Tambellini here focuses on contemporary life in a black community. The “X” of Black Plus X, is a filmic device by which a black person is instantaneously turned white by the mere projection of the negative image. The time is summer, and the place is an oceanside amusement park where black children are playing in the surf and enjoying the rides, quite oblivious to Tambellini’s tongue-in-cheek “solution” to the race problem. – Grove Press Film Catalog

Aldo Tambellini (Syracuse NY, 1930). Studies at University of Syracuse, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1000+ artworks, films and poems since 1960; screenings and exhibitions at Tate Modern (London), Brooklyn Academy of Music, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitney Museum (New York), ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), etc. Oberhausen Film Festival Grand Prix (1969); Lifetime Achievement Award, Syracuse Film Festival (2007); Gold Medal, Lucchesi Nel Mondo (2010), etc. First appearance at Media City. Live in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Midnight Party belongs to a series of films left unfinished by Cornell, and completed by Lawrence Jordan in the late 1960s. Customarily exhibited as part of The Children’s Trilogy, special permissions have been granted to screen the work as a single film.

“Minimal, incoherent fragments:
The opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creations.

Theatre of spirits:
objects putting the laws
of identity through hoops.”– Octavio Paz

“The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age.” – Jonas Mekas

Joseph Cornell (Nyack NY, 1903 – Queens NY, 1972). Studies at Phillips Academy. Making films since 1936; major screenings and exhibitions at the Guggenheim (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Royal Academy of Arts (London), and Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), etc.

Lawrence Jordan (Denver CO, 1934). Studies at Harvard University. Working in film since 1952; screenings at Cannes, “Views from the Avant Garde” at the NYFF, etc. Second appearance at Media City. Lives in San Francisco, California.

Two University of Virginia grapplers taking instructions.

Kevin J. Everson (Mansfield OH, 1965). Studies at University of Akron and Ohio University. 80+ films since 1997; screenings at Centre Pompidou (Paris), MoMA, Whitney Museum (New York), etc. Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), Rome Prize (2001), Media City Second Prize (2014). Seventh appearance at Media City; 2014 Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence. Lives in Charlottesville Virginia.

Claudrena N. Harold (Jacksonville FL, 1976). Associate professor of African American and African studies and history at University of Virginia (Charlottesville); specializes in African American history, black cultural politics, and labor history. Collaborates with Kevin J. Everson on films, Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013); We Demand (2016); Fastest Man in the State, and How Can I Ever Be Late? (2017). Author of The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South (2007), and New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2016). Lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Fleischmann frequently develops camera apparatus designed to expose relations between the film material and the object of the recording. The Generali Foundation was established in 1988 as an exhibiting and collecting organization, specializing in conceptual and performance art, rooted in the tradition of institutional critique. In 2014, the Foundation announced it would close its exhibition space and transfer its collection to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, on loan until 2039. This move threatens the site-specific topicality of the Generali‘s collection. Drawing from the foundation’s history of artistic intervention, Fleischmann conceived of this work to call attention to the gaze of the art object itself.

Philipp Fleischmann (Hollabrunn, Austria 1985). Studies at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien and Die Schule für unabhängiger Film Friedl Kubelka (Vienna). 8+ films since 2006; screenings at Berlinale, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Vienna Secession, etc. Third appearance at Media City. Lives in Vienna, Austria.

“Abstractions might seem evasive to some people, but to me they’re a way of achieving simplicity or frankness. They’re very liberating. My problem was that I realized that with many abstractions I could still pick up on their sources; I could still distinguish the reality they came from, and so I was seeing two things—the separation from reality and the reality itself—and I wanted to see if I could make something where I could only see the former, where only the abstracting process itself was visible.” – Manuela de Laborde

“AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN is one of the most direct confrontations with representation and meaning-production to occur outside of Peter Gidal’s polemical circle of Structural/Materialists.” – Blake Williams

Manuela De Laborde (Mexico City, Mexico 1989). Studies at Edinburgh College of Art and California Institute of Arts. Working in film and video since 2013; screenings and exhibitions at TIFF, 25FPS Festival (Zagreb), International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA (New York), and VideoBrasil (São Paulo), etc. Lives in Mexico City.

“Set in an otherworldly layered landscape of rock formations by a pristine mountain spring, an atmosphere of eerie femininity pervades the images.”
– Julia Dossi

Antoinette Zwirchmayr (Salzburg, Austria 1989). Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. 9+ films since 2012; screenings and exhibitions at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Indielisboa (Lisbon), CPH: DOX (Copenhagen), etc. Best Innovative Film Award, Diagonale (Graz), Kodak Cinematic Vision Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016). Second appearance at Media City. Lives in Vienna, Austria.

To keep a promise she made to her dying mother, a young woman goes off in search of her father, a womanizer she has never met. Along the way, she soon learns that he is dead, but continues on the journey to find him. Carried by the spellbinding rhythm of the maloya, a ritual chant from Reunion Island, Cilaos explores the deep, murky ties that bind the dead and the living.

Cilaos is a village on Reunion Island where runaway slaves found freedom in the uninhabited mountains in the island’s interior. The word Cilaos comes from the Malagasy expression “tsy laozana,” which means “the place that you don’t leave.”

Camilo Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia 1975). Studies at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, California Institute of Arts. 5+ films since 2011; screenings at Cannes, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Courtisane Festival (Ghent), TIFF, Mar del Plata Film Festival, “Projections” at NYFF, etc. Winner Silver Pardino, Locarno International Film Festival (2016). Member of L’Abominable (Paris). First appearance at Media City. Lives in Paris, France.

1 base 4 frames 200 frames
1 base 3 frames 201 frames
two loops on each projector

There are many metaphors recurrent in discourse on the nature of consciousness. Written for the 1967 International Experimental Film Festival at Knokke-le-Zoute and quoted by Annette Michelson in Artforum, June 1971, Michael Snow’s description of his film Wavelength bestirs subterfuge.

1) In which way is the film experimental? “It is new.” was Snow’s response.
2) Real life views or animation? “Real life.” he said.

Pain of Salvation—Let me seek the answer that I need to know, let me find a way, let me walk away through the undertow . . . please let me go.

Bruce McClure (Washington DC, 1959). Studies architecture at Virginia Tech. 30+ projector performances since 1995; screenings and exhibitions at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), two editions of the Whitney Biennial (New York), etc; Guggenheim Fellowship (2011). 15th consecutive appearance at Media City. Lives in Brooklyn, New York.