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 12 - 23, 2025
Because of (U)
by Tohé Commaret
France, Chile, 2024, 13’
ov: French; st: English
Laura is trapped in a toxic relationship with a famous rapper, quietly enduring his selfish outbursts. After a violent argument, her reality begins to distort as she wanders through a bleak, ghostly suburb, feeling increasingly isolated and adrift. Haunted by obsessive thoughts and repressed memories, she struggles with social anxiety driven by a fear of missing out and an inability to form healthy relationships. Because of (U) blends documentary style with magical realism to uncover the lonely masks we wear to hide painful truths, while capturing the fragile and often contradictory dynamics of romantic relationships.
Regard du Louvre, Sans titre
by Rafik Greiss
Egypt, 2023, sound, 4’7’’
Greiss was among the twenty artists invited by the Louvre Museum to participate in their project “Regards du Louvre” for their 230th anniversary. For the occasion, he created Le premier musée d’enquête universelle, a visual travel essay reflecting on early 21st-century civilization through archival exploration and cultural contrasts. The work delves into the paradoxes of socially constructed ideals and cultural limitations, exploring the commonalities and differences between Western and Eastern worlds, and examining how people’s consciousness, belief systems, and behaviours relate to their environment, and how feelings, memories, and objects react when repositioned within an institutionalised and sacred environment.
Le Daftar
by Vir Andres Hera
Mexico, 2023, 32’ 8’’
ov: French, English; st: English
Shot in various formats (16mm, DV, digital, 35mm), Le Daftar captures performers as they reappropriate architectures and places through spontaneous rituals, words of uprising, and meditative communion. Filmed along the shores of the Atlantic and featuring artists such as Fabienne Guilbert, Léonce Konan Noah, Ife Day and Daniel Galicia, the work inhabits ruins as living archives where non‑Western deities return via gesture, voice, and the persistence of desire. The film emerges from shared experiences of immigration, exile, gender identity, and cultural multiplicity. It unfolds through an open, unscripted creative process that welcomes and integrates the practices of its participants, thereby redefining the very notion of authorship. The voice of poet Belinda Zhawi narrates like a pythia, offering a performative experience that echoes ancestral oral traditions, transforming listening itself into a cinematographic grammar. This version of Le Daftar has been specially edited for the MYMovies platform.
Moune Ô
by Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Belgium, France, French Guiana, 2022, 16’47’’
ov: French; st: English
Scenes of festive events accompanied the premiere of the film Jean Galmot, aventurier (1990) by Alain Maline, a “celebration” of the French presence in Guyana, in which Jean-Baptsite’s father appeared as an extra. By slowing down and rewinding this footage, together with video images surrounding the making of Maline’s film, Moune Ô reveals the colonial inheritance within the Western collective unconscious, still marked by persistent stereotypes. Through these technological alterations, Jean-Baptiste creates a retroactive challenge to colonial memory.
Guardian Angel
by Olukemi Lijadu
United Kingdom, Nigeria, 2022, 24’ 31’’
ov: English; st: English
Guardian Angel explores the artist’s upbringing as a Catholic Nigerian woman through her relationship with her late grandmother, reflecting a post-colonial society’s contradictory relationship to religion and spirituality. The work explores Nigerian and western histories and themes of grief, loss, and belief. Shot over seven years in Lagos and London, the film weaves archival footage, staged scenes, and intimate recordings. Its sound track is a live DJ set performed by the artist, blending audio from her grandmother’s funeral, forgotten 1970s Nigerian songs, and original compositions, creating a rich collage of sound and image. Working in the legacy of thinkers such as Prof. Sophie Oluwole and drawing on interviews of Fela Kuti, Guardian Angel entangles the personal with the political as she puts her relationship with her grandmother in conversation with the history of her nation.
RIVÂL
by Thomias Radin, Alex Brack & Mats Meisen
France, 2023, 18’ 38’’
Ov: English
Set in Greece, RIVÂL follows two rival dancers, Cibuqueira and Karukera, as they navigate themes of migration, identity, and belonging. Played by Thomias Radin and Andrège Bidiamambu, the characters — who are migrants — embark on an uncertain journey through a foreign land in search of themselves. Greece, itself a country shaped by migration, provides the backdrop as the dancers move through everyday spaces: the sea, bus stations, administrative buildings, museums, the rooftops of Athens, and modest homes. In the shared quest for belonging, the two rivals find one another through dance, using movement as a shared language.
LOOPHOLE
by Jordan Starfer
United States, 2023, 24’ 35’’
ov: English; st: English
LOOPHOLE is a short film chronicling a torrid romantic affair between a defense attorney and a juror during a nationally publicized Kennedy rape trial in the early 1990s. Drawing from actual court transcripts, the film re-enacts key moments from the trial while imagining the illicit relationship that unfolded behind the scenes. Blending fact and fiction in the erotic thriller genre popular at the time, LOOPHOLE offers an unsettling exploration of power, desire, and corruption within the legal system.
Grounds of Coherence #1, but this is the language we met in
by Shen Xin
China, 2023, 12’ 16’’
ov: English, Arabic, Hindi, Kazakh, Turkish, Uyghur, Mandarin, Tibetan; st: English
Protests in regional Mandarin, words for a story in Arabic, and a couple telling myth felt in English; what is heard, and what is then given meaning in these connectedness of migratory and loving nature. The wide-ranging imagery and multifaceted soundscape are permeated with the artist’s deep yearning to unearth language in its most primal and embodied forms, revealing both the persistence and fragility of communication across geographies and the essential, if imperfect, role of translation as an act of connection. Shen uses the tree in particular as an embodied metaphor for these “ecosystems of language”. Images of bark, branches, burning logs, and wooden walls appear throughout the short film, showing how language, like a tree, grows, changes, and holds memory.
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)