After 10 years of activity, in 2022 VISIO further expands by introducing the VISIO Production Fund, a production fund worth 40,000 euros developed in partnership with Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome), FRAC Bretagne (Rennes), and Seven Gravity Collection.
The funds have been awarded to four artists selected among the eight participants of the 11th edition of VISIO, who collaborated with Leonardo Bigazzi and the Schermo dell’arte team to each create a work that will be premiered at the 16th edition of Schermo dell’arte in 2023.
An artist’s edition of each of the produced works will become part of the permanent collection of the four partnering institutions, which are committed to promoting and exhibiting them in the following years.
The selected artists of the inaugural edition of the VISIO Production Fund are: Simon Liu, Gerard Ortín Castellví, Maryam Tafakory, and Yuyan Wang.
Simon Liu
In his practice Liu 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. Liu’s work has been presented at film festivals and museums globally including the Berlinale International Film Festival (Berlin), Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival (Salt Lake City, Utah), New Directors/New Films with MoMA & Film at Lincoln Center (New York), BFI London Film Festival, The Shed (New York), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, MOCA Los Angeles, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and in a solo program at MoMA as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently included Liu’s Quadruple 16mm Projection Highview, along with other recent works, in their Permanent Collections.
Gerard Ortín Castellví
Gerard Ortín Castellví is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher currently doing a Ph.D. and teaching at the MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths University London. His practice focuses on the relationship between moving images and the technologies and ecologies of food in the context of the current environmental transformations. He is 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 Bureau Amsterdam, and Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo). His works have been screened in institutions like the Anthology Film Archives (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), LUX (London) and festivals like Berlinale International Film Festival (Berlin), Visions du Réel (Nyon), Open City Film Festival (London), Cinéma du Réel (Paris), KVIFF (Karlovy Vary), HKIFF (Hong Kong).
Ph. credits KVIFF – Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Maryam Tafakory
She works with images, words, and feelings to create textual and filmic collages that stitch together poetry, documentary, performance, archival, and found material. She is interested in depictions of erasure, secrecy, and the violence of invisible regulatory bodies. Her research-based projects, look at what is often neglected and discarded as trivial, excessive, or unscientific. She completed her MFA at Oxford University, and her work has been exhibited internationally, including: Cannes Film Festival; MoMA (New York); Locarno Film Festival; IFFR (Rotterdam); Oberhausen Film Festival; FICUNAM (Mexico City); ICA London; HKW Berlin; True/False (Columbia, Missouri); M HKA (Antwerp); and Anthology Film Archives (New York) amongst others. Awards include the Best Experimental Short at 70th MIFF (Milan), Gold Hugo Award at 58th Chicago International Festival, Tiger Short Award at 51st International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Barbara Hammer Feminist Award at 60th AAFF (Ann Arbor, Michigan), amongst others.
Yuyan Wang
Yuyan Wang is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the impact of image creation in media, representation, and the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her practice focuses on the mutation of the industrial production chain of images, whose endless development leads to an abstraction of reality. 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 (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Berlin Biennale and numerous festivals such as Berlinale International Film Festival (Berlin), International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), 25FPS International Experimental Film Festival (Zagreb).
Ph. credits Ji Aiqing
Single File
by Simon Liu
co-produced with Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Single File is a sensorially dense experimental depiction of human engagement with the overwhelming amount of information encountered through our devices, and of how this may alter our cognitive relationship to space. Hong Kong, where the artist was born, has always been central to his identity and artistic practice. Liu decided to comprehensively archive the evolving climate of the region, which has drastically mutated politically and culturally since the 2019 civic upheaval, through dense layers of shrouded imagery from personal documents. As the city faces mounting censorship, misinformation, and cultural disappearance, the artist seeks new lexicons through formal experimentation to articulate concepts now obfuscated from public discourse.
Still credits: Simon Liu, Single File, 2023. Video stills. Courtesy the artist, Lo schermo dell’arte, and Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Bliss Point
by Gerard Ortín Castellví
co-produced with Fondazione In Between Art Film
Bliss Point focuses on the transformation of food into moving images by documenting the new regimes and infrastructures of distribution. From the advanced technologies of circulation in AI-managed warehouses to commercial perception and representation in food photography studios, the journey portrays fragmented coexisting realities. The term Bliss Point refers to a specific amount of an ingredient such as salt, sugar or fat in order to optimize the palatability of a product. In the film, this concept is expanded to include other aesthetic and scopic qualities. As the third piece of a trilogy on food production (Agrilogistics, 2022), distribution (Bliss Point, WIP) and consumption (Future Foods, 2021) it completes his long-term investigation Technologies and Ecologies of Food Regimes.
Still credits: Gerard Ortín Castellví, Bliss Point, 2023. Video stills. Courtesy the artist, Lo schermo dell’arte, and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Sukhte-del
by Maryam Tafakory
co-produced with Seven Gravity Collection
Sukhte-del is a film about disobedient bodies in Iranian post-revolution cinema, attempting to reorient our attention from the limitations of censorship to the everyday resistance of the bodies that are erased both on and off the silver screen. Working with collected excerpts, sounds, words, and feelings, this research-based project delves into a cinematic history reworked into fresh arrangements as a way of inscribing buried stories and histories.
Turning the fictional films into a non-fiction fragment of the political realities of contemporary Iran, Tafakory argues for cinema’s complicity with state violence. Sukhte–del continues the artist’s research on the representation of women in Iranian films and is part of a trilogy of which the first chapter, Mast-del, premiered at the 55th Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.
Still credits: Maryam Tafakory, Sukhte del, 2023. Video stills. Courtesy the artist, Lo schermo dell’arte, and Seven Gravity Collection
The Moon Also Rises
by Yuyan Wang
produced by Petit Chaos
co-produced with FRAC Bretagne
The Moon Also Rises is inspired by China’s 2018 initiative to launch three artificial moons for endless daylight. The film envisions a drift into the eternal glow through a nocturnal society dominated by relentless efficiency. A collective hallucination sustained by everlasting activity, accessibility and connection. Lethargic crowds are immersed in fluorescent landscapes while machines enter a trance-like state performing repetitive tasks on the production line of luminous gadgets. Haunted by memories of omnipresent brightness, people search for the fossils of light within the mineral dust tracing the “light” back to its earthly origins. Guided by Édouard Glissant’s call for “le droit à l’opacité” (the right to opacity), the film contemplates the myth of immaterial new technologies, offering an enigmatic interplay between technology light and darkness in our modern world. A first version of the work was presented as an installation at the 12th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2022.
Still credits: Yuyan Wang, My views on the Darkness, 2023. Video stills. Courtesy the artist, Lo schermo dell’arte, and FRAC Bretagne
VISIO. European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images – XI edizione
promosso e prodotto dallo Schermo dell’arte
a cura di Leonardo Bigazzi
in collaborazione con:
- Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato)
- Fondazione In Between Art Film (Roma)
- Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi (Firenze)
- FRAC Bretagne (Rennes)
- Seven Gravity Collection
Ph. Credits: Maryam Tafakory, Sukhte del, 2023. Video stills. Courtesy the artist, Lo schermo dell’arte, and Seven Gravity Collection
La selezione dei partecipanti è realizzata in partnership con
- Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera
- Art House (Scutari)
- AV-arkki – The Centre for Finnish Media Art (Helsinki)
- Careof (Milano)
- Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid
- De Ateliers (Amsterdam)
- Gasworks (Londra)
- Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlino)
- La Casa Encendida (Madrid)
- Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing)
- Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam)
- Royal College of Art (Londra)
- Royal Institute of Art (Stoccolma)
- Städelschule (Francoforte)
- WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre (Bruxelles)
Lo schermo dell’arte 2022 è realizzato con il contributo di
• MIC – Direzione generale Cinema e audiovisivo
• Regione Toscana | Giovanisì | Toscanaincon
• Comune di Firenze
• Città Metropolitana di Firenze
main supporter
Fondazione CR Firenze
con il sostegno di
• Fondazione Sistema Toscana | Cinema La Compagnia
• Ambasciata del Regno dei Paesi Bassi
• Institut français Italia
in collaborazione con
• 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
Sponsor tecnico
• Alterama