TBA21–Academy's Program at Floating Cinema
Unknown Waters
September 2, 2022
Giudecca, Venice

Photo: Chiara Beccattini
Photo: Chiara Beccattini
Photo: Chiara Beccattini
TBA21–Academy
Programming

For the third year, TBA21–Academy's Ocean Space contributes to the program of Floating Cinema (Cinema Galleggiante), this year with a body of works selected as a part of the three-year cycle The Current III "Mediterraneans: 'Thus waves come in pairs' (after Etel Adnan)”, led by Barbara Casavecchia with the special participation of the Sardinia Film Commission. 

The festival's third edition theme is the surreal, dreamlike, hallucinatory visions and the absurd. This search for paradox is at the core of the nature of the Floating Cinema - Unknown Waters, where, in a floating context that leans towards the unreal, its first aim is to trigger a collective enchantment on the lagoon horizon. This year's programming, therefore, aims to echo this mechanism and amplify the perception that transcends the ordinary.

Floating Cinema is a cycle of screenings that takes place exclusively on the waters of the Venetian Lagoon; this year, from Thursday, August 25, to Saturday, September 10, 2022, under the title Unknown Waters. TBA21–Academy's selection will be screened exclusively on Friday, September 2, between 6 and 11 pm

Cinema Galleggiante – Unknown Waters is a project conceived by Edoardo Aruta and Paolo Rosso presented by Microclima, in collaboration with Ocean Space TBA21−Academy, Pentagram Stiftun, Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana - Pinault CollectionFondazione In Between Art FilmCollezione Peggy GuggenheimCOMBO, Chantal Crousel Consulting and Padiglione Nazionale dell’Uzbekistan.

Spectators will be able to watch the programming from both their own boats, and from a barge designed to accommodate members of the public without a boat, with free booking.

For registration and the full program of the festival visit www.cinemagalleggiante.it.
LOCATION
PROGRAM
September 2,  6-11 pm

Riccardo Atzeni, Augmented, 2022, (20’’);
Erica Meloni, Il Mare negli Occhi, 2022, (15’’);
Barbara Pirisi, Diventare un'isola, 2022, (10’’);
Matteo Porcu, Spazi semplici, 2022, (15’’).


These animations have their roots in the research scouting "Marine, terrestrial, and aerial animals, humans and more-than-humans" - National Park of Asinara (Sardinia), July 2022, developed as part of The Current III: Mediterraneans in collaboration with with Sardegna Film Commission production | special project NAS - New Animation in Sardegna.

Raffaela Naldi Rossano, WARP, 2022, (30'). 

The new short film WARP (2020-22) by Raffaela Naldi Rossano - which debuts simultaneously in Venice and at the Lofoten International Art Festival - is the result of multiple experimentations around the rewriting of the myth of sirens. The archetype of the siren embodies a modality of being which is in transformation, interspecies, non-binary, beyond pathologies and the division between real and surreal. Started with a sea voyage from Naples to Delphi in 2020 in the company of some companions, passing through coasts and islands linked to the oracular cults of the female divinities of the Mediterranean, the research led the artist to undertake a second voyage by sea, in June 2022, upon the invitation of LIAF 2022 curators Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, joining a scientific expedition of microbiologists off the Norwegian Sea to study the effects of climate change on the tiny crustaceans at the base of the marine food chain.

By interweaving rituals, practices of "automatic writing" and "sacred madness", through which the ancestral divinatory arts were expressed, with underwater surveys and high-tech experiments, the film establishes a correlation between sacred science and contemporary science, stitching together different methodologies of knowledge. How is it possible, it asks, to communicate and create an exchange with processes of care and respect, beyond the extraction of data and a taxonomic knowledge of reality?

WARP is commissioned by LIAF -  Lofoten International Art Festival - 2022 with the support of TBA21–Academy. 

Abdessamad El Montassir, Galb’Echaouf, (18'48'').

Galb’Echaouf is a mountain in the Sahara desert in the South of Morocco, a relevant one for the collective poetic imagery of the Sahrawi people. Oral tradition tells us that, one day, Galb’Echaouf turned blind.
 
Abdessamad El Montassir’s storytelling guides the spectator in a poetic journey through the desert following a number of characters – humans or otherwise –  that are trapped in silence and amnesia, that confide in landscapes and deep timescales. 
Does the desert – or the ocean – have a memory of the stories that its inhabitants wish to forget? Can mountains, plants or rocks help humans recover from amnesia?

Galb’Echaouf was made in Boujdour, a city located in the desert, in the South of Morocco, where Abdessamad El Montassir was born and raised. The film initiates a conversation that aims to guide gazes in this blurred communications, averting an amnesia that threatens their capacity to build a stable future.