The Underground Cinema

Artwork

Pauline Curnier Jardin

Lucciole (Fireflies), 2021

Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980, Marseille, France) works across installation, performance, film, and drawing. Her cinematic installations create unorthodox universes and tell stories, thus proposing alternative narratives. At the center of her practice stands the refusal to identify with the masks and markers of violence and the categories and genres of visibility and narratability that sustain and naturalize this violence. Her works animate lived solidarity with violations and subjections, but even more so, with vivid and perpetual rebellions against the total framework of life’s subjection. “Fireflies” (2021) is a collaborative meditation on liminal spaces and desire. The film was developed together with the sex workers from the Feel Good Cooperative in Rome and shot on the margins of the city, where there used to be fireflies. Today, the headlights of cars act like searchlights, while suitors spot sex workers through erratic flashes of light. They in turn may be lit up by a flashlight directed at their invisible bodies, a brazier or little bonfire. In this instant, the mostly trans sex workers working and performing there are themselves reminiscent of fireflies.

Lungiswa Gqunta

Rolling Mountains Dream, 2021

mediums of sculpture, performance, printmaking, and installation to deconstruct and address spatial modes of exclusion and oppression. Gqunta’s works act as sites of resistance, offering a space for reflection on land ownership and access, labour, and the potential for recovering lost knowledge.
“Rolling Mountains Dream” (2021) traces the intangible world of dreams as a space of learning where extraordinary, overlooked, and discredited places of knowledge are illuminated. Gqunta positions dreams as a response to the enclosures imposed upon African knowledge systems and a space from which new knowledge can emerge. She explains how she dreamt about a giant wave, like a tsunami, that she could walk through as if you were walking through mountains. This dream kept recurring and inspired the video work “Rolling Mountains Dream”.

Beatrice Marchi

Autoritratto dormiente in 'Der Jungbrunnen', 2019

Utilizing various media including video, performance and painting, Beatrice Marchi (1986, Gallarate, Italia) works with a series of characters that permit her to narrate moments of personal experience, to address collective questions such as gender stereotypes, the desire to belong or the conflict between generations. Through the gaze of the clown or the animal, she observes the dynamics of power, control and vulnerability that set the tone of human society. In the animated video “Autoritratto dormiente in 'Der Jungbrunnen'” (2019), the Fountain of Youth depicted by Lucas Cranach the Elder becomes the set in which the self-portrait of the artist as a marionette with eyes closed endlessly pedals, supported by her double.

Alice Bucknell

The Alluvials Chapter 1: California pilled, 2023

Alice Bucknell (1993, Sarasota, Florida) is an artist, writer, and educator with a particular interest in game engines and speculative fiction. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. “California Pilled” (2023) is the first chapter of “The Alluvials” series, which explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future version of Los Angeles. The story is told through numerous more-than-human perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion. Merging history, future, and fiction, “The Alluvials” focuses on the slippery interplay between engineered ecology, disaster capitalism, and nonhuman systems that shape Los Angeles. Acknowledging Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the Tongva People of the Greater Los Angeles Basin, the project underscores that nature is an intelligent system, a technology in its own right.

Valentina Furian

CIACCO NC, 2021

Valentina Furian (1989, Venezia, Italy) works mainly with images in movement and time-based installations. She uses film, performance and drawing to investigate the relationship between reality and fiction. Her research stems from the interspecific bond between human beings and nature, seeking the value of wildness in everyday life and exploring the taming of animals and humans as a form of power. "Ciacco" (2021) comes from a reinterpretation of the Canto 6 from Dante’s "Inferno", when Dante and Virgil reach the third circle, that of the gluttons, where they encounter the sinner whose name has been borrowed for this video. "Ciacco" is the gaze through which we are spectators, protagonists and dogs. The eyes of a damned soul, struck incessantly by a cyclical tempest of images, instincts, rain, subjected to the terrible torments of Cerberus, the gigantic, fearsome dog, a wild triad. The locations of the film become episodes of exploration for the viewer, in this “long night of the world” we are living.

Stephanie Comilang

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise), 2016

Stephanie Comilang (1980, Toronto, Canada) is a Filipina-Canadian artist working on the experience of migration and on how it reduces people to anonymous individuals living and working in unstable elsewheres. Through a genre she terms “sci-fi documentary,” Comilang creates films whose narratives are driven by multiple voices and points of view, to consider how culture and society engage with such salient aspects of the globalized world as mobility, capital and labor.
The 2016 film “Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise)” narrates the lives of three Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong who digitally transmit their stories and memories back to the Philippines at the end of each work week. The film focuses on the beauty of caregiving but also explores how technology is used as a pivotal way to connect. Raising questions around modern isolation, economic migration and the role of public space in both urban and digital forms, the film offers a commentary on the present, from the point of view of the future.

Silvia Rivas

Ejercicio individual I (Individual Exercise I), 2015

Silvia Rivas (1957, Buenos Aires, Argentina) works with video and performance, spatially installed and exhibited, as a central medium for her artistic output. Interested in the possibilities of capturing visual ideas rooted in time, Rivas' work explores situations where this concept materializes as an inescapable presence. In her vision, an attitude of tenacious resistance, firmly applied to their perception of the present moment, is the subject's resource facing a turbulent context. Her work problematizes the presumed realism of the moving image in order to reflect on the power of the audiovisual storytelling, to wonder about the images and their references. From the series “Momentum”, the work “Individual Exercise” (2015) presents an action that is defined as a decision to surrender to the opacity of becoming. In vain, we try to control the course of our lives. Maybe, our potential is manifested as an experience the precise moment just before the outcome, in a vertigo condition, the sensation of waking up falling.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

Les Gayrillères, 2022

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera, often starting with a song, a picture, a film or a score from the near past. They upset normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship, as figures and actions across time are staged, layered and re-imagined. “Les Gayrillères” (2022) tells us that being in the light, visible, is a political precondition for claiming rights. But queer, deviant and racialized bodies have often been rendered hyper-visible in order to be scrutinized and policed. Les Gayrillères move in the dark, as well as in spaces of total luminosity, where the blinding lights offer a refuge to hide. The choreography shows a series of steps for a gay guerrilla, building on the unpredictable power of bodies moving in concert, experimenting with forms of togetherness.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

Thomas, May 24th 2023, room 005, rue Constance, Paris, 2023

Lili Reynaud-Dewar (1975, La Rochelle, France) adopts diverse production approaches, variously discursive, pedagogical, contemplative, or aestheticizing. Avoiding guiding principles and specific themes, her work persists in introducing social issues into the artistic field and in making visible the contradictions this entails. The film “Thomas, May 24th 2023, room 005, rue Constance, Paris” (2023) is part of the series “Hello, my name is Lili and we are many” for which she interviewed in hotel rooms eleven men she knows personally: family, friends or colleagues. In this case Thomas is a friend and an artist. Through the films, we approach different generations of individuals who fall within the societal category of ‘men’ sharing their experience about the fabrication of masculine identity. Avoiding the definition of any general schema of masculinity, the project addresses questions of belonging and heritage, awareness, determinism and the reproduction of archetypes.