics, producers and directors of international institutions during round tables and individual 40-minute meetings. Whether used as an opportunity to present portfolios or simply have a conversation, these are meant to be moments of dialogue that will foster the participants’ professional growth and extend their network of international contacts. Confirmed guests include Diego Marcon, among others.
3. Festival
The participating artists are invited to attend the screenings, meetings and lectures included in the programme of the 17th edition of Lo schermo dell’arte – Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival. This year’s edition will feature works and live events by Garrett Bradley, Sergio Caballero, Diego Marcon, Rosalind Nashashibi and Agnieszka Polska, among others. The programme also includes the world premieres of the works produced through the VISIO production fund 2023 by the artists Andro Eradze, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno and Valentin Noujaïm.
4. Streaming
A work by each of the VISIO participants will be presented online, from 13 to 24 November 2024, on Lo Schermo dell’Arte’s digital channel with MYmovies ONE.
Sarah Brahim
Brahim is a visual and performance artist working across many mediums to present work rooted in experiences of the body. She examines how gestures of the body create a language that can be used to voice grief, metamorphosis, the unseen form, and our relationship to the natural world. Transformation through movement is reflected in her works that explore questions of embodiment and cycles of connection, whether social, spatial, or spiritual. She trained as a professional performer, teacher, and choreographer at San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and received a BFA from London Contemporary Dance School. Her research-based practice began while studying medicine at university, leading her to receive a BS in Public Health: Community Health Education from Portland State University. His work has been shown internationally, including: 16th Lyon Biennial (Lyon); Diriyah Biennial (Riyadh); Noor Festival for contemporary light art (Jeddah); Islamic Arts Biennale (Jeddah); Bally Foundation (Lugano); Philipp Zollinger Gallery (Zurich).
Abdessamad El Montassir
El Montassir combines research and creation through collaborations with scientists, citizens, and activists. His work reflects personal and collective histories, reviving oral memories often overshadowed by dominant narratives. The experiments that El Montassir leads, and the anonymous encounters that he has in the Sahara in the south of Morocco, allow him to explore trauma and how lived or anticipated violence shapes individuals’ behaviors. His artistic practice is grounded on the right to forget, fictional and visceral narratives, and the trauma of anticipation. Uncovering previously invisible geographical spaces, his works focus on a profound consideration for both human and non-human entities in our environment. Currently, he is in residency at Villa Medici (Rome). Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Bétonsalon (Paris); Push To Enter (Seoul) Centre Pompidou-Metz (Metz); MAXXI (Roma); Kunst Meran Merano Arte (Merano); BIP – Biennale de l’Image Possible (Liège); 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil (São Paulo); Institut d’Art Contemporain (Villeurbanne); La Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille); Fonds Régionnal d’Art Contemporain de Franche-Comté (Besançon); Musée d’art de Joliette (Joliette, Canada); FIFA Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Montreal); 9th edition of the OVNi festival (Nice).
Gala Hernández López
Hernández López is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice blends film, video installations, performances, and publications. Her work investigates new forms of subjectivation influenced by computational capitalism, examining ecofeminist perspectives on virtual communities, disruptive technologies, and reactionary tech utopias. She creates research-based artworks that merge materialist analysis with poetry and intimacy, exploring human fantasies of techno-scientific control. A PhD candidate at the University Paris 8, she has taught and held various research positions, including an artist residency at the French Academy in Spain. This year, she won the César for Best Documentary Short and the Experimental Work Award of La Scam (France). Her work has been exhibited in institutions, private spaces and festivals, including: CICA Museum (Gimpo); Punto de Vista Festival (Pamplona); Tabakalera (San Sebastián); Festival Márgenes (Madrid); Salon de Montrouge (Paris); The Photographers Gallery (Winterthur); Cineteca Madrid (Madrid); Locarno Film Festival (Locarno); Berlinale Talents (Berlin).
Peng Zuqiang
Peng works with film, video, and installations, with an attention to the affective resonances within histories, bodies, and language. Among recent exhibitions and screenings: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin); Kevin Space (Vienna); Cell Project Space (London); E-Flux screening room (New York); videobrasil (Brazil); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing); Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt); Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick).
Charmaine Poh
Poh works across media, moving images, and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. She aligns herself with strategies of visibility, opacity, deviance, and futurity. Her practice initially focused on using experimental documentary photography to explore how femininity and queerness are articulated. Her work centres the affects of vulnerability, desire, and intimacy from the vantage point of subversion. After a MA in Visual and Media Anthropology, she is pursuing a PhD at the Universität Berlin. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: 60th Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere (Venice); Singapore Art Museum (Singapore); Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul); SeMA Bunker (Seoul); Leslie Lohman Museum (New York); Queer East Festival (London).
Young-jun Tak
In his practice, Tak examines socio-cultural and psychological mechanisms that shape belief systems. Blurring the lines between media, techniques, and subject matter, he pursues obfuscation as a tool of critique. In his films and sculptures, he often exposes the human body in the context of polarizing norms and conventions. His work has been shown internationally, including: PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich); COMA (Sydney); Atelier Hermès (Seoul); Julia Stoschek Foundation (Berlin, Dusseldorf); palace enterprise (Copenhagen); O—Overgaden (Copenhagen); Wanås Konst (Knislinge); Skånes konstförening (Malmo); Capsule (Venice); High Line (New York); Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago).
Philip Ullman
In their practice, Ullman captures movements and voices that are inherent to the human body and applies these to non-human characters. Through these characters, in fictional 3D animated realities, Ullman questions the grounds on which value and sentience are prescribed, why one life is more valuable than another and what it means to be human. They recently completed a MFA at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Solo exhibitions include: Goswell Road (Paris); Mutter (Amsterdam). This year, they exhibited in several international institutions, private spaces, and festivals including: Berlinale (Berlin); Rotterdam Film Festival (Rotterdam); Annecy International Animation Film Festival (Annecy); Lago Film Fest (Revine Lago, Italy); Kaboom Film Festival (Amsterdam); Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Hamburg); Vienna Shorts (Vienna); Syncro Film Fest (Buenos Aires); Guanajuato International Film Festival (Guanajuato City); International Film Festival of Kerala (Thiruvananthapuram).
Leyla Yenirce
Yenirce’s multi-disciplinary practice moves between video, installation, sound, painting and performance. Her work deals with multi-layered themes such as cultural and medial structures of dominance, often creating cinematic, staged works based on found footage that are politically and critically charged. A central aspect of her work is the deliberate use of sound. She studied cultural anthropology, time based media, and painting at HafenCity University Hamburg, Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In 2019, she participated at the Kurdish Film Festival in Berlin, where she was awarded with the Karl H. Ditze Art Prize for the best final work. She completed the 2023 Art Explore – Cité internationale des arts residency program (Paris). Recent exhibitions, screenings, and performances include: HFBK Neue Kunst in Hamburg; Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Hamburg); Kunsthaus (Hamburg); Capitain Petzel (Berlin); Schiefe Zähne (Berlin); Kunsthalle Münster; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Moltkerei Werkstatt (Cologne); Studio Mondial (Berlin); Haus der Kunst (Munich); Braunsfelder (Cologne); Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg); Sophiensæle (Berlin).
On the streaming channel Lo schermo dell'arte on MYmovies ONE
November 13-24, 2024
He said, we must forget
by Sarah Brahim, 2023, 9’22’’
Originally conceived as a two-channel installation, He Said, We Must Forget uses images collected over the course of an entire year, two films run in parallel; they intersect and oppose each other, one undoing what the other brings forward with a technique based on hand-painting. Through fragments of images, Brahim tries to understand involuntarily whether it is possible to forget certain things in order to move ahead and how memories, and access to them, become blocked. An invitation to contemplate about the limits of human memory, its longevity, and the delicate boundary between reality and imagination.
Galb’Echaouf
by Abdessamad El Montassir, 2021, 18’43’’
While investigating an event that profoundly changed the landscape of the Sahara, El Montassir was faced with the silence of previous generations who remain haunted by a history that they are unable to tell. With Galb’Echaouf, El Montassir focuses the viewer’s attention on landscapes, plants, and poetry, in search of answers or elements that could participate in the reconstruction of this amnesia and the transmission of the narratives.
La Mécanique des Fluides
by Gala Hernández López, 2022, 38’
In 2018, an incel (i.e., an involuntary celibate) posts a suicide note on the Reddit platform with the title “America is responsible for my death”. La Mécanique des Fluides is an attempt to find answers to his words. A virtual drift on the Internet in search of his digital traces that ends up being an inner journey between two connected solitudes.
Sight Leak
by Peng Zuqiang, 2022, 12’15’’
Sight Leak, filmed in 16mm black & white, reconfigures Roland Barthes’ memoirs of his 1974 journey to China, published posthumously, from the perspective of a local tourist visiting Changsha; the artist’s hometown.
Barthes’ judgments about China are refracted in the film as fragments of dialogues on class, queerness and desire, responding to the reflections on the same matters elicited alongside Barthes’ sense of eroticism.
Commissioned by Macalline Art Center.
Good Morning Young Body
by Charmaine Poh, 2023, 6’23’’
The video uses as its basis found footage and material of the artist’s time as a preteen TV actor in the early 2000s in Singapore, a time of an unregulated internet and nascent image distribution. Through the use of a deep-fake, the video resurrects the series character, E-Ching, to address the politics of the gaze, the femme-presenting body, and agency. By compressing time and space, the eternal 12-year-old E-Ching offers a revisionist narrative that holds a yearning for freedom.
Wish You a Lovely Sunday
by Young-jun Tak, 2021, 18’45’’
Two choreographers and two dancers collaborated to create new choreography for the church “Kirche am Südstern” and the queer club “SchwuZ” in Berlin, each assigned a different Bach piano piece for four hands. After rehearsals, the venues were swapped, and participants learned their performance locations only on the actual day of filming, requiring them to adapt their choreographies to the new spaces. This juxtaposition of distinct settings aims to explore the coexistence of religious practice and club culture, highlighting the dancers’ struggles and commitment to fitting their movements into these new contexts.
Supported by Arts Council Korea, Berlin Masters Foundation, Burger Collection, and Center Stage.
Preoperational Model
by Philip Ullman, 2023, 13’10’’
Anthropomorphic princess Sophie and her maid Jessica prepare for a new day in the royal court. Sophie’s struggle to play her role propels the two protagonists forward and backward in time, through worlds and identities to find a way to live together. A disempowerment story from the perspective of the powerful.
Being Strong Is Hard
by Leyla Yenirce, 2021, 4’13’’
The film is a rapid flow of images, gathered online or created by the artist, featuring Kurdish activists, journalists, and fighters—mostly women—facing the camera, often smiling, accompanied by electronic music. The work, which the artist herself describes as an “image machine,” combines concepts of solidarity and resistance and serves as a tribute to those who have been killed or who are still fighting.
VISIO. European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images – 13th edition
with the contribution of
Regione Toscana – Giovani Sì – Toscanaincontemporanea2024
promoted and produced by
Lo schermo dell’arte
curated by
Leonardo Bigazzi
in collaboration with
Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato)
Fondazione In Between Art Film (Roma)
FRAC Bretagne (Rennes)
con il sostegno ulteriore di Human Company
Photo Credits: Andro Eradze, Raised in the Dust, Film still, 2022, Video 4K, 8:12 min, commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia, courtesy of the artist and SpazioA
The participants are selected in partnership with:
- Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera
- AV-arkki – The Centre for Finnish Media Art (Helsinki)
- Careof (Milan)
- Cité internationale des arts (Paris)
- De Ateliers (Amsterdam)
- Gasworks (London)
- Hangar (Barcelona)
- Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin)
- Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing)
- Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam)
- Spike Island (Bristol)
- Städelschule (Frankfurt)
- Villa Romana (Florence)
- WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre (Bruxelles)