The Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab was established in 2006 by ethnographer and filmmaker Lucien Castaing-Taylor when he found himself in a predicament. He had recently moved from Colorado to Cambridge to take up a teaching position at Harvard, but the Anthropology department wanted him to teach filmmaking, and the filmmaking department would not have him. So he carved out his own space between the two, setting up the Lab as a space for experimentation in the field of Sensory Ethnography.

According to Castaing-Taylor, there is no strict definition of Sensory Ethnography. As described on the Harvard website, the Lab “encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with words”. Castaing-Taylor’s work, deeply influenced by his collaborations and interactions with Lab participants and colleagues, spans an eclectic range of subject matter, from the 2009 Sweetgrass, documenting modern-day shepherds, to his collaborations with Verena Paravel like Leviathan, about the commercial fishing industry, and the more recent De Humani Corporis Fabrica, following life – and death – inside a French hospital. 

Since its founding, the Lab has platformed a number of innovators in the field, including Diana Allan, Stephanie Spray, J.P. Sniadecki, Nnenna Onuoha, and Ernst Karel, and works produced through the Lab have been exhibited and screened at majorbiennales, museums, and film festivals around the world.

Could you briefly define Sensory Ethnography and your approach to the practice? 

No! I can’t. Actually. I chose the name because it is more evocative and suggestive than prescriptive and precise. Strictly speaking, it’s kind of meaningless, no? What is ethnography, anyway, in this day and age? At its core there is supposed to be a “method” anthropologists call “participant observation.” But what is that, really, when push comes to shove? As a philosopher friend of a friend put it, anthropologists had the genius (or delusion) to choose as their own putatively sui generis methodology what is simply the human condition. Something shared by us all. I mean, who doesn’t observe life, and who doesn’t participate in life, in one way or another? And which of us is not a sensorial creature? So there is no strict definition of it. And sensory experience is really infinite in its nature, however circumscribed it might be by biology, society, culture, politics etc. I called the Lab that because anthropologists have a bee in their bonnet about being the one social science or humanities discipline that gets out of the “library,” or off the “verandah,” as they say, and studies the real world in more qualitative than quantitative ways. But they remain, at their heart, what we might call cultural textologists. They are much more oriented towards the discursive than the figural, and in forms of cultural “meaning” that can be rendered in language, especially propositional prose, than they are in what we might call the plenitude of being – very little of which can ever be expressed in language. We are sensing, somatic creatures before we are semiotic ones, and academics need not to forget that, rather than constantly seeing to convert everything into their own (super reductive) discursive, disciplinary currency.

The work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab lies at the crossroads of various disciplines– film, contemporary art, and academia. How is the practice viewed differently in each field? 

I don’t really know, or to be honest, care, how we are viewed by these different fields. It’s hard enough to make original work; I don’t really have the time or interest to gauge how it is perceived by others. I am not sure we have really made any difference at all to the discipline of Anthropology. Artists and filmmakers seem to be more aware of what is and is not valuable in what we are doing. Our hope is to make art that is more anchored to the real than most of what is produced under the umbrella of contemporary art, and to make cinema that is less journalistic than most documentary, and less concerned with narrative and character than most fiction. The film world is obsessed with seeing itself as “storytellers,” but very little of life ever even makes it into the things we call stories.

How has the practice of Sensory Ethnography developed since the founding of the lab and your earlier work like Sweetgrass? Are there any trends that have come and gone, or that you see emerging now?

I think everything is always changing, no? At least it better be. Nothing is sadder than some old artist or filmmaker or intellectual or politician giving a “master class” and pontificating about the proper way of doing things. 

We need conventions if there is to be any meaning, if we are to be able to communicate with one another, but conventions come with their own blinkers, and over time coalesce and congeal, and end up anesthetizing us to the world… so they also always need to be subverted and broken down. Otherwise reality is reduced to realism, and manners to mannerism. I would guess that the biggest challenge today is to resist the notion that everything is just a cultural construction. 

The constructivist reflex of critical theory has become an unexpected handmaiden of Trumpism and “alternative facts.” First, cinéma verité birthed the narcissistic performative horrors of Reality TV, then digitization produced new epistemologies and technologies that have led finally to AI, and now the global surge of nativism, nationalism, and populism is spawning dissimulation upon deception upon disenchantment upon dis-almost-everything so that the very future of humanity appears precarious in a way that is without precedent for about 90 years now. The banality of evil is now so widespread, so many millions are willing to be the mindless executioners of the neo-fascists, that it is hard to retain much faith in humanity, a species that has visited horror on the world (both its conspecifics and others, animal and vegetal and mineral) on a scale that no other species could even begin to match.

Time seems like an essential element to the practice of Sensory Ethnography– putting oneself in a place and waiting to see what meaning comes out of it. It’s important to the viewing process as well; the act of sustained looking elicits powerful bodily responses and deeper consideration of the subject matter. Could you talk about the role of time in the practice and presentation of Sensory Ethnography, and if it poses challenges in a fast-paced media environment?

Well, I think you just put it better than I ever could. It may by now be a cliché to say of modernity that time came to be experienced as fragmentary, multiple, and even, so to speak, ephemeral, as our “temporal regime” became ever more consumed with, and by, the present, leading also to embodied experience to be characterized as “inauthentic,” incomplete, or divested of meaning. This is incomparably truer today in the 21th century than it was in earlier moments of so-called modernity. Our collective Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder is a symptom of an insufficiency, but also of course of sufficiency, plenty, even excess…. And even of Inactivity and Immobility… Constant stimulation leads to a kind of blindness and sensorial atrophy, and even indifference towards other beings and lifeworlds. Action and movement are both embodied endeavors that occur in and over time…. The compression of time has gone hand in hand with the compression of space. One doesn’t have to be outrageously romantic or naively nostalgic for some pre-modern sensibility of temporal duration to recognize how much is lost with this, and also how most art and most cinema is itself a reflection of, and caters to it.

What do you consider most interesting or urgent to explore about humankind’s current relationship with nature? 

I really don’t know. I am not an idea person. I am full of shit, and don’t have any confidence in any of my ideas. If I really believed in my opinions, I would probably write, be an intellectual, or a politician or something. But since you ask, well, let me try. I think I think that we (humankind) are not exactly kith and kin with nature, but that we are nature itself. Emanuele Coccia even argued, superficially paradoxically, that all of our insanely brilliant and awful technological inventions are the closest thing we have to what we call “nature”, including evolutionary adaptations, in other species.  He’s right, even when they are or become thoroughly dystopian – and disadvantageous, whether to ourselves or others. The history of evolution, as he said, is a history of broken technologies. 

But it is one thing to say we are part and parcel of nature. It is quite another to say it (or make an artwork that conveys or demonstrates it) in a way that actually makes people feel it. Someone once said that most of the so-called “chattering classes” (ourselves very much included) now imagine they “know” that anthropogenic global warming is real, and that we have unwittingly engineered a climate crisis of a scale that we cannot fathom (never mind fathom our way out of), but we don’t actually, when push comes to shove, truly “believe” it. Look at how both production and consumption have returned with a vengeance since the COVID 19 pandemic. 

Film festivals and art fairs and biennales are now obliged to engage in self-serving green-washing like many others, but it is all deeply deceptive. I think the ultimate challenge – as many indigenous cosmogonies recognize – is to create work that will truly convince people that Nature Is Us, and only when or if we manage to do so will an ethic of care that meets the challenge of our Anthropocenic or Capitalocenic or Plantationocenic or Chthulucenic or Wotevacenic moment be able to come into being – care at once for ourselves and for our more-than-human sisters and brothers and others. Verena’s and my film Leviathan was a very early effort that now seems super timorous in this direction, to adumbrate an aesthetic for the so-called Anthropocene, but we really haven’t begun to meet the challenge.

Leviathan, co-directed with Verena Paravel, centered on the industrial fishing industry and humankind’s exploitation of the sea. Could you talk about your experience with filmmaking at sea?

It was amazing. So intense. We set out to make a film about our relationship to the sea – through the prism of industrial fishing, yes, but that’s not the real subject of the work. Our initial hope, weirdly, was to do so without our ever seeing the sea. We filmed on land, in and around New Bedford (the mythic port of departure of Moby Dick), for 6 months before we ventured out to sea. And in the end we made a film, quite unintentionally, in which you never see land. And, for that matter, you barely see daylight. Go figure. I wonder why? Anyway, the whole experience was totally wonderful and absolutely terrifying. And humbling beyond belief. Neither of us had ever felt so small, so Lilliputian, so dwarfed by the elements. The groundfish dragger we were on was about 25m long, but we felt too miniscule (and irrelevant) for words out there in the middle of the Atlantic. The experience was totally sublime, even as we were bearing witness to, and perhaps even complicit with, our raping of the ocean and many of the species coursing their way through it. It was so aesthetically overwhelming being on the boat that I never wanted to quit filming – we did not stop until we realized, in looking at our footage, that everything we were filming looked just like what we had already filmed… that we were having no new insights or experiences that could contribute anything to the film. It was quite a disappointment in the end. 

Is water a theme you would like to explore further in your work? 

I’m currently building an experimental permaculture laboratory at my studio in Catalonia. I’m working on it intensely this year, but it will be a life-time project. And water is certainly at the heart of it: filtering and recycling all grey and black water, and harnessing as much rainwater as I possibly can. Fortunately this spring has been exceptionally wet, but that doesn’t really make me very sanguine for the future. My valley goes up in smoke every ten years or so, and it is only likely to become more frequent.

In any event, yes, I think water is good-to-think-with, as Lévi-Strauss said, and not just good to drink, for almost every species on earth, in an infinity of ways. And if we think the rise of the neo-fascist right in Europe is in part a response to immigration from Africa and the Middle East — folks fleeing regions becoming ever more inimical to human life because of desertification caused in significant measure by the Global North’s rapacious capitalistic consumptive practices — well, we haven’t seen nothing yet. Fine, bien-pensants can retort that we humans, like plants, are all migrants, all refugees — that no one is native or indigene and no one is alien or invasive — but I think it’s almost impossible to imagine the magnitude of the dystopian sociopolitical (never mind environmental) consequences of the climate crisis we have created and, with our eyes wide shut, which we continue to exacerbate. As the poet John Donne put it, in one of his Psalms, from the womb to the tomb one is never fully awake. Or something like that.

Skye Kuppig is a writer born in the US and based in Rome. With degrees in film from the Holden School and Columbia University and a background in global film sales, she covers the intersection between film and the contemporary arts in international settings.

Dear Society, is a grieving circle initiated by Dutch curator Julia Fidder as an invitation to gather around experiences of loss, mourning, and love. Since 2024, Dear Society, has hosted public events in cinemas, galleries, and theatres, exploring the possibilities of rekindling rituals and collective mourning through contemporary art. Dear Society, has held space to formulate shared practices, affects and vocabularies for experiences of personal and societal loss, and resisting over-productivity, hyper-consumption, and isolation. Club Grief is a club night for grievers and friends, hosted for the first time in Helsinki on 22 February 2025 at Madhouse, an artist-run performance and production space for live art. The lineup featured performances by Death by Landscape (Victor Gogly and Joni Judén) and M LORE, and a participatory installation by Leik Silvestrini. This is a reflection on the pervasive passion – the other side of grief – that soaked Club Grief’s dancefloor, and the melancholic anger that, once made collective, can mobilise mutual recognition, acceptance, and possibly regeneration.

The gig begins slowly, mellow in the reassuring energy that ambient music diffuses amongst a crowd of acquaintances. Bathed in blue and orange, Victor Gogly and Joni Judén ever so slightly undulate to the music commencing. Death by Landscape guide us gently into their sonic landscape with a mix of synthetic sounds and field recordings; almost descriptive to begin with, while at times surprising. Woody, leafy, watery noises chime to the subtle humming of Gogly’s guitar.

Two neatly chopped wood logs lay funnily next to Judén’s mixing table. He crouches and disappears behind the cloth, touching the bark with a contact mic. The music becomes dense and dark, as natural sounds glitch over a sort of buzz. The composition arches into a cinematic soundtrack: a eulogy to decomposing, a love letter to the richness of a land about to die. Gogly’s bass is now almost narrative. I picture a large misty valley and a poet hollering to its inevitable withering. ‘Through an attention to loss, we are looking for ways of thwarting the mechanisms of domination; this is about connecting worlds and exploring new ways of composing,’ Victor explains.

Increasingly, the sounds morph into an abstract and dramatic choir, which is now growing angry, powerful, sad. The mourning is violent and no longer ours; the land shouts through its own necrosis. To end, Death by Landscape allow us a cleansing shower: water drops surround our earing, calming the mind, before the soundscape fades. Victor and Joni lull gently to the music. The kindness of their presence catches my attention, appreciating Death by Landscape as another loving statement to the real and everyday companionship with the land and its regeneration, which Victor and Joni have dedicated the last years of their practice to.

Sara Blosseville and Victor Gogly moved to the outskirts of Helsinki in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, restoring the house and workshop of Sara’s late grandfather. Their lovely garden framed by a suburban forest has been hosting ‘The Lightharvesting Complex’: the gem of an exhibition space in a small greenhouse where they cultivate zucchini, tomatoes and the artistic work of friends. Around the same time, Kaitlyn D. Hamilton and Joni Judén had moved to Joutsa, in the Central Finland region, and opened the doors of TUO TUO, an artist-led residency focused on ecological thinking. ‘The residency is really the cradle of this project,’ Victor admits. The long rehearsals, the road trips, and Joutsa’s beautiful nature give ‘magic to the process … our music has a visual character too.’

I want to make an argument for art as a space to exercise coalition. Researcher Emma Dabiri proposes ‘coalition’ as an alternative to ‘allyship’ in the context of organising against white supremacy: while allyship reinforces difference and hierarchical privilege, coalition relies on intersectional collective action – ‘We can start to tell new stories, rather than fall back into fault lines that were designed to divide us in order to better exploit us.’¹ Julia Fidder’s work insists that curating is always a practice of hosting. Whenever I enter the space of her exhibitions and events, I know I will engage in two actions and feelings: of witnessing and of being held. These activate a series of affective connections – introspection, self-recognition, active listening, questioning, communicating – that help us process and reformulate our personal experiences as simultaneously individual and social.

During the break, I cuddle up in Leik Silvestrini’s Lachrymatory, a textile nook in the middle of the dance floor. As one enters, a carpet of one-hundred soft teardrops invites the dancers to sit for a while. Silvestrini remembers the 2022 shooting at a queer bar in Oslo and the loneliness that queer clubs often hosted during the covid-19 pandemic. ‘Oslo mental hospital has a Blue Room, filled with mattresses, pillows and weighted blankets, where the patients could lay down and find comfort. I was wondering how such room could translate to a club setting.’ On a small round table in the middle of the Lachrymatory one can find an open diary and a UV light with the invitation to read and write. Something shimmers at the corner of my eye, and I notice faded text written on the sky-blue curtains. Hovering the light closer, words appear hand-written on the cloth. With the intimacy of a confession, I’m trusted with fifteen anonymous stories collected by Silvestrini. They tell of sexual violence and the void it leaves behind, the loss of a sense of self that is slowly rebuilt, the capacity to find a degree of self-acceptance despite pain.

‘I want to activate as many senses as possible, so that there is something beyond “logic”: something to smell, look at, touch, taste, hear. I inserted a flask of onion essence to induce tear production. Soap bubbles to make breath visible. Tea for a warm caress of the throat.’ A tear-shaped punching bag in petrol-blue leather hangs next to the Lachrymatory. ‘Tears are so politically loaded,’ Silvestrini notes how the act of crying accrues different value based on body politics and social stereotypes; ‘to me, rage and grief are connected.’ Soft, tight, holding, startling, piercing, and reassuring at once, Silvestrini’s participatory installation offers the time to indulge in the strength and resilience of our bodies and minds – to accept the anger boiling in our chest as we are reminded of the structures of oppression and repression – to cry that anger away.

YOUR HOPES, YOUR DREAMS, YOUR FEELINGS

LOCKED IN YOUR WROUGHT IRON STERNUM

TRY TO ESCAPE

YOU WON’T LET THEM

THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME

YOU GO WHERE THE WIND BLOWS

FIND OUT WHAT YOU ARE

DISSECT YOUR OWN HEART

AND FROM THE FLESH

MUSHROOMS FRUIT²

M LORE picks up from that anger and discomfort, closing the night with a VJ full of rage, euphoria and trans joy. The stage is dressed in the theatricality of a gothic church, celebrated by an androgynous character for their loved ones or for another part of themselves – the one labelled and erased by the gender binary. The smoke and flickering lights of this impromptu rave allow us some anonymity. Dear Society,’s events activate a third space – a private communal place – within a found community – those who respond to Fidder’s call to grieve together – in a space that should be public – art, music, food, culture. In other words, grieving together flips the coded behaviours of these artistic formats and venues into what we might want to understand as undercommons, with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney:

‘… what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls.’³

Dear Society, has showed us that being a witness to each other’s love, pain, loss, change and growth has the double-effect of allowing privacy for our internal labouring and offering the support of peer recognition – ‘the possibility of being alone without being lonely’, as Fidder puts it.⁴ Of loving and of change, grieving is a relational condition; it continuously demolishes and rebuilds the pathways to oneself and to others. A love that holds you by the hand, needy, estranged and familiar, grief is inevitably of the undercommons. ‘My grief stood beside me on the dancefloor like a block of concrete. This is the most acute example of dancefloor grief I can recall. I hope everyone’s grief-sculptures feel welcome at our club’, comments M LORE.⁵

Dear Society, hosts the many ways in which we can be companions to the rocky-loves of each other’s grief. Re-socialising grieving through ritualistic or ritual-like gathering is a political and a cultural practice exactly in the commitment to such companionship: the work of working with others, of formulating together what was broken, of finding a safer space within the structures that negate the reality of being broken while perpetrating the break. Club Grief has reminded us that one answer is the passion that grief carries as its companion.

SWEET SMILING MOONBEAM

SWEET SMILING MOONBEAM

BE MY RHAPSODY

BE MY RHAPSODY

SO DEEP MY LOVE!⁶

Bio:

Micol Curatolo is an art worker, curator and producer based in Finland. Her professional interest lies at the intersection of border politics, contemporary art, feminist and antiracist work. Her research explores movements and languages that mediate experiences of geography, labour, and migration. Often working collaboratively, Micol’s practice questions participation and presents processes, politics and aesthetics of constructing a sense of place.

Footnotes:
1. Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next (Dublin: Penguin Random House, 2021) p.26.
2. Lyrics by M LORE for Club Grief, 22 February 2025, Madhouse, Helsinki, Finland.
3. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (United Kingdom: Minor Compositions, 2013) p.6.
4. ‘Interview with Julia Fidder and M LORE’, Madhouse, February 2025 (https://www.madhousehelsinki.fi/en/ajankohtaista/haastattelussa-juliafidder-mlore)
5. idem.
6. Lyrics by M LORE for Club Grief, 22 February 2025, Madhouse, Helsinki, Finland.

In samenwerking met Ornamenta

Women should never be content being invisible.

This year, the International Film Festival of Rotterdam promised to shed light on storytelling that aims to connect. With this in mind, the festival hosted the first international retrospective dedicated to German director, documentarian, and film historian Katja Raganelli, showing several short documentaries she originally made for television. Raganelli centers female filmmakers in her documentaries, educating the masses and inspiring curiosity towards the creators and their legacies. She is known for portraits like I Am Wanda (1980) and Longing for Women: Dorothy Arzner (1983). However, the first of many subjects in Raganelli’s documentaries was Agnès Varda. In 1977, Katja portrayed the grand dame of the French Nouvelle Vague in Les Femmes Sont de Nature Creatives: Agnès Varda, also known as Women Are Naturally Creative.

During the shooting of Varda’s L’une chant, l’autre pas (1977), Varda invited Raganelli into both her actual home on Rue Daguerre and the constructed home on the film set. Varda shares her approach towards filmmaking, creating a safe and free environment to play in, centered on the need to include women in film. During that time period, female roles were tailored to support male characters. But Varda emphasizes female subjectivity, both on- and off-screen. She wishes to represent reality through filmmaking, which means the inclusion of female directors, writers, actresses, producers, camera-operators, and editors. The visibility of women allowed them to be more than objects of male desire. Varda narrates her process, describing how she likes to have her children around as much as possible, and the subjectivity of her female characters.

Varda liberates herself from the constraints of concrete plans and storyboards. Instead, she takes inspiration from light and space. For instance, Raganelli films Varda’s approach to framing in L’une chant, l’autre pas, and the possibilities created by the set. Raganelli greatly admires the spontaneity and determination with which Varda created her films. She embraces conquering the unknown, trusting the people involved, but most of all, allowing the film to form itself. Ragnelli’s portrait makes clear how Agnès Varda became the inspiration she remains today, a woman to look up to in the grand scheme of film history.

Similarly to Varda’s spontaneous attitude to filmmaking, Raganelli insists on coming prepared and well-read in order to portray her subjects, but also welcomes spontaneity in the moment. She emphasizes the need to meet them as they are, as people. Her interview style consists of simple questions rather than an intellectual approach to film techniques and detailed philosophical interviews. Raganelli likes to let the conversation flow into talks about the nature of reality. While making Les Femmes Sont de Nature Creatives: Agnès Varda, Raganelli learned to become intimate, especially in documentaries. One does not have to be an acclaimed critic but should try to be personal and open.

Having conversations on a human level, Varda shares her views on motherhood, financial insecurity, livelihood, and the merging of family and filmmaking. For instance, Varda’s five year old son Matthieu, comes in during one of the interviews. Varda lets him interrupt and admits she cherishes this moment because it shows the reality of motherhood. Male filmmakers have their wives or nannies look after their children off-camera, but they do not show this reality. For Varda, this moment reveals no division between filmmaking and domestic family living. Even so, she wishes her children were more

involved, but only if those moments were spontaneous. Ultimately, this is what Varda and Raganelli seek: a closer image of reality.

In the 1960s, producers tried to uphold an estrangement of female creatives due to a misogynistic lack of trust in female filmmakers. After the screening, Raganelli recounts from personal experience how it was common practice to have a male director on call as backup for a female director, in case she would fail in her duties. In Women Are Naturally Creative, Varda states the only way to make the films she wanted was to produce them herself, even when this meant continuous financial risks. Financing came from government institutes, creative friends, and colleagues. For some films, Varda pre-sold to distributors before shooting them. Raganelli experienced the same issues with financing. However, she saw an opportunity whenever a female filmmaker was interested in collaborating on a documentary. A positive side to this independent way of filmmaking was a particular flexibility in her practice. Being a female filmmaker in the 60s and 70s was a risk. Raganelli and Varda represent the importance of visibility of female filmmakers. Women should never be content being invisible.

Alongside Raganelli’s portrait of Agnès Varda, IFFR programmed Varda’s Lópéra-mouffe (1958), Résponses de femmes : Notre corps, notre sexe (1975), and Ulysse (1983). In the three short films, Varda seeks to visualize the subjectivity of humanity, womanhood, and memories.

Should we believe everything we are told?

Thursday night the 54^th edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam opened its doors for the grand public at the Oude Luxor with Michiel ten Horn’s Fabula: a crime-packed black comedy infused with elements of fantasy and folklore. Vanja Kaludjercic, Festival Director of IFFR, introduced the film with a speech about the way that cinema changes the way we look at life and relate to one another.

Divided in several chapters, Fabula follows Jos (Fedja van Huêt), a provincial criminal and self-proclaimed loser much like the generations before him. But unlike his ancestors, he is determined to get to the bottom of his family’s misfortune. Together with his brother Hendrik (Georg Friedrich), his son-in-law Özgür (Sezgin Güleç), and his father Lei (Michiel Kerbosch), he encounters a host of mysterious characters who bring him closer to the answers he seeks. But when a criminal dealing goes awry and one of the brothers disappears, the film leans into the relationship drama between the remaining family members. Fabula depicts the nuanced dynamics between Jos and the supporting characters as they evolve from suspicion to trust. Ultimately, Fabula suggests that being a family means being partners in crime, no matter the circumstances.

Previous to the screening, director Michiel ten Horn explained the many inspirations that sparked this particular story, the biggest of which was the location: Limburg. The region and its landscapes provide grounding for the magical and fantastical elements of the film, as well as for the criminal activity that sets the plot in motion. According to Michiel ten Horn, it was a challenge to balance these various elements, and to close the film with a smaller ending. Especially after having worked on it for eight years, with a larger than life magical narrative, it can be quite the task to return from absurdity to vulnerability. “Coming home a great player, with fortune and abundance,” as Jos would say.

Fabula is a fable, one that connects people in spite of misunderstandings. Its dialect and niche folklore, incorporating elements such as Carnival, the traditional dish called ‘vlaai’, and the protection of the village by train conductors, lighten the deeper themes of misfortune, drug abuse, and personal trauma, and instead make space for transnational cultural understanding. Whether the Limburgish dialect is practiced to perfection matters less when the viewer is brave enough to dive head-first into the mystery. Fabula’s absurdity makes it an Alice in Wonderland-style adventure with a loser called Jos in its midst. Fairytales used to teach the difference between good and evil, but Fabula is here to tell a new tale: “Good is not all good. Bad is not all bad.”

The works in Katoenhuis expand the concept of cinema out into a three-dimensional space, and in doing so reveal both its possibilities and its limits.

Entering the Art Directions exhibition in Katoenhuis during the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam, the visitor is greeted by a screen displaying four figures: Alice, Bob, Carol, and David. Their names suggest individuality, yet signify archetypal cryptographic placeholders. Powered by the Unity game engine, the four move in a delineated but open gray field, improvising responses to narrated prompts and at times interacting with one another. The work by Viktor Timofeev, homonymously titled Alice, Bob, Carol and David, stimulates reflection on the nature of autonomy and control, exploring the boundaries of free will in both the characters and the viewer. 

It is a fitting introduction to the exhibition in Katoenhuis as well as to the role of Art Directions as a subsection of the film festival. Consisting of immersive media, performances, and installations, Art Directions “allows audiences to explore the possibilities of cinema and the moving image outside the bounds of a film theatre,” as IFFR Festival Director Vanja Kaludjercic explains. Yet if the language of cinema has long been defined by these same bounds- by the immobilization of the viewer and the complete control of their gaze within the black box- then what does it mean to release both subject and work into a three-dimensional space? 

Leaving the first room and entering the main corridor of Katoenhuis, the visitor is confronted with precisely this question. Curtained doors extend along either side of the hall, offering the opportunity for exploration without a suggested itinerary, and the visitor is made intensely aware of their own freedom of movement within the structure. Consequently, the works themselves are liberated from the temporal linearity of traditional moviegoing. Without a set beginning and end, subject to be viewed in their entirety or in pieces, they each experiment in their own way with the meanings that can be created by the audiovisual medium in the exhibition space. 

In Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape Are Often Migrating, Amsterdam-based artist Basir Mahmood collaborated with a Lahore-based film crew to reinterpret videos taken by migrants on their arduous journeys from South Asia to Europe. He conveys the fragmentation of these videos via the screen itself, folding it into three sections with three concurrent views. The dimensional triptych of landscapes, body parts, equipment, and screenshots challenges the illusion of spatiotemporal unity created by traditional cinematic forms; rather than portray a trajectory from point of departure to point of arrival, from beginning to end, Mahmood evokes the disorientation of the migrant experience by centering the physical discomfort, communication difficulties, and unforgiving landscapes that characterize these journeys.

Where Mahmood uses the freedom of the installation format to fragment geography, Ecuadorian artist Francisco Baquerizo Racines uses it to complicate linear chronology in his work La Quema (del Planeta “B”). The installation plays out on two screens, one placed in front of the other in the space. On the front screen, a papier-mâché model of a Dutch East India Company galleon is constructed in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil. On the back screen, the galleon is doused in gasoline and set alight in an adaptation of the mestizo tradition of burning año viejo dolls on New Year’s Eve. Both the building and the burning of the ship is a collective activity, with a small crowd of onlookers commenting and joking as the paper ship goes up in flames. 

The work refers to the colonial history of Guayaquil and the burning of the city by the Dutch Nassau fleet in the 17th century. Through the present-day application of a local tradition to this historical event, Racines collapses the distance between past and present. Yet by doubling the act of burning, he also creates ambiguity and tension between cyclical repetition and progression. The positioning of the parallel screens further confuses the linearity of time; while entering the installation, the visitor witnesses the building and destruction of the ship in chronological order. While leaving, the visitor again passes the building of the ship that they have already seen burn, turning the act of watching into re-watching, and construction into re-construction. 

The work Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes by artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland likewise bridges time and place to investigate colonial practices in history and present-day. Yet in juxtaposition to Racines, her investigation operates via the act of care. 

Entering the space of the installation, the visitor weaves their way between boards displaying pages pulled from early 20th-century issues of National Geographic: all articles on the development of the nighttime camera-trap invented by George Shiras III. Overlooked in the history of this invention is its origins in the hunting practices of the Ojibwe people. At the far end of the room are two screens joined like pages of an open book. On the left, a thermal image camera captures the meticulous work of conservators of taxidermy at the Natural History Museum in London. Their body heat reflects off the cold metal of the institutional surroundings and lingers on the skin of the creatures as the conservators suture incisions back together, tweeze bits of antlers, and insert glass eyeballs. On the right, infrared camera footage captures the reintroduction of endangered animals from Europe back into their native habitat in Argentina.Rinland’s work is by far the quietest of the exhibition; the soft murmurs of the conservators are overlaid with the scuffling of the nocturnal animals as they explore their new habitat and nurture their young. Yet beneath the apparent calm of these actions lies the implicit violence of colonial extraction, forcing the viewer to ask how these practices and animals arrived to where they are today. Extramission directly examines not only what we see, but by what means we see.

Behind another curtained door, in a room bathed in neon, technologist and artist Mila Moleman steps beyond questioning the technologies of sight to controlling them in her VR piece Show Me The Light, a silent disco set to the pace of rapid societal development. After being fitted with a VR headset and headphones, the visitor is led onto a neon-lit dance floor. The VR world rises around them as an infinite metropolis of identical gray block buildings under a red sky, expanding at an unstoppable pace as the music of Brass Rave Unit fills their ears. The visitor stands on an anonymous platform, powerless to do anything but watch and dance along.

Advances in VR fulfill the dream of freedom from physical and visual constraints of moviegoing, inviting the viewer to become an actor within the fantasy world. But Moleman’s piece reveals the limits of this freedom. If the world is virtual, why does it feel impossible to step beyond the edges of the platform? Or to halt the breakneck ‘progress’ of history as it careens towards a seemingly apocalyptic end? In Show Me The Light, the visitor becomes Alice, Bob, Carol, and David: trapped within a pre-designed world, free only to respond to prompts from a greater power, and unable to look away. 

The works in Katoenhuis expand the concept of cinema out into a three-dimensional space, and in doing so reveal both its possibilities and its limits. Most importantly, they highlight the fragile conditions of control that keep dominant narratives in place, both in cinema and in history. The moment the languages and technologies of perception are changed, a whole world of stories and experiences is opened up.  

The 2025 edition of Art Directions was curated by Eva Langerak. Read our interview with her here.

 “I think for both the future of artistic practice, but also as an interesting social experiment, Art Directions are unmissable.”

International Film Festival Rotterdam has long been a leader in pushing the boundaries of cinema. It is one of the first film festivals in Europe to incorporate ‘encounters’ where the cinema and art meet. Today this focus on the interdisciplinary finds its home in the Art Directions section. Described by the festival as ’the space where the festival steps out of the screening room,’ the section is divided into four programs: Performances, Immersive Media, Installations, and Sound//Vision.

After previous work with Art Directions over the past few years, Eva Langerak assumed the role of curator for the 2025 edition. With a master in Arts and Cultures from the UvA and the VU, Eva has worked at both the Stedelijk Museum in the photography and time-based media department, and the EYE Film Museum as member of the exhibition team. She brings an experimental, interdisciplinary approach to her work with IFFR, informed by her background in conceptual art and a strong interest in the interaction between works and the spaces that house them. We discussed the trends of this year’s program, the process of curating within the festival space, and her plans for next year.

When you’re approaching the curation of Art Directions, do you consider these works as complementary to the film world, or as an extension of the cinematic medium?

The art world and cinema flirt with each other. But art has various media; depending on the story that they want to convey, artists choose a medium that fits. In cinema, film is the only medium of expression. So I think that the Art Directions section stimulates discussion on the question: what is cinema? At the same time, it also shows us the interesting and expansive qualities that film has within an art section and how film is not just something that is static but also something that can be sculptural, something that quite literally fills a space and sets a mood. So there is a lot of dialogue between these two sections.

IFFR has always been about experimentation: not only showing the mainstream, but also showing what there is in the peripheries. And this experimentation with film in the arts is part of that periphery, it’s part of that experimental character that defines IFFR.

Would you be able to identify a thread or a theme within the Art Directions section this year?

I think that all the artists are trying to investigate the various ways in which film exists in our lives, not just in the artistic sense, but also in the more practical or scientific way. For example, they’re investigating how these media came to be and how we can use them to decolonize and to reflect upon how certain ideas have come into our collective consciousness. Because film and the arts play a very important role in manufacturing our collective memory or identity.

For example, the work by Jessica Sarah Rinland, Extramission, uses the night vision camera and the thermocamera to investigate the invention of that camera, which was based on the hunting practices of the Ojibwe people that the scientist George Shiras took. So there is this idea of extraction. By using these mediums and by investigating how they came into being, she’s making us aware that what is now part of our current knowledge system or our tools with which we investigate the world, they’re not objective.

The same goes for Francisco Baquerizo Racines, who in his work La Quema (del Planeta “B”) uses the ritual of burning to cleanse a colonial history of Guayaquil in Ecuador. There, the camera is used as a tool for collective gathering. Rather than extraction, it’s about connection. He’s also trying to bridge a distance within time. In the film, he burns a papier-mâché replica of a VOC ship, referencing an episode from the 17th century when the Nassau fleet of the Netherlands allegedly burned down Guayaquil. But the burning of these papier-mâché dolls is a ritual of cleansing, which he’s using to cleanse this colonial past by bridging the burnings.

That act of bridging is also something that you see in Basir Mahmood’s work, Brown Bodies Moving in an Open Landscape Are Often Migrating, where he is directing his film crew in Lahore, trying to bridge a distance through film. I think that the bridging, connecting, trying to investigate the origin of this medium as well to reflect on a problematic past and to find quite literally a new vision for a brighter future is what unites all these works.

Could you talk a bit more about where the projects in this section come from?

A lot of these works have come to us in an open call, some are scouted, and some are co-commissioned. We have a very active role in contributing to this sector by co-commissioning works. I think it’s an aspect of the festival that leads to very interesting transnational collaborations like the one we’re doing now with Tabakalera. So for next year where I will be curating, I hope to find some overarching narrative, and to curate with the intention of showing the current state of the arts moving image and immersive media, as well as to find resonance with the film program.

I think it’s quite interesting that the festival opens itself up to that kind of knowledge, and I’m looking forward to find where these two meet.

How do you feel that the film and arts spaces differ, and how do you approach curating art within the film festival?

Film is durational; it has a beginning and end. You need to be in that cinema space, and when you miss it you’ve missed it. On the other hand, art festivals and biennials are long exhibitions. So to merge that with the film festival is quite interesting. What would it mean for the arts if we were to have that same mingling of audience and that same confrontational togetherness?

What I find very interesting is that when you’re watching a work within the space here, maybe you don’t finish the whole work—you walk away or you come back to it again. There’s a freedom of movement within the space. But if you walk out of a film in the cinema it’s quite a statement. You don’t have that direct feedback in an exhibition space. By placing an exhibition within a film festival, you experiment with what an exhibition can or should be. And that is something that I don’t have anywhere else. 

I like that this is a space for experimentation, and that is something I really want to protect—to give trust to the artists and to say, “here you can experiment”. We’ve had artists making their first film work, or filmmakers making their first installation here. And that’s something that can exist in the festival setting.

This program is called Art Directions and you did mention a bit about next year’s programming. How do you think the role of the arts within the festival circuit will develop in the future? Is the space for this kind of work expanding?

During one of the discussions that we had with other curators of festivals and of the Biennial, they were talking about space as being the most problematic thing. How do you find space? Where is the space? I think it’s not just a problem within the festival. It’s a bigger problem of the commodification of space and a problematic housing market and late capitalism in general. But what I like about the festival is that it creates a world outside of reality. For just a little bit, your whole idea of time totally disappears and you’re just in the festival. This is something that museums and institutions in general cannot do at the moment, because they are so concrete, they are within the boundaries of their own space. But the festival has the potential to pop up, to move around, to occupy space, and to create space where ideas can be shared. That is what festivals are about: bringing people together from around the world and having them exchange different ideas. For arts festivals in general this is the most magical thing, and conceptually the most interesting as well.

We need places of experimentation, especially within the current political climate: to have these spaces where some things can be contested, where you can take a risk. I think that a lot of institutions are careful now with their programming because of the risks that come with certain decisions. But festivals have the potential to defy these rules or constructs. For artists, this is the place where you can experiment with different formats and you don’t have to be afraid of filling galleries for three months. I think for both the future of artistic practice, but also as an interesting social experiment, Art Directions are unmissable for the future.

It does feel very special to be here right now during this time, and to see these installations and these projects in spaces that were not necessarily meant to be exhibition spaces.

Here in Katoenhuis, we’re showing work in an old warehouse. It’s not a black box, it’s not a white cube. We are across from the Food Bank Rotterdam, and we have given them tickets to come see the exhibition. This is a periphery area where a lot of interesting social groups come together; some artists have their studio space here because the rent is cheap, and there are also many people working in industrial structures and warehouses. But they’re all quite curious what’s happening here and we bring them in. Some people that are joining for tours would potentially not go to a museum or to a cinema, but because we create this experimental pop-up space, they’re inclined to come in and experience. That’s what the festival allows for: to make use of spaces and to investigate what they could mean to the works. You always have to find a dialogue with the space in which you curate the work.

When working in the arts there is often no clear distinction between professional and personal time. Evenings and weekends are spent and needed for attending openings and exhibitions, maintaining social ties and friendships, keeping up with art theory, and developing your opinions and observations. All those add up to becoming a better art worker with more opportunities, am I right? “Art life” sometimes feels like one big to-do list where ‘calling a friend’ or ‘having lunch’ becomes part of work obligations and networking. Are people assessing whether precious time can be spent with one another? That is a thin line between tactical and genuine intentions. In this scenery, there is the possibility that sincere, autonomous, playful interests can be drained away and that every moment can be seen as a productive one. 

The invitation to contribute to this publication raised an initial thought: In sleep we are never ruled. Withdrawing from the world, detaching from all immediate thoughts and letting go, seems to be the maximum cut-off from being productive. My afterthought was that this is somewhat of a general assumption to say so. Sleep seems to be the ultimate break from productivity and, at the same time, is also merely necessary to keep continuing creating. Sleep, in this sense, is an inspiring process: in order to unwind and fall asleep, one has to findone’s own autonomous zone. Isn’t that same autonomy equally necessary to come to inspiration for an independent process, to create a work of art, write something or make an exhibition? In that sense, they are interconnected processes, flourishing oftentimes without too much influence, to eventually get back to being productive.

This text follows the structure of the three stages of one night of sleep: closing eyes (stage I), light sleep (stage II) and deep sleep (stage III), explored through three art practices that inspire and trigger states of rest. The first stage, Louis van Gasteren and Fred Wessels, follows the unwinding process of an affective work. The second stage describes Mladen Stilinović’s and Vlado Martek’s ideas on laziness. Finally, the deep sleep stage settles in with Yoeri Guépin’s practice. Through the curation of these three art practices, I present several ideas on what production accumulates, distracts, how it rules, what it ruins and how rest plays a part in it. This text is written in hesitation and doubt, through examples of art (historical) practices and based on personal reflections. It’s an acknowledgement of questions and contemplation, which are just as much a practice of rest between ideas and dreams.  

I Louis van Gasteren & Fred Wessels 

In 1969, The artists Louis van Gasteren and Fred Wessels created the work Sunny Implo ,with the intention of placing a series of round circular bubbles on every street corner in the city. People would pop their heads into the two-and-a-half-meter-long artwork, with a 60 cm opening at the bottom. The suspended sphere swayed vertically back and forth, at a speed barely perceptible to the spectator. Inside, 400 points of light and 24 speakers played music designed to have a psychotherapeutic effect of disorientation and isolation for calming down. The two artists offered passers-by a moment of rest -to hear their own beating heart – while being in the middle of the frantic city. After launching the artwork at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1970, the project was unfortunately never realized as street furniture.¹ It could have generated an interesting rhythm of rest zones throughout the city. Imagine all those daily stimuli being slowed down for a moment: It would contribute to stimulating subconscious processes. 

There is a huge emphasis on being productive to realize ideas and dreams among art workers. There are roughly two curves in navigating the arts. The commercial art market on the one hand, and situated subsidized art projects on the other. Those who do not participate in the gallery world, explore the subsidy field and make (adapted) plans within one of the advanced artistic schemes.² Funds are the fundamental boosters in realizing ideas. It’s an advantage to work along an infrastructure that promotes building on your artistic career through time and research. Applying for funding creates a first step for a hypothetical project. The first idea – a potential outcome – is ‘set in motion’. A first step in a process with a purpose. Although project grants create time and space to experiment – there is always a goal in mind. An idea can be developed into a result in many ways, with some end goal being pursued. I wonder if that rather ‘active’ process of applying, still allows enough mental space to (subconsciously) be creative, to play, and experiment?  How do we practice laziness? 

The social psychologist Devon Price speaks in his book The Laziness Lie about “deeply ingrained cultural beliefs” that each of us absorbs throughout our lives about the value of work and the danger of laziness. In The Laziness Lie Price states that our value as human beings is tied to our productivity. No matter how busy we are, we should always ignore them and do more. Price explains that people today do far more than nearly any other period in history, but most of us often still feel like it’s not enough.³ In parallel to Price, the artist, poet and academic Tricia Hersey manifests with her book Rest Is Resistance the potency of rest and encourages to retreat from the ever-evolving neoliberal capitalist productive mindset. She examines how we have to become less attached to the idea of productivity in order to unravel from capitalism, and more committed to the idea of rest as a portal to just be. Taking naps or any form of rest (might also be just sitting and staring) has a disrupting power of current structures and stresses, which makes space for imagination, invention and restoration. It would in turn  regenerate curiosity and take away the consumed feeling.⁴ 

II Mladen Stilinović & Vlado Martek

The artist Mladen Stilinović considered being lazy a form of political resistance and at the same time a method of achieving autonomy in art. He regarded non-activity as a fertile state to achieve independent creativity. In the series Artist at Work (1978), the artist Mladen Stilinović captured himself in several black-and-white photographs. Instead of being in a studio, where we would expect an ‘artist at work’, he shows himself in bed in various states of apparent sleep and wakefulness. In some photos, he appears to be daydreaming, while in others he lies staring at the ceiling with his eyes open or looking ahead. His own presence is at the centre. With his laziness, he tried to ‘de-symbolize’ the untouchable working-class culture in former Yugoslavia. With anarchic and cynical rebellion, he wanted to mock socialism. It’s an act of protest, showing his attitude towards socialist working-class culture on the one hand and the production obsession of western capitalism on the other.

Almost two decades after Artist at Work, Stilinović, together with the artist Vlado Martek, wrote the short manifesto The Praise of Laziness in 1993. The text reflects Stilinović’s 1978 work, praising the virtues of laziness and declaring that “there is no art without laziness”: ‘Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, just dumb time – total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practised and perfected’.⁵ Rest liberates to a core that ensures curiosity and creativity. Stilinović and Martek considered laziness as a form of political resistance and at the same time a method of achieving autonomy in art. In fact, non-activity is in that regard a fruitful state to achieve independent creativity. 

III Yoeri Guépin

The idea of rest also brings me to the wish of structuring the representation of the artist and their work differently. The finalization of an exhibited work doesn’t always emphasize the making process.. The representation of less result-based works, allows a different relationship between artist and viewer. It can make the questions, doubts, and all the levels of the eventual outcome of an artwork or project, even more accessible and eventually deepen the understanding of an artistic practice. 

In my own curatorial practice, I would like to feature more artists that share their insights of the working process. The process with the artist Yoeri Guépin for his presentation during the group exhibition Plurals, felt, loud exemplifies such a process. In the course of preparations, it became clear that the moment of the exhibition would disrupt a long-term project. His art practice consists largely of projects where he brings vulnerable people (from different vulnerable stages in their lives) together in gardens and other ecological settings. At the time, he was working with his father and grandmother on the film The Smallest Gesture in which they link the loss of biodiversity and industrial forms of agriculture to his father’s dimentia. We tried to surpass the ‘final stage’ of representation and discussed how to actually use the exhibition space as a work – and storing space – to support his ongoing project. His collection of seeds of medicinal plants, which he collected for his ongoing project, were dried in the exhibition space. We would present that part which would allow him to see that moment as a dialog within the longer-term project. We planned one workshop and a collective gathering to collect the dried seeds at the end of the exhibition together with the audience. The drying of the seeds and workshop were part of a cycle in the continuation of his practice. The space was used to address a component that was currently at the center of the development of his work. Through showing those ‘live practices’, it opened a dialogue for the artist himself and made his intrinsic and social processes visible to viewers.

In this sense, the exhibition space can also function as an in-between space towards the development of a new work or the addition of a new layer to an existing work. Exhibitions mostly rely on the representation of works or projects that are completed and therefore representative. However, the institution or environment where the art is represented, can also be counted as a moment of rest for art (practices). Institutional settings can interrupt and provide an environment to contemplate (with the audience) which eventually makes the work or exhibition vulnerable – while at the same time the whole is not being ruled by an initial idea(l). 

Interrupting a productive process with a rest mechanism can be done by pausing plans, naps or not going to an opening for once. Consequently, autonomy, taking a step back, will make sleep delightful. Sleep is ultimately a form of inspiration for the art world. There needs to be enough distance from all the distractions – to get to sleep and rest. The same applies to art, which is a form of independence, often requiring distance to achieve autonomy. 

Annosh Urbanke (1992) is an independent curator, art critic and researcher.

footnotes:

¹ Magic Center: Art and counter culture 1967-1970, https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/amsterdam-the-magic-center (accessed 20 March 2024).

² Collaborative structures based on self-organization are left out, as the piece wants to talk more about individual processes. 

³ Robert Raymond, “Laziness Does Not Exist: An Interview with Dr. Devon Price” Protean Magazine, 29 July 2021, https://proteanmag.com/2021/07/29/laziness-does-not-exist-an-interview-with-dr-devon-price/ (accessed 20 March 2024).

⁴ Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2022): 149-150.

⁵ Mladen Stilinović, The Praise of Laziness (Rome: Gato Negro Ediciones, 2015): 23.