Great Dismal Swamp – Jason Sudak – USA – 2018 – 11 min

Contact and underwater microphones are combined with 16mm film to portray the real and imagined landscapes of the Great Dismal Swamp. Once upon a time, George Washington drained it. Then it became the largest refuge for escaped slaves in the US. Edgar Allen Poe hung a picture of it on his wall. Robert Frost went there to commit a romantic suicide, but didn’t.

Jason Sudak is an artist who works in film and sound. He has an MFA from Duke University and currently lives in Durham, NC.

La Cognizione del Calore – Salvatore Insana – Italy – 2017 – 12 min

The heat cognition. a summer day in a city park. a scorcher. Those who can not escape looking surrogates to their holiday mood. The beaches are colored in green and off-stage feeds the view. childish and burned plots views. Pursuits to loss of sight. That place is loaded with ghosts. Of presence. What is now a public park was once a great psychiatric hospital in Collegno, near Turin. Perhaps ghosts have remained among those gardens. A mystical surplus is evident. And the cognition of extreme heat is one that leads to a dimension of alterity, life burned by life itself.

Salvatore Insana graduated in 2010 at Dams di Roma Tre with a work on the concept of useless. In 2011 he creates with Elisa Turco Liveri the collective Dehors/Audela, producing, in the constant attempt to overcome genres, places and tools “deputies”, theater pieces, audiovisual research projects, urban installations, experimental workshops. Carrying forward his research among moving images, photography, performing arts and other forms of revision and erosion of the imaginary, he has collaborated with numerous musicians and sound artists (including Simone Pappalardo, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, Giulia Vismara, Jacob Kirkegaard) and his works have been presented in numerous multidisciplinary festivals in Italy and abroad.

Grabados del Ojo Nocturno – Jean-Jacques Martinod – Morocco/Ecuador – 2016 – 7 min

A collage of collected imagery turned ritual travelogue: from the Sahara to the oceans of South America, passing through an old ancestor’s abode.

Jean-Jacques Martinod is a filmmaker and visual artist originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador. His films have screened in a variety of venues including the Museum of The Moving Image and festivals such as FIDMarseille, EDOC (Encuentros del Otro Cine), Festival Dei Popoli, Les Inattendus festival de films (très) indépendants, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, ULTRACinema Festival de Cine Experimental y Found Footage, Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media, among others, while also in a variety of galleries and DIY venues. His films oscillate between non-fiction traditions utilizing formal experiments in celluloid film, analogue tape, digital media, and archival footage. He resides in Montreal, Canada, where he is a member of both the Global Emergent Media Lab and the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, where he is currently an MFA candidate.

Re-Vue – Dirk de Bruyn – Australia – 2018 – 7 min

Re-Vue is a mutilated love-letter to the film’s form in address to the the act of seeing itself. It is shaped as a response to, and in dialogue with, Mike Hoolboom’s Color My World ( 3 minutes, 2017, Canada). A flicker-fest lamenting a lost relationship with narrative cinema, by which it is forever marked. Yet there are hints for a way back in this age of surveillance.

Dirk de Bruyn has made numerous animations, performance and installation work since 1973. Retrospective programs of his animations have been presented at Melbourne International Animation Festival (2016), Alternativa, Belgrade, Serbia (2015) and Punto Y Raya, Karlsruhe Germany (2016). His book The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art was published in 2014. His filmography is partially documented at: http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn.html His academic writing can be further sourced at: https://deakin.academia.edu/DirkdeBruyn

Teardown – Kate E. Hinshaw – USA – 2018 – 4 min

Based on a series of dreams, Teardown is an experimental short film that blurs the line between fantasy and reality through hand painted 16mm and super 8mm film. Through lush colors and phantasmagoric imagery it depicts a story of divorce, gentrification, and the fraught relationship between mother and daughter that surfaced from the destruction a home.

Kate E. Hinshaw is a filmmaker and visual storyteller who hand paints and distresses 8mm and 16mm film. Through the tactile manipulation and destruction of celluloid, her work depicts internalized conflicts of memory and nostalgia. She was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “As a filmmaker, I create experimental films that externalize internal narratives of the subconscious mind and create visceral viewing experiences. My practice includes hand-processing and distressing celluloid film using coffee, bleach, India ink, nail polish, hairspray, craft materials, and a typewriter in order to create chaotic dreamscapes. In exploring narratives of the subconscious, I expose internal conflict, particularly as it relates to issues facing women and the phenomenon of internalizing trauma. By doing so, I render internalized womanhood visible and shift the cinematic gaze from a perspective that often objectifies women to one that seeks to express the experiences of womanhood holistically.” – KH

History of a Dying Eye – Mattia Biondi – Italy – 2017 – 4 min

An eye dies, and the last visions, film emulsions and fragments of life crumble within it. This work explores the materiality of creative process and it is a declaration of impossibility in the act of seeing.

Mattia Biondi is an italian independent filmmaker mostly focused on images study and interested in specific purpose of Cinema. His research is mainly directed to the development of anti-narrative creative processes, aimed at expressing the inner sound of the ideas. This work is a poetic and contemplative investigation into the contemporary. His works have been screened at numerous international film festivals, including Pesaro Film Festival, Bogota? Experimental Film Festival, ULTRAcinema, Punto y Raya Festival.

De.Cadence – Marisol Bellusci & Luis Saray – Argentina/Colombia – 2018 – 3 min

Operating on vestiges of analogical film, this piece goes from being just a material object to being a reformed film through the appropriation of one medium on another (photo / video), going from analog material to digital information. Found footage used in a videographic way, to form an object of hybrid aesthetics and recycling manners for the experimental resignification of a commercial movie with a script about couple relationships deconstructing and reconfiguring its narrative.

Marisol Bellusci is a video artist, professor of Visual Arts and a feminist. Completing a Master’s Degree in Combined Art Languages ??at Universidad National of Art in Buenos Aires.  Production coordinator and curator for the Videopoetry Videobardo Festival. Currently her artistic productions gather expanded video and sound experimentation.

Luis Saray studied Fine Arts at the UJTL (Jorge Tadeo Lozano University), Visual Arts at the Academy of Arts A.S.A.B. in Bogotá, and the Specialization and Magister Degree in Lenguajes Artísticos Combinados (mixed artistic languages) ??at the National University of Arts U.N.A. in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He works in different medias; his videos were shown in exhibitions as the “Inter-American Biennial of Video Art” (BID) IDC Cultural Center. Washington D.C., Video Brasil Cultural Association (Sao Paulo, Brasil), Bogotá Film Festival (Colombia), Alta Tecnología Andina ATA (Cultural) Lima Perú, Loop ’09 Istituto Europeo di Design IED Barcelona, Chateau CAC centro de Arte contemporáneo (Córdoba, Argentina), Istituto Italo-Latino Americano in Rome, Museo del Barrio New York, Qorikancha Cusco Perú, “Yoveo International Video Festival”. The Suffolk Space / At CVS Cultural Center New York City, “Videopolis Helsinki” Helsinki Finland, “imagen Regional 7” Salas de exposiciones del Banco de la República de  Colombia, “Daliudens” Fundación Telefónica  in Lima,  festival “Video Bardo” National Library in Buenos Aires, the National Exhibition of Artists (Mincultura Col), the “Latin American selected Art exhibition” by the Spanish international cooperation agency (AECID) Centro Cultural de España en México CCMx, “I Festival Iberoamericano de videoarte ” Centro Cultural de España CCE Lima, Perú, “youth art” Modern Art Museum of Bogotá (MAMBO), “Lado V” La Verdi Buenos Aires, Argentina “New contemporary scene” at the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires Arg, “Osmosis” audiovisual festival in Taipei, the audiovisual festival “now and after ” Moscow.

The Garden of Delight – Michael Fleming – Netherlands – 2017 – 12 min

Three scenes reflecting on paradise, lust and hell. In The Garden of Delight beauty and evil go together like in a dream. We dive into a world of erotic derangement, inhabited by dancing lovers, lustful mutated baboons, tropical birds, deformed pin-ups, butterflies and Body-builders. This hand-manipulated collage film, made entirely out of 35 and 8mm found-footage, explores the marriage between heaven and hell, our irresolvable endless conflict that goes with human nature. Inspired on the triptych ‘the Garden of Delight by Jheronimus Bosch. Music composed, recorded, mixed, and edited by: Aaron Michael Smith.

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.

Reading Curator and Readers

Jessica Lawson is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose work has appeared in The Fanzine; Yes, Poetry; Cosmonauts Avenue; The Wanderer; FLAG + VOID; Dream Pop and elsewhere. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Smith College, a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, and an MFA from CU-Boulder, where she served as an editor for Timber Journal. Her chapbook Rot Contracts was a finalist for the New Delta Review 2017-2018 Chapbook Contest. She teaches classes on creative writing and LGBT literature in Colorado, and has just completed a manuscript about the downfalls of trying to power bottom the patriarchy.