VISIO 14th EDITION
Lo schermo dell’arte presents the fourteenth edition of the VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, a research, residency, and production programme dedicated to young, Europe-based artists who use moving images in their artistic practice.
The project, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi, will be held in Florence as part of the 18th Lo schermo dell’arte – Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival (November 12 – 16, 2025). 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 Friday, May 23rd, 2025.
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), FRAC Bretagne (Rennes), and with the support of Human Company, a historic enterprise and reference point in Italy for open-air hospitality, which also provides a reimbursement of participating artists’ travel expenses.
8 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 2026. 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 of the VISIO Production Fund are: Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Abdessamad El Montassir, Andro Eradze, Gala Hernández López, Peng Zuqiang, Simon Liu, Valentin Noujaïm, Gerard Ortín Castellví, Maryam Tafakory, Yuyan Wang. The works produced with the fund have been presented in institutions such as Tate (London), MoMA and MoMA PS1 (New York), Kunsthalle Basel (Basel), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Accademia di Francia a Roma – Villa Medici (Rome), among others, as well as in competition in festivals such as the Berlin International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel (Nyon), and CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), among others.
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: Hiuwai Chu, Head of Exhibitions MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 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: 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 Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Artistic Director of Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), among others.
3. Festival
The participating artists are invited to attend the screenings, meetings and lectures included in the programme of the 18th edition of Lo schermo dell’arte – Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival. This year’s edition will feature works and live events by Sven Augustijnen and Sammy Baloji, among others. The programme also includes the premieres of the works produced through the VISIO Production Fund 2025 by the artists Abdessamad El Montassir, Gala Hernández López e Peng Zuqiang, and of Valentin Noujaïm, winner of the VISIO Production Fund 2023.
4. Streaming
A work by each of the VISIO participants will be presented online, from 12 to 23 November 2025, on Lo Schermo dell’Arte’s digital channel on MYmovies ONE.
Tohé Commaret
Commaret is a Franco-Chilean filmmaker, born in Vitry-sur-Seine and based in Paris, who has developed a body of work that oscillates between experimental cinema and documentary. Trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and later at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, she has developed a distinctive visual language through short films that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Her approach, both poetic and committed, seeks to redefine the forms of cinema and question the relationship between art, politics and society in the contemporary world. Her films exhibited and screened at: Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou (Paris); Maison Salvan (Labège); Lyon Biennial (Lyon); Casa Conti (Corsica); FORDE gallery (Geneva); La Sira (Paris); Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum (Vitry-sur-Seine); Le Louvre (Paris); Berlinale Shorts Competition, Berlin; Locarno Film Festival (Locarno); House of World Culture (Berlin); LE BAL (Paris).
Rafik Greiss
Greiss works can be described as atmospheric, provocative, and sensual. His practice spans a wide range of formal and technical approaches, incorporating both digital and analogue techniques. What unifies his practice is a commitment to sensation over theme or medium, resulting in a body of work grounded in the viewer’s capacity to engage with their own senses. His work has been exhibited at; Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris); Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation (Venice); Galerie Molitor (Berlin); Kunsthalle Zürich (Zürich); LC Queisser (Tbilisi); Swiss Institute (New York); Musée du Louvre (Paris); All Stars (Lausanne); Marlborough Gallery (London); Spazio Amanita (Florence).
Vir Andres Hera
Hera works across film installations, sound, performance, and critical writing. Rooted in expanded cinema, his practice explores diasporic consciousness, exile, gender identity, and memory through fragmented, multilingual, and non-linear forms. Drawing on both personal and collective archives, Hera constructs poetic audiovisual montages that challenge dominant histories and foreground marginalized voices, engaging with queer, Chicana, and Black epistemologies. Recent exhibitions, performances, and screenings include: Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou (Paris); Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); Musée d’Art et d’histoire (Genève); Museo de la ciudad (Queretaro); Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing); La ferme du buisson (Noisiel); Montpellier Contemporain (Montpellier); Mimosa House (London); SBC gallery (Montréal); ZBD gallery (Lisbon); AC Les Tanneries (Amilly); DS Galerie (Paris); Objectif Vidéo Nice (Nice); YGREC (Aubervilliers); Studio Flair & Le Houloc (Paris); Atelier des artistes en exil (Paris).
Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Jean-Baptise grew up in the context of the Guianese and Antillean diaspora in France. His work delves into the complexities of colonial history, focusing on archives and forms of reconstitution to conceive a living, embodied memory. Recent screenings include: Locarno Film Festival (Locarno); Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin); Sundance Film Festival (Park City), CPH:DOX (Copenhagen); Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (Toronto); Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (Clermont-Ferrand); IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Amsterdam). He has created several scenic productions, mixing theatre, dance, and song in the context of Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Tate Modern (London), e-flux Screening Room (Brooklyn), among others.
Olukemi Lijadu
Lijadu is a visual and sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice weaves philosophy, moving image, music, and archival material. Her work explores cultural hybridity, collective memory, and the complexity of Black diasporic identity through what she calls “legacy work”, a poetic, research-based form rooted in personal history and political inquiry. Influenced by Yoruba metaphysics and trained in philosophy at Stanford University, she challenges binary worldviews and treats music as a living archive of communal memory and lost connections. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: V.O Curations, ICA, Royal Academy, and No.9 Cork Street Frieze (London); Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (Chicago); The Metrograph and The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room (New York); G.A.S (Lagos); Venice Biennale. Performing as DJ Kem Kem, she has appeared at Tate Britain and Serpentine Gallery (London); Bozar (Brussels); La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris); and the National Museum (Lagos), among others. She held the Villa Albertine residency in Chicago.
Thomias Radin
Radin’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, and film, rooted in his background in dance and his upbringing between Guadeloupe and France. His work centers on Black subjects as carriers of memory and movement. Movement that tells a story of deep spirituality tied to ancestral knowledge, yet dynamic, alive, and evolving. Emphasizing fluidity and the intangible, Radin weaves archetypal motifs and ancient narratives into a universal language. Music and dance, from HipHop to Gwo Ka and Capoeira, inform his gestural brushwork and rhythmic compositions. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Esther Schipper (Seoul, Berlin, Shanghai); Fondation Van Gogh (Arles); Loop Barcelona (Barcelona); Kunstverein Gottingen (Gottingen); Steve Turner (Los Angeles); SAVVY Contemporary, KINDL, Galerie Wedding, Frontview (Berlin); Artco Gallery (Paris); Strada Gallery (New York); Venice Biennale; Luce Gallery (Torino); The Curators Room (Amsterdam). This year, he held the DAAD artist residency in Berlin.
Jordan Strafer
Strafer is an artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice explores systems of power and social dysfunction. Working across video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, she creates unsettling scenarios where intimacy meets spectacle and attraction clashes with repulsion. Blending personal and fictional narratives with historical materials and the visual codes of cinema and television, her work reveals how power and representation shape collective perception and public opinion. Recent exhibitions and screenings include; Fluentum (Berlin); Renaissance Society (Chicago); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); Secession (Vienna); Index (Stockholm); Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston); PARTICIPANT INC (New York); New Museum (New York); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); New York Film Festival (New York); IFFR Rotterdam Film Festival, (Rotterdam); e-flux Screening Room (New York). This year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Shen Xin
Xin works with moving images, installation, sound, text, painting, and performance. They practice co-creating languages that speak the grammar of sense, volition, technique, and spaciousness, while abiding knowing in relation. Through a deep, land-based way of knowing, their work tells stories that challenge the idea of nation-state borders and speak to a sense of innate belonging. Their practice resists imposed boundaries and instead nurtures a connection to truth as something shared and relational. They were born in Chengdu, Sichuan, and finds home in Northern An t-eilean Sgitheanach (Isle of Skye) and Mni Sota Makoce. They received the BALTIC Artists’ Award (Gateshead) and held the Rijksakademie residency (Amsterdam), among others. Recent exhibitions include: Collective (Edinburgh); TINA (London); Richmond Art Gallery (British Columbia); M HKA (Antwerp); KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS (Vienna); Swiss Institute (New York); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou (Paris); Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai); Seoul Mediacity Biennale (Seoul); MUMA (Melbourne); Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju); Sigg Prize, M+ Museum (Hong Kong); New Museum Triennial (New York).
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 – 14th edition
With the contribution of:
Regione Toscana – Giovani Sì – Toscanaincontemporanea2025
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)
and thanks to the additional support from Human Company
Photo Credits: Maryam Tafakory, راز دل Razeh-del, 2024, video still. Courtesy the artist.
The participants are selected in partnership with:
- Careof (Milan)
- Cité internationale des arts (Paris)
- De Ateliers (Amsterdam)
- Delfina Foundation (London)
- 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)