Join us on Wednesday, September 25, 7:30pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave., Denver) for night 6 of the Unseen Festival 2019!

Reading

ellie swensson is a queer southern ex-pat currently writing poems in denver, CO. she earned her MFA from Naropa in 2015 and is the founder and co-director of Bolder Writers Warehouse, a mobile writers’ community resource. swensson is a firm believer that poetics is what occurs where eros, divinity, activism, and careful craft intersect. her first book of poems, salt of us, is forthcoming from Punch Drunk Press this October. and while she encourages you to buy a copy (of 2) of her book, she will always, always prefer her words alive in the mouth and the body. “I have a few thematic voices I like to travel between in a reading: activist, witchy/divinatory, and erotic. All of these can be involved in a single piece or embodied in their own distinctive cadence. Vulnerability, responsibility, and evocation are goals for my writing and performances. I honestly have no idea what pieces I will bring or create for this event. I’m feeling called to expressing more intimacy these days, the minutia of lovers and of inspiration and of revelation, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that motivation carries into this set.”

Dance

Laura Malpass is a ballet and contemporary dance teaching artist, dancer, and choreographer, interested in the ways dance can transcend all boundaries we perceive or feebly construct, empowering individuals and transforming communities for the better. After graduating with a major in Psychology and minors in Dance in French from Hope College, she toured California and the southwestern states with contemporary company Moving Arts and danced with Coco et Compagnie in the SF Bay Area. Teaching is her passion, and she has taught dance courses and as a guest artist in public schools, retirement communities, dance studios, community centers, and universities. This past May, Laura completed her MFA in Dance at CU Boulder, with a secondary emphasis in Somatics and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies. She creates dance work rooted in story and identity to unpack how our physical bodies hold the memory of our emotional, relational, and experiential lives

rick h m is a QTPOC, anti-disciplinary artist based in Boulder, CO. They are a current MFA (Choreography) candidate at University of Colorado Boulder, and a Graduate Part-Time Instructor in the Theatre & Dance Department. rick received their BA (Dance & Sociology) from Wesleyan University, concentrating in performance studies and choreography as a means of ascribing a creative process rooted in imagining queer utopia(s). Their scholarly research on queer utopia has further led to community building via various artistic/life pursuits, including their performing under the stage name, umami goddess™. rick’s current research interests include emerging technologies (AI/machine-learning), absurdism/comedy, decolonizing studies, Asian-diasporic studies, queer theory, and how dance might constantly be reimagined towards hybrid art practices representative of hybrid lived experiences. rick has worked with and studied beneath noted dance makers/scholars including Michelle Ellsworth, Rennie Harris, Darrell Jones, Katja Kolcio, Bebe Miller, Eiko Otake, Erika Randall, and Nicole Stanton. Through written and embodied forms of creative research, rick calls for a dismantling of the systems that enforce control over our abilities to liberate our social bodies.

Keith Haynes, a Houston native, is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and video projection designer who recently received his MFA in Dance, with an emphasis in video technology, from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Haynes began his dance training in 2012 while pursuing his BFA in Radio/Television at Stephen F. Austin State University under the direction of Heather Samuelson and Katie Parr. As an interdisciplinary artist, Haynes fuses contemporary modern dance and video projection to investigate and explore identity, race, and his Christian faith. Haynes’s research emerges from investigations with reference to notions of how identities collide and coincide within one body. His work aims to undo the recurring patterns of normalcy and compliance imposed upon people of color and uncover the misconnections between identities that lead to self-regulation, perpetuated by internal and external forces deemed socially tolerable. Recently, Haynes has worked and trained with Heather Samuelson, Gesel Mason, Larry Southall, Chris and Bashir Page-Sanders and Helanius J. Wilkins. Additionally, Haynes has performed in works at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and the American College Dance Association Gala concerts in Eugene, Oregon and Boulder, Colorado.Currently, Haynes is working on multiple projects throughout the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area that include video projection design and dance curation for The Unseen Festival

Film

Monsters Walking – Diego Porral – Spain – 2018 – 1 min

Monsters Walking is a short film about monsters that walk.

Diego Porral (Madrid, Spain, 1992). He’s currently studying Animation at Gobelins (Paris, France). Monsters Walking is his third short film as a director and animator. His previous short film, “A day in the park” (original title: “Un día en el parque”) was nominated to the Goya Award to Best Animated Short Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Spain and reached more than 100 international selections and 20 awards.

Exile – Murat Sayginer – Turkey – 2019 – 3 min

Earth is a prison planet and humans are in exile.

Murat Sayginer is a self-taught artist who works in the fields of photography and digital art, and is also known as a filmmaker and composer. Born in Prague in 1989, Murat Sayg?ner studied in Paris during his childhood and graduated from Lycee Charles De Gaulle high school in Ankara. He got involved with photography in 2007 and won several international awards. In 2008 his works were selected for ”IPA BEST OF SHOW” exhibition in New York. In 2010 he was awarded Emerging Talent of the Year in the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards. He has written, directed and produced several animated short films since 2013. His films were screened in over 150 film festivals and 6 of them were staff picked on Vimeo. He is currently living and working as a freelancer in Ankara. 

Crash Test – Estelle Vétois – France – 2018 – 2 min

Crash Test is a loop video installation inspired by the scanning movement and gradually revealing a picture. Crash Test is based on a reflection about the border between photography and video, a reflection on the image by the image.

The origin of the project is a photo album found at a flea market which recounted the career of a cameraman at the ORTF (Office of French Television Broadcasting created in 1964 and replaced in 1974). The selected picture for Crash Test expands the frame by showing what is usually hid- den : the film set and the cameramen. A first way to question the limits of the media image and its nature : is it the real or a construction of real?

By constantly appearing and disappearing, the image becomes a mental phenomenon, a diffe- rent experience according to our cultural references, our memory and our level of concentration at the time.

That’s why Crash Test could be characterized as a «mirror piece», that is, a piece that brings us back to our own experience as a spectator. To support this idea, the image shows a public facing an accident scene bringing back us to our own experience and our desire to restore the whole picture from a fragmented space. It’s always a tension between construction/destruction.

Playing with the curiosity of each one, Crash Test tries to relearn how to look at the image. Against the “fast picture”, should we see less to see better ?

Estelle Vétois was born in Paris in 1992.During her studies of information and communication where she was introduced to the sociology of mass media, Estelle Vétois began to develop a reflection on the use of photography or video in the media, especially on television. It is for her to no longer consider these images as objective evidence but as a construction of the real. From 2014, she continues her training at the School of Fine Arts in Metz. Faced with our increasingly excessive consumption of images and the resulting visual saturation, she decides to work on the fragility of the image, to explore its technical limits and to reveal its missing part. She draws inspiration from images she finds on television or at flea markets. This is to stop the flow and slow down, to find a new temporality for the image. She graduated (master degree) in 2018 with the congratulations of the jury and won the first prize in her school for Crash Test. In the same year, she received the Rotary Award for another piece : Unknown Location. Her work has recently been shown at Galerie Neuf in Nancy, at Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, at Galerie 0.15 in Metz.

Merry Go Round – Ihor Podolchak – Ukraine – 2017 – 5 min

Somnambulistic circus Ribera & Velazquez welcomes everyone to the show “Merry-Go-Round”, where shadows, that escaped the Platonic cave, turn the carousel in the foggy catacombs.

Ihor Podolchak. Born 1962 in Lviv, Ukraine. Graduated with distinction from the Lviv Academy of Fine Arts, 1984. Filmmaker, artist, creator of extensive projects in the field of visual art, laureate at 25 international art exhibitions in Canada, the United States, South Korea, Latvia, Poland, Norway, Spain, and Ukraine. Among 24 personal exhibitions, one bears the distinction of being the first art exhibit ever to be held in space, aboard the Space Station Mir, in 1993. The artwork of Ihor Podolchak is housed in 26 museums and public collections worldwide.

Parrall | Axe – Maxime Hot – France – 2018 – 7 min

“Parallax, a term derived from the Greek, means “contiguous displacement”.

In optics, parallax is one of the main indices that allow the perception of depth.

In psychology, parallax is a modification of subjectivity, the difference of perception of the same reality.

A subject is said to be a parallax when he perceives a reality or a state in a different sense, and manages to decenter from his own perception to construct a new sense of the same reality.

In the cinema world, parallax is used as an effect that marks the contrast between the subject and the background.

For that we realize a movement of camera, a traveling most often.” – MH

Maxime Hot. Enthusiastic moviegoer, He’s interested in experimental, arthouse, bis, documentary and underground cinemas. He studied cinema at the University of Lyon (France) and wrote about scientific photography of the 19th century and experimental movies. At the same time he organized several screenings (hallucinogenic cinema, movies-concert…). He’s involved in several festival (Les Inattendus) and collectives (Les Enthousiastes, Météorites). He makes short experimental videos (especially from chosen footage) since 2016.

Never Never Land – Michael Fleming – Netherlands – 2018 – 9 min

Never Never Land is about our obsession with physical perfection, our domination and wanting to control everything. Not only being the perfect human being but also creating him. Chance is replaced by choice.

This idea that all is possible and engineerable arises the belief that even our fantasy is realizable. ‘Shaping my life’ this becomes our individual main goal; our life as a project.

In our greedy ‘me-itis’ we want to fully explore ourselves, create our ultimate dream. Our demand to be ‘Homo Perfectus’, being Superman, the DIY-made Uber-God 3.0!

Michael Fleming is an Amsterdam based visual artist. In essence his work appropriates iconic cultural images, altering them to highlight underlying issues. His ‘moving paintings’ are primarily made out of found footage, using feature films, advertising and pop-cultural scenes completed into a mesmerising montage of images. Flemings work has been featured in exhibitions and film festivals internationally.

32-Rbit – Victor Orozco Ramirez – Germany/Mexico – 2018 – 9 min

“My grandmother was convinced that the only animal that made the same mistake twice is the human being and I was convinced that everything can be fixed with CTRL+Z.

An essay short film about my very own Internet, a parallel world where memory loss, errors, surveillance and addiction smear everything and everyone.” – VOR

Victor Orozco Ramirez. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Hamburg Germany with a master’s degree in Fine Arts in the area of documentary filmmaking. He also organized in Ecuador, Germany and Mexico until 2012 the short film festival ambulart.

The Last Day of the Luna Moth – Guillaume Vallée – Canada – 2019 – 5 min

A luna moth is dying under the eyes of a child. From the point of view of the insect, we hear the child wonder about death, post-mortem and ephemeral, in the form of a monologue inspired by Cioran.

Experimental filmmaker, video artist and independent curator, Guillaume Vallée graduated from Concordia University with a Major in Film Animation and an MFA in Studio Arts – Film Production option. He’s interested in alternative forms of moving images in analogue forms as a way of considering the direct interaction between different mediums. His work is an exploration of materiality within the creative process. In attempts of creating a more complex relationship with his subject matter, Vallée makes use of cross-medium forms that range from camera-less techniques to optical effects, glitch, video feedback, resulting in expended & hybrid pieces. He works mainly on Super8, 16mm and VHS. 
Vallée is questioning the notions of recycling & reappropriation, treating all material as found footage within a collaborative practice, in film, video & performance. His audiovisual performances have been shown in various festivals in Canada, USA, France, Italy and Japan and his experimental films and videos, distributed by Vidéographe and Winnipeg Film Group, have been screened internationally. His short film, Le bulbe tragique, won the ”Best Canadian Work” at WNDX (Festival of Moving Image) in 2016. 
Guillaume Vallée has been an artist-in-residence at La Bande Vidéo (Quebec, Canada) in 2017 and at Le Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, FR) & Signal Culture (Owego, USA) in 2018.

Strange Animal – Arthur B. Senra – Brazil – 5 min

Strange animal, the dictatorship: men without wings, birds without feet

Arthur B. Senra is Brazilian. He studied Film and Video and has a specialization in Creative Processes in Words and Image. He is a director of short films, music videos, professor of audiovisual workshops, and also collaborated on several film projects. His works have been featured in national and international festivals, receiving several awards. He worked as assistant director of the MUMIA – Underground World Animation Festival from 2006 to 2015. From 2016 to 2018 he was curator and programmer of the Sesc Palladium movie theater in Belo Horizonte. Currently lives in Brasilia and works as curator and programmer of film festivals.

Temple of Truth – Giuseppe Boccassini – USA – 2018 – 15 min

Temple of Truth is an archive that constantly ambulates amid tangles of decaying worlds, ex-perienced as petrified, deprived, residual traces, preserving in the process of taking along and transforming itself, a magmatic state, a specific, ancestral, sometimes whitish non-space. A liveliness of half-alive bodies , both human and animal, that catch fire in a latent bullfight and which, in becoming pers?nae, inhabit sarcophagi which crumble into solid ground like streams of water that suddenly submerge clouds, swinging on the brink of a vertiginous fall of nocturnal glances in the middle of exotic poses and aerial visions.

CFA International Media Mixer 2018

Sound: Alex Inglizian

Giuseppe Boccassini is an Italian filmmaker mainly working in Germany and Italy. He graduated in film theory at the University of Bologna and in film direction at The New University of Cinema and Television located in Cinecittà, Rome.  His work has been shown at several international film festivals and exhibitions , including FID Marseille, France, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Schottland, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival , Czech Republic ,Torino Film Festival , Italy, FESTACURTAS BH , Brasil, Crossroads SF, USA, Avvistamenti , Italy, Punto de Vista, Spain, Trentino History Museum, Italy, Pesaro Film Festival, Italy. His entire film production is distributed by Light Cone. By transforming and manipulating various sources of archival material, his work reflects upon the notion of a haptic proximity of contemporary media. The director considers film as “a phallic conqueror that, folding in on itself, now flaccid deus ex machina, observes itself from the inside like a lysergic membrane that slowly founders between the folds of its own material”. His most recent collaborations include the film editing for Aldo Tambellini’s solo exhibition Black Matters, at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany and is the artist for Chicago Film Archives’ 2018 Media Mixer.  He is in charge of the programme at Fracto, an Experimental Film Encounter at ACUD macht neu, Berlin. 

Untitled, Fourth Movement – Ricardo Perea & Julio Lamaña – Colombia – 2018 – 24 min

Untitled, Fourth Movement brings us closer to both dreams and nightmares of the colombian people to verify that the echos of conflict and violence nest in the collective unconscious. “The dreams of reason breed monsters”. It’s a documentary filmed in “Mundo Aventura” Bogota’s amusement park.

Ricardo Perea. (Bogotá – Colombia) .- 25 years of work in the field of community communication, audiovisual production and photography for social change in Colombia. His work has focused on making visible proposals for alternative development of indigenous, peasant and Afro-descendant communities, based on the recognition of cultural identity and traditional forms of production that guarantee food sovereignty, fair trade, gender equity, sense of belonging over the territory, environmental sustainability and economic autonomy.

Julio Lamaña.- (Barcelona – Catalonia). President of the Catalan Federation of Cineclubs (FCC) from May 2003 to September 2006. He is also the Secretary General of the International Federation of Cineclubs. Within the international sphere, he is the promoter in the South of Europe of the alternative distributor CINESUD, which promotes alternative cinema to all film societies on the planet. Founding partner of the cinema club BEC (Barcelona Espai de Cinema) that organizes its activities in the city of Barcelona. Professor of film history.