Lo Schermo dell’Arte presents the eleventh edition of 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 in conjunction with the 15th Lo Schermo dell’Arte – Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival (November 15 – 20, 2022). The 8 participants will be young European artists who work with moving images; they will be selected through an open call organised in collaboration with some of Europe’s leading art academies, schools and artist residencies. The deadline to apply is Friday, September 9, 2022.
After 10 years VISIO develops further by introducing the VISIO Production Fund, a €40,000 production fund conceived in partnership with Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome), FRAC Bretagne (Rennes) and Seven Gravity Collection.
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 four winning artists who will work with Leonardo Bigazzi, and the Schermo dell’Arte team, to produce the works and premiere them at the Festival in 2023. 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 beginning of this new course will also be accompanied by the release of a publication dedicated to the first ten years of VISIO. The book traces the history of the project and promotes the research of the 128 artists who took part in the programme and the exhibitions organised between 2012 and 2021. The book aims to investigate some of the fundamental themes animating the international debate in the field of moving images today through texts commissioned for the occasion and conversations with artists, curators, researchers, collectors and producers involved in the project over the years.
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: Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator, MoMA (New York) and 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: Diego Bergamaschi, Seven Gravity Collection; 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 discuss, during round tables and individual 40-minute meetings, with artists, curators, critics, producers and directors of international institutions hosted by the Festival. 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 artists Rosa Barba and Eric Baudelaire, Erika Balsom, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London and Andrea Lissoni, artistic director at Haus der Kunst (Munich).
3. Festival
The participating artists are invited to attend the screenings, meetings and lectures included in the programme of the 15th edition of Lo Schermo dell’Arte – Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival. This year’s edition will feature works by: Rosa Barba, Eric Baudelaire, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Andres Serrano among many others.
4.Online Platform in collaboration with MYmovies
A work by each of the VISIO participants will be presented online, from 16 to 27 November 2022, on the Festival online platform. In the 2021 edition, the platform achieved almost 12,000 views.
Jérémie Danon
He studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. He works within a wide range of different media, from video and film to photography, painting, and sound. Activating hybrid forms, in constant dialogue between fiction and documentation, Danon questions the narrative potential of reality, exploring the relationship between bodies and spaces, and the notion of intimacy in the territory of the political. His work has been exhibited in several institutions and film festivals and it has been awarded the Prix du Jury Sarr at CRUSH, Beaux-Arts de Paris, the Prix du Jury d’Art Contemporain de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the Prix Artaïs at the 72nd edition of the Jeune Création Festival. His video Afrokingdom won the prize for the Best French Short Film at the Champs-Elysées Film Festival in 2021. Jérémie Danon is currently working on his first publication with the publishing house NERO and a medium-length film, which will be shot in Israel.
Ph. credits Aurélie Lamachère
Aziz Hazara
He works across different mediums, including video, installation, photography, sound, and sculpture, addressing dichotomies such as proximity and distance, migration and memory, life and death, reality and fiction, war and peace. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2022); Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York (2020); the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Kunsthal Aarhus (2020); the Busan Biennale (2020); the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM), Marseille (2019); and Asia Culture Center, Kwangju (2017). He has participated in a number of artist residencies and he is the winner of the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize 2021. His solo show will open at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2023.
Ph. credits Leonie Hugendubel
Paul Heintz
He is a Fine Arts graduate at Beaux-Arts de Nancy, at Arts Décoratifs de Paris and at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains. Heintz’s eld of action is a bizarre set of cases where what is real is largely imbued with fiction, and where social normativity also makes its weight entirely felt. His work goes through object, sound, film and installation and has been presented at contemporary art events and film festival such as FID Marseille, IFFR Rotterdam, Visions du Réel, Paris Nuit Blanche. In 2019, he won the contemporary art price Révélation Emerige and Artist book of the year Adagp 2021.
Ph. credits Ewan Golder
Simon Liu
SELECTED ARTIST FOR THE 2022 VISIO PRODUCTION FUND
He is a film artist who seeks to build a lyrical catalog of the rapidly evolving psychogeography of his place of origin in Hong Kong through alternative documentary forms, abstract diary films, multi-channel video installations and 16mm projection performances. By exploiting abstraction and inverting observational cinema practices, the works formally manifest hidden energies and histories within civic space, developing a new language to investigate censorship, concealment, nostalgia, and self-expression at a time of unease both within the city and globally. Liu’s work has been presented at film festivals and museums globally including the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Toronto International Film Festival: Wavelengths, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films with MoMA & Film at Lincoln Center, BFI London Film Festival, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Portland Institute of ContemporaryArt, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, The M+ Museum and MoMA recently included Liu’s Quadruple 16mm Projection Highview, along with other recent works, in their Permanent Collections.
Randa Maroufi
She graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts, Tetouan, Morocco (2010), the School of Fine Arts, Angers, France (2013) and Le Fresnoy: Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France (2015). Her experimental works explore an elastic awareness of reality. Her films and moving images often employ special effects and other formal devices that alter perceptions of time and space. Maroufi’s films have been featured at Museo Reina Sofía, Spain (2021); Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands (2020); New Museum, NY (2020); Dakar Biennale (2018); Prospectif cinéma, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2016); New Directors/New Films, MoMA, New York (2016) and Marrakech Biennale (2014). Her film Le Park (2015) has received several awards, including; Videonale Award, Fluentum Collection, Berlin (2017); Jury Prize, International Film Festival Rotterdam (2016) and ADAGP Digital Art Award for Video Art, Paris (2015).
Gerard Ortín Castellví
SELECTED ARTIST FOR THE 2022 VISIO PRODUCTION FUND
Gerard Ortín Castellví is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. After completing an MFA at Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), he finished an MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is currently doing a Ph.D. and teaching at the MA Art & Ecology. He is also a mentor at UCL Creative Documentary by Practice MFA, and a member of the Ecological Reparation project. He has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Tabakalera (Donostia-San Sebastián), Stedelijk Museum Buro of Amsterdam (Amsterdam), and Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo). His works have been screened in places like the Anthology Film Archives (NY), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), LUX (London) and festivals like Visions du Réel (Nyon), Open City Film Festival (London), Cinéma du Réel (Paris), KVIFF (Karlovy Vary), HKIFF (Hong Kong) and Berlinale (Berlin).
Ph. credits KVIFF – Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Maryam Tafakory
SELECTED ARTIST FOR THE 2022 VISIO PRODUCTION FUND
She moved to the UK in her twenties to study computer science before obtaining an MFA at Oxford University and a Ph.D. at Kingston University. Her practice is often disoriented at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. Assembling textual and filmic collages, she stitches together poetry, documentary, archival, and found material.
Her work has been exhibited internationally including at MoMA Doc Fortnight; IFFR Rotterdam; ICA London; HKW Berlin; True/False; Pergamon Museum; M HKA; Videonale Kunstmuseum Bonn; and Anthology Film Archives amongst others. She has received several awards including the Tiger Short at 51st IFFR, Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at 60th AAFF, Best Experimental Short Film at 70th MIFF, the Fugas Prize at Documenta Madrid, and the Best Short Film at Festival de Cine Lima Independiente. She was awarded the Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence (NY) in 2019 and received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2022.
Yuyan Wang
SELECTED ARTIST FOR THE 2022 VISIO PRODUCTION FUND
She is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines image production in mediation, representation, and repercussions regarding the economy of attention. Both poetic and political, her practice of image recycling inverses and subverts the functions and meanings of the images used. Her videos dissolve the hierarchies of founding, processed, and produced material and underscore the diversity of the effectual matrix between suspense and action. Employing editing, sound, and immersive environments, she alternately creates focus from distraction and ambiguity from clarity. Wang graduated in 2020 from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains and in 2016 from Beaux-Arts de Paris. Her works have been presented at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Berlin Biennale (2022) and numerous festivals such as Berlinale International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, 25FPS International Experimental Film Festival.
Ph. credits Ji Aiqing
On Più Compagnia in collaboration with MYmovies
from November 16 to 27, 2022
Bab Septa
by Randa Maroufi, 2019, 19′
In Bab Septa Randa Maroufi reconstructs a series of situations observed in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil crossed by thousands of people every day and scene of an intense trafficking of manufactured goods, sold at discounted prices. The border between Spain and Morocco, where stories of smuggling are legion, turns out to be an excellent playground to stage individuals who are on the move. Three periods, three distinct moments corresponding to the different stages of the crossing of the border guide the camera’s trajectory and provide the main thread of the film.
Character
by Paul Heintz, 2021, 18′
Artist Paul Heintz publishes a classified advert in the English newspaper The Sun searching for namesakes of the hero of George Orwell’s novel 1984. Part of the film narrates the daily life of those who answered to the advert, whilst the other shows the meeting of the Winton Smiths. Here, the viewer can’t tell whether it’s a theatrical act with a predetermined text or the result of spontaneous gestures and words. The film is built on a subtle movement between the individual and the collective, the private and the political in which excerpts from Orwell’s novel blend in with the lives of the Winston Smiths.
E-Ticket
by Simon Liu, 2019, 13′
A tight editing of 35mm photo negatives and moving pictures, taken during the artist’s formative years, are obsessively cut apart, reshuffled then tape spliced together inch by inch in rigid increments. Fragmented views swipe between a school trip to India then culminate with a protest of a 2005 World Trade Organization summit in Hong Kong. E-Ticket is a frantic (re)cataloging of a personal archive and an opportunity for rebirth to forgotten images.
Eyes in the Sky
by Aziz Hazara, 2019, 5’10”
In Eyes in the Sky Hazara uses the optics of surveillance and military reconnaissance as he shows us some children playing with war remnants and abandoned military vehicles in the Afghan desert. In this film the artist explores military conflict through the rituals and customs that define and connect the several fragmented and intermingled ethnic communities of Afghanistan. The film raises the questions of what and who is missing from these barren landscapes, and what does it mean for these boys to play ‘war’ when war has surrounded them since birth.
Future Foods
by Gerard Ortìn Castellvì, 2021, 21’
Future Foods revolves around the relationship between technology, industry and ecology. The images show the making of plastic food at the workshops of Replica LTD, one of the few UK based companies that still manufactures props for films, advertisements and displays. The perception of food, its appealingness and palatability through a constructed image, come into play when observing these hand-crafted manufacturing processes through a camera. A phone conversation with the CEO of a Finnish future foods’ start-up introduces us to a cutting edge technology consisting of the production of Solein, a new protein generated from water, electricity and CO2 captured from the air. With Solein humanity could develop food with a reduced carbon footprint.
Irani Bag
by Maryam Tafakory, 2021, 8’
Using excerpts of films produced between 1990 and 2018, this video essay by di Maryam Tafakory questions the innocence of bags in post-revolution Iranian cinema. Here, bags are often deployed as surrogates for human touch, sometimes with hilarious effects. Irani Bag deconstructs a cinematographic motif in order to propose a powerful textual and political analysis of censorship and intimacy in post-revolution Iran, inviting the spectator to reconsider the relationship between sight and touch.
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean
by Yuyan Wang, 2020, 11’30’’
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean is a kaleidoscopic montage of images based on a selection of satisfying videos diffused on the web. The selection has been made first following the algorithm based on the artist’s tastes on social networks, then through a choice made consciously by herself. Underwater or microscopic images, human or robotic images, natural or mechanical images, aquatic or 3D-animated images: from the ola in a stadium to the devastation of floods, from the fatigue of sport to weightlessness in space, from lava to rubbish. Images so rapid that are impossible to contextualize, process or interiorize individually, but by which one can only be swept away as by a wave. The montage is accompanied by an hypnotic and abstract audio by sound designer Raphaël Hénard, who, thanks to an algorithm, has selected and edited sounds from ASMR videos.
Open Air
by Jérémie Danon, 2020/2021, 26’
After spending some time with former inmates, Jéremie Danon invites them to speak in front of a green screen; through this setting the artist de-contextualizes their narratives by presenting them inside imaginary spaces. The artist asks them: “Where would you like to be now?”. Their words are animated by images taken mainly from the gaming world: from the city of Falkreath from the Skyrim videogame to the environments of the action and adventure game GTA V. The virtual images create a contrast with the words of the interviewed people trying to offer a new perspective at their dreams and desires.
VISIO. European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images – 11th Edition
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 (Rome)
- Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi (Florence)
- FRAC Bretagne (Rennes)
- Seven Gravity Collection
Photo Credits: Roman Khimei e Yarema Malashchuk, Dedicated to the youth of the world II (2019)
The selection of participants is realised in partnership with
- Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera
- Art House (Scutari)
- AV-arkki – The Centre for Finnish Media Art (Helsinki)
- Careof (Milan)
- Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid
- De Ateliers (Amsterdam)
- Gasworks (London)
- Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin)
- La Casa Encendida (Madrid)
- Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing)
- Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam)
- Royal College of Art (London)
- Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm)
- Städelschule (Frankfurt)
- WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels)
Lo Schermo dell’Arte 2022 is realised with the contribution of
• MIC – Direzione generale Cinema e audiovisivo
• Regione Toscana | Giovanisì | Toscanaincon
• Comune di Firenze
• Città Metropolitana di Firenze
main supporter
Fondazione CR Firenze
with the support of
• Fondazione Sistema Toscana | Cinema La Compagnia
• Ambasciata del Regno dei Paesi Bassi
• Institut français Italia
in collaboration with
• Fondazione In Between Art Film
• Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
• Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
• FRAC Bretagne
• Seven Gravity Collection
• Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza Virgilio Sieni
• MYmovies
• Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze
• Archi.Media Trust Onlus
Main Sponsor
Gucci
Sponsor
• B&C Speakers
• Findomestic
• Unicoop Firenze
Media partner
• Flash Art
Technical sponsor
• Alterama