by Marine de Dardel ‘The Colour out of Space’ reflects the transmutation of the image through the combined use of computational tools and poetic fiction, superimposing abstract visuals with evocative text. Scripted with the p5.js web editor,1 shaded forms slowly emerge, morph, and fade as each point value is mapped across the HSB spectrum. […]
by Kevin B. Lee During the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, the Future of Cinema research team at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) organised a three-day conference to reflect on cinema’s relevance to the question of survival. Titled ‘The Future of Survival’, the conference convened 50 scholars, students, filmmakers, and artists for presentations and discussions on […]
by Chiara Grizzaffi A lake, an image Upon learning that the Future of Survival conference I was about to attend – organised in Locarno by Locarno Film Festival and Università della Svizzera italiana, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation – would include a practical workshop in which we would not be working on […]
by Silvia Cipelletti and Evelyn Kreutzer This video essay grew out of an experiment, which took place over the course of half a day during the Locarno Film Festival. The experiment arose from the observation of a particular phenomenon: an apparent disconnect between the international and glamorous atmosphere of the film festival, the cultural […]
by Donatella Della Ratta, R. Alessandro Turchioe, and Sofia Busquets This video essay is a meditation on memory, politics, and the unsettling persistence of images. Through the recurring presence of a simple yet charged phrase ‘Hands off Syria’, on a wall in Locarno, Switzerland, we trace the trajectory of a revolution, a war, and […]
by Mira Herbel & Florian Krautkrämer Florian: Videographic studies of festivals have the advantage of focusing on the surface. While the focus at film festivals is generally on the films and the makers, and perhaps also the audience, infrastructures can usually only be grasped by looking at the surface. With a camera on the […]
by Elsa Despoix I began working on ‘Pressure’ while attending the Future of Survival conference organised by the Locarno Film Festival and Università della Svizzera italiana. Surrounded by discussions on sustainability and cinema, I found myself looking down – literally – at the structures and cables under our feet. As an architect, I became curious […]
by Ariane Hudelet From March 2020 to 2022, the global population endured months of lockdowns, social distancing, and sanitary measures, which restricted public gatherings and movement. One of the striking and intriguing effects was the specific sense of attachment, comfort, and knowledge that television series provided to their audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all […]
by Mathias de Bondt This audiovisual essay examines a conspiratorial reading of the cult television series Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-2014). During the COVID-19 pandemic, I rewatched Utopia while conducting ethnographic research on conspiracy-oriented Reddit communities, where I observed intense engagement with this series. Users interpreted its plot – featuring a bioweapon engineered to sterilise […]
by Catherine Fowler At a time when, for many, lockdown meant isolation from others, the absence of actual intimacy made depictions of it onscreen achingly poignant and even painful. That is one way to explain the streaming surge that accompanied the ten-part BBC/Hulu series Normal People in April 2020, when it was reportedly downloaded 16.2 […]
by Pierre-Olivier Toulza I first saw Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018) during the 2020 lockdown and was puzzled by its rejection, and even erasure, of the novel it claims to be adapting. Indeed, its emphasis on male characters radically undermines the novel’s concern with solitary and unstable girls in ‘an attempt […]
by Barbara Zecchi ‘Atemporalities and Becomings in the Age of Covid’ juxtaposes two distinct visual experiences: clips from the Spanish television series Estoy Vivo, a tragicomedy I watched during the evenings of the COVID-19 lockdown as a way to relax and disconnect from the horror of the outside; and news on the pandemic, which I […]
by Nicolas Bailleul As a mostly stationary filmmaker, I was inclined to believe that documentaries filmed in offices and in bedrooms would erase the physical presence of the auteur. While viewing desktop documentaries I asked myself if the physical traces on screen of the stationary documentary filmmaker, such as the uncontrollable camera shaking that might […]
by Chloé Lavalette My research trip to New York at the beginning of 2017 closely followed the brutal and unexpected death of my 63-year-old father Christian Lavalette. He was a recently-retired man, a graphic designer, a painter, engraver and editor, and died in three days from a septicemia while he was himself on a trip […]
by Alice Lenay and Théophile Gay-Mazas In this visual and performative setup, my body is embedded in a video of the Olympic Games. We focus on a specific sequence from the 1996 Olympics, when the gymnast Kerri Strug injured her ankle but continued the competition to win the gold medal for her team. By being […]
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Ilona Hongisto
University of Helsinki
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
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