“To be haunted is to be touched by the past that is not over.”
— Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters




SPEAK VOLUMES brings together seventeen experimental films and video art works into a triptych that reflects on history, place, and subjectivity. The program unfolds as a journey through different registers of memory, tracing how images show what endures, what disappears, and what returns.

As Avery Gordon writes in Ghostly Matters, ghosts are signs of unfinished presence — what was meant to vanish but never did. Haunting makes visible how trauma, injustice, and loss endure in gestures, language, dreams, and memory. The works in this program approach memory as something alive, reshaping both personal and collective histories.

The first section, When History Returns, opens with works that address the persistence of historical traces and the ways cinema re-inscribes them anew. Here, images mythologise, allowing erased or spectral presences to step back into the present. Testimonial voices, ghostly figures, and sculptural gestures act like alternative archives, turning film into a medium through which history’s absences can be both witnessed and transformed.

The second section, Haunted Grounds, turns toward landscapes of displacement and erasure. Borrowing from Marc Augé's concept of “non-places” and Deleuze's notion of “time-images,” these works explore spaces stripped of identity, carrying the echoes of those who once inhabited them. Demolished neighbourhoods, fragile architectures, and digital terrains become sites where memory resists disappearance. In such geographies, absence is a generative force, opening constellations of images where time stretches, collapses, and repeats.

The final section, Private Echoes, shifts to the language, family archives, and personal gestures. Here, memory emerges through retellings and revisions, striking a balance between absence and presence. Whether through children’s voices, home footage, or the thermal residue of everyday life, these works ask how personal memory resonates beyond the private sphere and reveal their political dimension.

Taken together, these three constellations suggest cinema as a space where memory is never fixed. It breaks apart and recomposes, moving through time as both trace and transformation. SPEAK VOLUMES invites viewers to inhabit this unstable temporality, to attend to what official memory excludes but which continues to shape the present.

The films of this section offer distinct and varied gestures that form a panorama of cinematic practices unsettled by the question of history and its persistence. From this encounter emerge images that unfold freely, just as "Rage" (Katherina Sadovsky — Russia — 2023) departs from the too vertical and too imposing Soviet architecture to favour detour and circumvolution over any desire to delimit. This dynamic echoes Jacques Derrida, who writes that where the trace is deficient, it must be supplemented by an image, a commentary, a narrative. Cinema, says Derrida, does not replace other memory devices; it mythologises. In doing so, it allows the erased trace to re-enter the present through the screen.

"The Hungry Steppe" (Ruslan Zhubanysh — Kazakhstan — 2025) opens with a classical return to narration and a first-person voice, an ‘I’ that positions itself as both victim and narrator. Through voice-over, the film embraces the testimonial mode, establishing a direct relationship with the past of the Kazakh land and the cinematic medium: one thinks of Malick, Tarr, Pawlikowski. "53" (Sofia Borges — Portugal/ São Tomé and Príncipe — 2023), by contrast, unfolds through a layered narrative construction structured around an epistemological ghost: a presence that returns not to haunt or seek revenge, but to serve as a conduit for knowledge. This spectral figure becomes a vehicle for accessing the lived experience of the massacre conducted by the Portuguese colonial police forces in São Tomé and Príncipe in 1953. The film navigates a theatrical space where time is dilated and the senses are heightened.

Rejecting narrative (and marking the beginning of the non-narrative part of the program) is "NOT IN SIGHT" (Miguel Rozas Balboa — Germany — 2023). The work presents a simple sculptural gesture: the body of Amadou Bah, draped in the gold of a survival blanket, confronts us directly. This frontal posture evokes the solemnity of an icon. The strength of the piece lies in this extreme economy, as dignity emerges from this stillness, from the body’s capacity to transform the fragile blanket of emergency into a vestment of worth. It is, for me, the singular image that lingers, where the human figure, in its stark frontality, becomes a testament to the fundamental right to be seen.

"In Troscurpos: From the Crowd to the Wind" (Arnaldo Drés González — Venezuela/Germany — 2023), the viewer is immersed in an aquatic imaginary rejecting direct representation. Inspired by the stillness of an oil drilling machine and the shadows of colonial ships, the film navigates the afterlives of imperial violence in South America. The work builds a world from stark architecture pierced by darkness, a cinema of experience rather than meaning, where everything circulates, stretches, and dissolves. The film becomes the very site of emergence for a history without a fixed origin.

"Rage" (Katherina Sadovsky — Russia — 2023) follows a different logic. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s hauntology, the work stages a critical intervention within Moscow's VDNKh park, treating the kitsch site's Soviet-era monuments as a substrate for digital textures. The present is permeated by the past’s spectral-yet-utopic logic, revealing how imperial propaganda is perpetually re-animated for contemporary mass mobilisation. The ludic aesthetic of video games sprouted in my mind as my gaze was lost in the white columns, as the site’s oppressive stasis transformed into a constant ‘algorithmic’ reconfiguration. This process engenders a confrontation resisting closure, allowing rage, born from historical cycles, to manifest as a condition of being trapped within the ruins of a cancelled future.

In a gesture of counter-archiving, "This Bitter Earth" (Nazanin Noroozi — USA — 2023) confronts the monumental violence of “grand history”—the downing of Flight 752 in Iran, the Beirut port explosion, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan—with the fragile materiality of Super 8 family film. Refusing a synthetic narrative, it employs a stop-motion technique that degrades and reworks both archives. This re-materialisation demonstrates the political agency inherent in what Hito Steyerl calls the “poor image’s” capacity for “appropriation and détournement,” altering its surface to assert a new visual reality against the authoritative media. The vision of Air Force One rolling backwards stayed in my mind, as a poetic and political après-coup. I hope you enjoy this program as much as I did.

Louise Bouvet-Zieleskiewicz


  • aştyq jailağan dala is a video art piece based on true events, inspired by “The Red Terror” by Balzhan Khabdina and Zakhardin Kystaubaev, and “The Hungry Steppe” by Sarah Cameron. Set during the 1930–1933 famine known as the Asharshylyk, it reflects on the catastrophic consequences of Stalin’s collectivization policies, which led to the deaths of approximately 1.5 million people — including 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs.


  • 53 is a conversation between a traditional healer and the spirit of a man killed in the concentration camp of Fernão Dias, created by the Portuguese colonial administration in São Tomé and Príncipe.

    The film intends to approach colonialism from the collective memory and its current impact on the population, created with the testimonies of the last survivors and their families, victims of the massacre conducted by the Portuguese colonial police forces in São Tomé and Príncipe in 1953.

  • NOT IN SIGHT is a one channel video installation in order to give more visibility to the human tragedy that represents the African immigration in Europe today. The piece shows us a video staging centered on Amadou Bah, a young African refugee who managed to survive the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, who, surrounded and covered with golden survival blankets and immersed in the sound produced by these, demands the attention, recognition and empathy of the spectator.


  • Troscurpos: From the Crown to the Wind is a visual meditation on memory as haunting — a space where colonial legacies, extractivist violence, and diasporic dislocation persist in the present. Drawing on spectral human forms in constant metamorphosis, the work explores how identity and loss are inscribed on the body and landscape alike. Through video performance, sound, and poetic language, I conjure images that do not narrate but insist — ruptures, echoes, and silences that resist closure.

    Inspired by the haunting stillness of an oil drilling machine and the shadow of colonial ships, the piece navigates the afterlives of imperial violence in South America. Memory here is not archival but embodied: appearing as interruption, as a glitch in the visual field, as the repetition of wounds never fully healed. The video becomes a ritual space where the intimate and historical converge.


  • An experimental video work in which the artist explores the interaction of Soviet architecture and mass culture as tools of military and political propaganda used by the Institute of Power. A dialogue between the past and the future, which risks never coming. And how the moments of the "new" are trying to integrate into the imperial or federal system or quasi-federal institutions, becoming, again, an instrument for power. And the government, in turn, is known to be trying to slow down social development.

    Nowadays, these tools are aimed at mass mobilization of the population of the countries involved in the war. There is a generally accepted opinion that waging wars is a special form of activity of nations. The blind rage that motivates war destroys the social ties through which nations become possible. The forces of deconstruction unleashed by war destroy social bonds and produce anger, so it becomes unclear whether there is a possibility to restore these ties at all and whether there is a possibility of a peaceful existence in the future.

  • This Bitter Earth is an experimental stop-motion film centered around found footage and archival images from viral news stories juxtaposed with hand painted Super 8 family movie frames. The film encompasses four main image series reconsidered and revisited in multiple: the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by the Iranian government; the devastating explosion at the Port of Beirut, Lebanon in 2020; the last U.S. airplane leaving Afghanistan in 2021 after the military’s withdrawal; and home footage of a childhood birthday party in Iran.

    Imagery from Super 8 home videos serves as a foil to the political permutations of instability and insecurity. Punctuating the historical horrors around them, the birthday party Noroozi depicts in print and paper pulp becomes tinged with tension, as though the celebrants are anticipating a disruption to their joy. By blurring and distorting the home videos and news footage alike, Noroozi removes the individuality of her subjects to allow viewers to insert themselves and their own stories into the found images. She universalizes otherwise personal feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and despondence: a sense of sadness at the loss of life, despair at betrayal of principle, and the helplessness of losing control of one’s destiny ripple out globally.

This block turns to what Marc Augé described as non-places: sites of displacement, absence, and erasure, where communities are uprooted and belonging dissolves. Such spaces appear stripped of identity, yet they remain charged with the echoes of those who once inhabited them. They are ruins of cities and memories, marked by demolition and forced disappearance, as well as by the persistence of what cannot be fully erased. Here, absence is not emptiness but a lingering presence that refuses silence: the trace of lives cut short, of neighborhoods dismantled, of recollections that surface without orientation. In "When I Came to Your Door" (Antonio Paoletti — Ethiopia/The Netherlands, 2024, 10’), a woman searches through the ruins of Addis Ababa’s demolished neighborhoods, capturing the violence of forced evictions alongside the endurance of memory. "See You (Somewhere)" (Tianming Zhou — China/USA, 2024, 6’49’’) lingers on urban recollections that fail to anchor themselves in geography or chronology and fragments that remain unmoored, continuing to shape the imagination of place.

Other works shift toward what Gilles Deleuze called the any-space-whatever: spaces without function and full of time, where cinema captures durations rather than events. In "WAIT FOR ME IN OBLIVION" (Sergei Prokofiev — Denmark/France, 2024, 10’48’’), fragile sheets of graphite combust into traces that drift between persistence and disappearance. "The House That Slowly Collapses" (Alisa Kutsenko — UK, 2025, 10’40’’) undoes the linearity of history, proposing cyclical models in which past, present, and future coexist and overlap. "CAMP" (Pavel Checkulaev — Russia, 2024, 11’27’’) begins from the artist’s family tradition of camping, passed down from his grandparents, and translates it into the solitude of virtual terrains. In these digital campsites, the persistence of memory is less about geography than about the desire to keep intimate rituals alive, even in transformed, immaterial form.

Taken together, the block moves from the social to the philosophical, from the violence of erasure to the generative power of time-images, opening a constellation of political and spectral non-places where memory resists disappearance and absence becomes a generative force.

Daria Gnatchenko


  • A woman searches for her partner among the ruins of a neighborhood in Addis Ababa, caught in the waves of forced evictions sweeping through the city’s informal settlements. “When I Came to Your Door” captures real images from one of the most recent demolitions that displace low-income communities to make way for large-scale urban projects in a rapidly expanding city. Through the woman’s love letter, the film lingers on what still stands after the demolition.

  • See You (Somewhere) showcases fragments of urban recollections that people, including me, fail to place in our mindscapes. These fragments are discrete, out-of-context, and removed from geological, chronological, and cultural frameworks. They shape our impressions of the living environment in the process of continuous displacement and fail to connect us to real memories. Eventually, they linger as pieces in between reality and fantasy, past and present, places and non-places.

  • This film explores coping mechanisms, dynamic memory, and forgetting in the face of catastrophic events. 217 sheets of paper with graphite prints become frames. This is not just a graphic series, but a transformational process. The static sculpture that shares the three-dimensional space with us must begin its movement. After combustion, physical objects become memories of themselves. And in a series of prints/frames, they sink into oblivion.

  • “The House That Slowly Collapses” is a short animated film that deconstructs the idea of history as a linear sequence, where each new iteration must necessarily be better than the previous one, and ruins must be eradicated.

    It is a proposal of a new institution that reverses human progress and, instead of rushing forward, goes further into the past, visiting the sites of our failures, overlaying the fragments they generate. It creates a new elliptical model of time, where past, present, and future can collide and coexist.

    Composed of three chapters - Old Age, Adulthood, and Childhood - the film begins in a present moment of conflict, where our domestic monstrosities pile up at the walls of institutions no longer able to respond. Starting with a speculative fragment of mould on the walls, we enter the ruin of city planning in the London borough of Croydon. From there, we move to the second ruin - the disintegrating House of Ecclefechan. Through this house, we access a third and deeper ruin: the relationship between those who once lived there.

    Having gone on the journey into the past, the film returns us back into the present, redefining it on new terms.

  • In the late 1960s and early 70s, my grandparents and their children would go camping in a handmade kayak or catamaran on almost every vacation they took. Persistence, curiosity, the desire for adventure and the challenges of “primitive” life motivated my ancestors. At the campsites they set up tent, made a fire, picked mushrooms and berries, swam, and then set off again.

    Today, new experiences also beckon me. But instead of camping, I get comfortable in front of a monitor or put on a VR helmet and live the experience in the virtual space of video games. I'm surviving in a postapocalyptic world, seeking adventure on a tropical island, or catching fish in a fishing simulator. I experience emotions in virtual reality, exploring worlds, setting up camps or founding entire settlements. But the thirst for impressions drives me forward all the time, deeper and deeper into virtual spaces.

Private Echoes showcases works that explore the theme of personal memory through images, language, and family archives. Here, memory resonates through versions, gestures, and traces that connect the past to the present. Each piece invites viewers to appreciate and "guard" the subjective echoes of memory. But is this echo truly subjective?

The Echo of Language: In "Peace Reprise" (Joonhee Myung (Junos) — South Korea, Chile — 2025, 3'11"), we encounter lyrical characters fleeing war at different points in history. Joonhee Myung sets a dialogue between family memory, an “absence” of languages, and an “overabundance” of cultures. What may seem divisive leads to a simple thought: in our search for both external and internal peace, we find unity. Both the absence of language and its minimal presence shape our identities. "Tatar Lessons. Appreciation (Рэхмэт)" (Lana Bogdanovskaya — Germany — 2024, 5') utilises children's family videos alongside random Tatar words, reinforcing what is essential. Here, —"Рэхмэт" is about appreciation of something important, something that you probably never had— .

The Echo of Loss: "Marugenios" (Nespy5euro — Italy — 2024, 4'25") blends traditional and digital animation, addressing memory through a familiar narrative. Our earliest memories often circle the mother. Many recall being left alone at the checkout, дeading to fears of abandonment. As we grow older, we realise that these memories involve both the fear of being left alone in uncertainty and the hope that Mom will return. The ironic plot offers a subtle yet profound exploration of loss, memory, and grief. Depending on the circumstances, we revisit our memories in varied ways or even through their absence. In "23082022... Maybe we still love you" (Chayarat Ritaram — France — 2023, 15'56"), siblings who have never met gather seventeen years after their father’s death. They share childhood stories, articulating their impressions of growing up without him. Chayarat Ritaram views loss as an opportunity to reinvent and reflect on memories that never truly existed.

The Echo of Fixation: In "Every time you recall" (Jo Jovel — USA — 2024, 4'38"), the 16mm black-and-white reversible film and hand editing demonstrate how revisiting a critical moment alters its shape. We live by retellings, starting over again and again. Do these retellings correspond to reality? Perhaps not, but does that render them less objective? The film captures this phenomenon—not as a memory error, but as a way for memory to exist. The method of fixation may overlap with the trace, raising questions about its trustworthiness. "Yours is the world in which I move uninvited" (Maja Bojanić — Slovenia — 2025, 12'37") translates memory into measurable data: an infrared camera captures thermal traces in the artist's great-grandmother's apartment, a location officially removed from the register of Slovenians in 1992. This heat map of everyday movements illustrates that personal presence continues to coexist with administrative erasure, intertwining the personal and the political within the same frame.

Sofia Kuznetsova

  • I see a photo of a child fleeing to Poland alone in the midst of war.
    I look back at the kaleidoscope of memories my family and I share. Fragmented languages and cultures collide to the point of realisation that we are, in the end, all one.

    We all seek peace from war, a refuge in a new land. Hoping that everything will be better over the rainbow.

  • Experimental documentary based on family video archives. The director tries to connect with his cousins' childhood memories through random Tatar words. It is a story about finding and losing oneself through language.



  • This animated short film blends traditional and digital techniques in a mixed-media approach. It explores themes of loss, memory, and grief through the intimate relationship between a mother and her child. Set within a seemingly ordinary environment, the story unfolds into a quiet, emotional family journey.


  • In the image of a paternal funeral fantasy, after seventeen long years since his death, the siblings, who have never been reunited before, finally organise their first meeting in order to talk about their father, their memories and their hopes for the future. They share stories from their childhood, comparing notes on what it was like to grow up with an absent father and wondering what their lives would have been like if he had been around.

    Together they question the possibility of establishing a family relationship as strangers who have never met before and are unsure of what family love actually means.

  • This film was created in the spring of 2024 (in Baltimore City, MD, USA), shot on 16mm reversal black and white film and hand-edited. The theme of the work centers around how memory often changes as you recall important moments of time over and over again. Is what you recalled once again true to life, or is it just a fragment of light sifting through your mind?





  • An infrared camera moves through a suburban apartment, revealing traces of warmth left behind after one of its occupants was erased. Now appearing as a ghostly presence, these traces of warmth map a daily routine that has been forgotten over time, dissolving. Though officially removed from existence by the Slovenian Ministry of the Interior in 1992, the occupant continues to inhabit these rooms. That year, the Ministry quietly set in motion the erasure – a state-led removal of 25,671 people from Slovenia’s permanent residency records, most of them dual citizens of the former Yugoslavia and another republic. Among them was the artist’s great-grandmother, the very inhabitant portrayed in the film.