Field of Infinity – Guli Silberstein – United Kingdom – 2018 – 6 min. World Premiere!

“Inspired by renaissance paintings while visiting Italy, and outraged at Israeli deadly response to Palestinian protests at the Gaza border, I was moved to make this work, connecting classic paintings’ images of divine gestures and landscape views, to contemporary human attraction to news images, beauty, and blood. The work combines Gaza’s desire for liberation in the form of protests at the fence bordering Israel, Italy’s nature rejuvenation in the form of vibrant red poppy flower fields (with all the associations those contain) and a young girl’s youthful energy – an image of purity, but also fear and essentially loneliness. All are melded into a dark and colourful digital scramble, revealing and concealing, appearing and disappearing, a ground for discussion opening up an array of reflections. The field of infinity is endless but also self-contained, following Deleuze’s notion of plane of immanence. The work takes place here and now, there is nothing beyond, and at the same time it’s pointing to all directions.” – GS

Guli Silberstein. A video artist & editor based in London, UK, born in Israel (1969), now a British citizen. He received a BA in Film from Tel-Aviv University in 1997 and a MA in Media Studies from The New School University, New York City, where he studied and lived in 1997-2002. Since 2000, Guli creates short video works winning awards and shown worldwide in festivals and art venues such as: London Short Film Festival, Transmediale Berlin, Go Short the Netherlands, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival Germany, JIDFF Jihlava Czech Republic, Festival of (In)appropriation LA USA, The National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha, NE USA, and The Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, London.

Digital Trauma (And the Crystal Image) – Maria Molina Peiró – Netherlands – 2018 – 8 min

If we can access our past at any given moment, to what extent can we get rid of it and look ahead? What consequences do the access to a digital memory (including access to the words, images and sounds of the horrors of the past) have for post- conflict societies? Can a digital memory become a powerful tool to ignite more profound ethnic hate, violence and war? The unprecedented availability of online databases offering media-based documentation of the past can change people from passive consumers of history to interactive researchers. This creates an interesting scenario because it’s now easier to evaluate and compare contrasting representations of the past but also to create and disseminate fabricated versions of the past with its dangerous consequences. The Crystal Image (Deleuze) describes a moment where a past image becomes fused or confused with its presentness. In the film, post production is used as a conceptual tool to “traumatize” the Digital Image itself by using the slit scan technique. This effect creates images of time-based phenomena by merging different layers of time within a single image. The result is a liquid time, where the present becomes fused with the stream of images from the Google search box. All the images and sounds are the combinations of the real result from typing the words in Google search box.

 

Maria Molina Peiró is a filmmaker and audio-visual artist with a background in fine arts. She works in an open format mixing film, animation and digital media. Her body of work comprises Film, interactive installations and video art. Mari?a Molina’s films and art works have been showcased in international art spaces like EYE Film Museum (Amsterdam), MACBA (Museum of Modern Art Barcelona), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin, Hong-gah Museum (Taipei), Centre de Cultura Contempora?nia Barcelona (CCCB), Ci?rculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contempora?neo (CAAC) and International Festivals including Art Futura (Barcelona), VISS (Vienna International Film Festival), Taiwan International Videoart Bienal, DC Independent Film Festival (Washington DC), Amsterdam Spanish Film Festival, Forecast Forum (Berlin), Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona among others. Her work explores, among other things, the fluctuating nature of time through different time-scales and memory systems (Neuroscience, Historical memory, Digital Memory and Geology). She is particularly interested in how the ubiquity and pervasive nature of Digital Technology is reshaping the view of our past and therefore our identity. Mari?a holds a BA from the US (University of the Arts, Sevilla) and graduated Cum Laude from the Master of Film at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. She’s based in Amsterdam.

Beyond Action – Ana Rodríguez León – Spain – 2018 – 6 min

 

The wife of a pilot of the film Top Gun discusses the interconnection between the images throughout time and the mystery involving her husband’s death. Fiction essay that analyzes the boundaries between image, violence and reality.

Ana Rodríguez León. Born in Barcelona in 1981, she studied cinema at ESCAC (Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Cataluna), before moving to Madrid in 2006, where she develops her professional career. Her work is an inner and aesthetic search around the identity construction and its relation with representation, memory and body. She uses in her works several materials (S8, HD, found footage) to explore fiction, documentary, video art and its borders. She has directed the works El Sustituto (The Substitute) (post-production, 2018), Beyond Action (2018), El Umbral de Cristal (The Glass Threshold) (2105), Mundinuevo (Mundinuevo) (2014), Cranc (Cranc) (2014), La Maquina Espiritual(The Spiritual Machine) (2012), Memorais (Memorais) (2012, Super8), Bell & Howell 2146 XL (Bell & Howell 2146 XL) (2011), Lineas de Luz (Lines of Light) (2009). Her works have been screened at several national and international festivals: Message to man (Russia), Filmadrid (Spain), Miden Videoart (Greece), FIVA (Argentina), Festival Internacional de Las Palmas (Spain), Cologne Off (Germany), Madatac (Spain), Open Eyes FF (Germany), Cinespaña (France), Anthology Film Archives through Another Experiment by Women Film Festival (USA), and Simultan (Romania), between others. Beside, her works have been shown at museums and art galleries such as the Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei) and Centre d’Art Santa Monica (Spain). She has been recognized with several prizes. More information at:http://www.anarodriguezleon.com/blog

Uprooting Ghosts: A Queer “Fantasia on National Themes” – Rafal Morusiewicz – Poland – 2017 – 47 min

It’s year 1971, Warsaw. Walking around the city, Andrzej encounters ghosts of his parents, of his childhood friends, and of the victims of the state’s 1967-68 anti-Jewish propaganda, which led to the forced emigration of several thousand Polish Jews. One of them is his close friend, Maks, who, after an alleged suicide, is identified by a police investigator as “homosexual.” It’s year 1967, Warsaw. A group of former medicine students celebrate their graduation anniversary. They share a history of being accused of a serious offence against the state for messing up the installation of a gigantic portrait of Stalin. It’s year 1957, Budapest. Éva Szalánczky, a black-listed political journalist, is on her way to a job interview at a state-controlled weekly journal. There, she meets Livia, with whom she starts a relationship, recognized by the state as “lesbian” and therefore illicit. Both Éva and Livia are played by Polish actresses. A mash-up of experimental re-searching, Uprooting Ghosts: A Queer “Fantasia on National Themes” aims to capture the oppressive mood of 1952-1989 political and social realities in Poland and Hungary through contaminating/queering found-footage material with fragments of queer desire, auto-ethnography, and mixtape editing aesthetic. The work combines samples of three Polish and Hungarian films: Hands Up! (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1982), How Far Away, How Near (dir. Tadeusz Konwicki, 1971), and Another Way (dir. Karoly Makk & Janos Xantus, 1982), along with more than a dozen other films, texts, songs, and sounds.

Rafal Morusiewicz is a PhD-in-Practice candidate at Akademie der bildende Kuenste Wien (AT), completing his second doctoral dissertation in Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw (PL). His “PhD in Practice” dissertation and artistic project map queerable moments in the films set in, produced in, and/or invoking Poland’s 1952-1989. His film and writing practice is informed by the historiographic and auto-ethnographic working with affective memory, which manifests in the weave of film, sonic, and textual interventions into the found-footage film material. Currently based in Vienna, Morusiewicz is also a faculty adjunct at Webster Vienna Private University (AT), where he teaches courses that intersect gender/queer studies, film studies, and social sciences.

Rashid Mohamed was born and raised in the foothills of the Alps, but his roots lie in east Africa. Rashid is an ambitious writer who served as managing editor of the Arapahoe Pinnacle as well as the art & photography editor of the triple-award winning literary journal PROGENITOR. To compliment his B.A. in political science, Rashid recently completed his associate degree in Contemporary Journalism. Working several years with the United Nations has provided Rashid with a curious international perspective on human behavior which he likes to focus on in his writing.