Shorts XL: Symbiotic Landscapes

In this trio of longer shorts, you will encounter songs about bacteria, cross-matter sexual relations and bombarded buildings. Historical events are revisited and reframed, while the potency of our symbiotic life with the environment is brought up through poetic and absurd images.

Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars

LT, NL | 2022 | 28'

Director: Egle Budvytytė | Choreographer: Mami Kang

Shot in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit in Lithuania, Eglė Budvytytė’s Songs from the Compost is a poetic and hypnotic exploration of nonhuman forms of consciousness and different dimensions of symbiotic life in the forest: interdependence, surrender, dying and decay. The life cycles of the forest offer an alternative vision: here, when things die, they break down and merge into the earth to be reabsorbed by other living forms, like moss, mushrooms, insects and bacteria. The song lyrics draw on the work and words of biologist Lynn Margulis, celebrating the role of bacteria in making life and the collaboration between the single-cell organisms possible, as well as concepts by the science-fiction author Octavia Butler, who employed tropes of symbiosis, mutation and hybridity to challenge hierarchies and categorisation.

Heavy Weight Holding Body

DE | 2023 | 42' [World premiere]

Director & Choreographer: Karol Tyminski

Director & choreographer Karol Tyminski cruises the city of Berlin, exploring the intimate affinity between a human being and the surrounding architecture, rendering visible the latent erotism and its pulsations. His dance is a perpetual negotiation between one’s own desires and what is welcomed in public spaces. Heavy Weight Holding Body is a homoerotic story intertwined with the fantasy of becoming one with architecture; a cross-matter sexual act that not only perverts the dominant understanding of sexuality but also reveals the vibrancy of urban structures.

Pantelleria

IT | 2022 | 21'

Director: Masbedo

Between 9 May and 11 June 1943, the island of Pantelleria was violently bombarded by the Allied troops to reconquer Italian soil. Residents recall that, after the surrender, some of the buildings were blown up for the cameras of a propaganda combat film. Pantelleria traces the memories of this event in the local collective consciousness and looks at the contemporary implications of an episode that took place in the shadow of official history. Through a two-years long participatory process with the residents, the film explores the tension between the truth and its ideological distortion, between the reality of the bombs and their telling through images. The Nervi hangar, a symbol of Mussolini’s militarisation of the island, is now shown empty and inhabited by a magical animal presence. Extracts from the combat film are projected onto the buildings of today’s Pantelleria, while the camera travels through the bunkers dug by the Italian army. The voiceover, written and read by writer Giorgio Vasta, gives expressive form to the island’s stories, while the sound by GUP Alcaro and Davide Tomat distorts the recordings of the local orchestra Spata. In the liberating final dance scene, there is room for the reactivation of the past and redemption in the present.