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FINE ARTS

Iulia Bucuresteanu – Somewhere in Draculaland

by Iulia Bucuresteanu

Somewhere in Draculaland explores how the figure of Dracula shaped the Western construction of Eastern Europe through imperialist and neo-gothic frameworks. It examines how these narratives persist today through Hollywood-driven, pseudo-folkloric images that reinforce cultural hierarchies. Drawing on the figure of the vampire and its associations with contagion, otherness, and invasion, this project traces how these images emerge from late 19th-century anxieties and continue to circulate. Somewhere in Draculaland focuses on the way these representations detach from their literary origins and are reintroduced as pseudo-folkloric truths, creating a cycle in which identity is reduced to mere recognizability, to the benefit of Western cultural authority.

FINE ARTS

Hugo Baud – ALCOVE

by Hugo Baud

ALCOVE is an installation located in the ECAL lobby that invites a reflection on such an exhibition space. It consists of the school's display walls, each measuring 2.06m by 2.8 0m. The structure, which is 6.18 m long, 4.12 m wide, and 2.80 m high, forms a rectangle on the floor with an area of 25.46 m². The exterior of the structure is painted in S 1502-R, the official color of the building's walls, and the interior in RAL 9016, the color designated for exhibition spaces. The name ALCOVE echoes that of the iconic sofas in the ECAL entrance hall.

FINE ARTS

Mélody Lu – Merci d'avoir participé

by Mélody Lu

A sculpture-installation where you’re invited to sit beside this strange character: a large, soft dog — it looks like it's wearing pajamas. It’s waiting for something, though we don’t know what. Its gaze is fixed. If you get closer, you can overhear, faintly through its headphones, the stories being told to it — stories of grief, but also of love and joy. Stories of people reclaiming their voice. A voice they were never given, until now. Pedro says that as long as someone remembers you, you continue to exist. Even one person is enough. Say the names. We must say the names — especially the ones they tried to erase from the list of lives that matter.

FINE ARTS

Maia Gavina – Space for Everything: On Love

by Maia Gavina

For a total democratization of the audiovisual, we must think the curatorship of the scared space of the cinema theater without considering intentionality of the possible films there projected of inhabitting that space. That will or intuition doesn't inherently grant them the right of such recognition. Materials of the most varied origins (reels, home movies, TV, YouTube videos, etc) are equally capable of detaining the enlightening qualities of a project thought cinematographically in its inception. This curatorial project reflecting on the topic of love seeks to apply this intersectional approach to its selection, putting into question the  limitations of cinema as a mercantile medium.

FINE ARTS

Giorgio Cassano – ZONA DI SACRIFICIO

by Giorgio Cassano

ZONA DI SACRIFICIO is a film study that fuses documentary, ethnography, and poetic montage around the Fiume Tara—Taranto’s revered “miracle river.” Through a tapestry of memories, legends, visions, and personal testimonies, the film explores how this sacred source has sustained local identity and resilience, even as the encroachment of the ILVA steelworks has turned the surrounding landscape into a literal “sacrifice zone.” It is both a visual elegy to a once-pure watercourse and a poignant reflection on environmental violence, tracing the uneasy coexistence of spiritual reverence and industrial devastation in a community striving to reclaim its voice.

FINE ARTS

Ludovico Orombelli – Sinopia

by Ludovico Orombelli

Sinopia is the culmination of a research project carried out at ECAL on the techniques and images that have shaped the Western imaginary. A scene from The "Legend of the True Cross", painted in the 15th century, has been reproduced using the same materials that its author, Piero della Francesca, employed to sketch the preparatory drawing on the wall before completing it in paint. The image thus reappears in its earliest phase, as a ghostly presence that invites us to reflect on the presence and role of the past within our present time.

FINE ARTS

Camila Polania – Instructions of Rematriation

by Camila Polania

Some say the body arrives first, and the soul takes longer. This installation begins with that delay, in the tension between presence and absence. Instructions of Rematriation is a video installation projected onto a wind-moved fabric, a surface that never fully settles. In front, white Rimax chairs evoke everyday spaces of waiting across Latin America: porches, patios, sidewalks. The work follows the passing of a single day, tracing the slow return to the body after displacement. Through video, writing, textile, and sound, the installation holds a kind of return, not geopolitical, but personal and ancestral: a political and spiritual reconnection with what was once left behind.

FINE ARTS

Axel Mattart – Was it the dream of a poppy ?

by Axel Mattart

Tired of Fighting Against Your Brain ?

FINE ARTS

Deemed Visionless

FINE ARTS

Workshop Trajal Harrell & Cécilia Bengolea

with Stéphanie Moisdon, Shirin Yousefi

In practice, Trajal Harrell will introduce participants to runway categories and dance techniques, guiding them through warm-up exercises and curated music playlists that shape his artistic approach. Meanwhile, Cecilia Bengolea will explore the concepts of self-presentation and performativity, inviting participants to engage in a dynamic investigation of identity, whether real or constructed. Through movement and expression, she aims to question the fluidity of identity and the ways in which it can be shaped or reimagined in a performative context.

FINE ARTS

Symposium - Worldbuilding in an era of extreme fragmentation

with Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Stéphanie Moisdon, Shirin Yousefi

This one-day conference is an interdisciplinary event taking as its starting point the fragmentation thesis, based on the observation that our political conversations online – in forums, social media platforms, or discussion sites – are secluded into ideologically uniform groups. This tendency towards homophily is nothing new yet it has dramatically taken speed recently, to the point that it can be seen as a planetary condition of our times. The infrastructural changes in our digital networks – privatization, tracking, and algorithmic rationality – are not the sole explanatory factors. Finance capitalism, genocidal conflicts, climate crisis, as well as ambient anxiety all trigger responses that tend to favor withdrawal strategies.

FINE ARTS

Readings with Gilles Furtwängler

with Gilles Furtwangler

FINE ARTS

Workshop Vittorio Brodman & Mathis Altman

with Stéphanie Moisdon, Shirin Yousefi

The POOL workshop focuses on interdisciplinary practices and involves a wide variety of mediums. Its core is rooted in the ideas of sculpture and painting, as seen in the work of Mathis Altmann and Vittorio Brodmann. The two artists explore techniques for embedding narrative structures, highlighting representational elements while investigating how abstraction can lead to distortion, the grotesque, and the fantastical.

FINE ARTS

Ana Francesca Bălan – Studiu de mansardă (Attic study)

by Ana Francesca Bălan

Studiu de mansardă (Attic study) is a collection of family artifacts reassembled into frames carrying questions of value, heritage, haunting, and the archive as a speculative tool.

FINE ARTS

Lorenzo De Bellis – I furnished the den and it seems to have turned out well

by Lorenzo De Bellis

The fox serves a dual role: a trickster and a symbol of guidance and protection. Initially introduced through a documentary S. watches on TV, the fox is featured in a fox hunting documentary where it is hunted and ultimately is killed. Images from this documentary are taken and projected on panels, forming a sort of theatrical scenography. The realm is the one of the horror. The tryptic is composed of three images representing the hunting scene and developed on the wooden panels using a photosensitive emulsion. The killing of the fox represents the prelude which is simultaneously a foreshadowing. The starting point of the project is a script, which is then used as a score to compose and create the work.

FINE ARTS

Gabriele Ferrarini – Measures

by Gabriele Ferrarini

The work on display stages an attempt to inhabit a psychological space characterized by new intentions and antagonistic ideas. A lucid dream in which the tools for measuring architecture reappear as nailed shadows, black silhouettes. Physical and atmospheric alterations accompany a misuse of the mentioned objects, making them apparently unrecognizable. The union of each element articulates an improbable metaphor that, in a poetic and ironic key, seeks to emphasize the doubts that drive us to observe reality and the criticality of the measures that control it.

FINE ARTS

Felice Berny-Tarente – I CRAVE

by Felice Berny-Tarente

This installation combines video performance, a poem, a sound piece in collaboration with Max Klunge and images generated by artificial intelligence. The looping video is as tragic as it is comic, it is this inner tension that my piece is dedicated to. The mantra I CRAVE structures the text in passages of deep desire and fearful prostration. Although nothing much seems to be happening, the undercurrents are imbued with deep emotion. Or rather, they capture an inability to cope or break out of mental loops, as in this vacant act of running and undergoing this performance. It's hard to understand exactly what the purpose of this temporal journey is, except perhaps a brief tale of solitude and endurance.

FINE ARTS

Oriane Emery – Every stain carries a memory

by Oriane Emery

My project Every stain carries a memory represents a laundry room featuring a passport photo of my biological father (with whom I did not grow up) and a fabric embroidered with carnation stitches, also known as Algerian Eye. This installation represents my interbreeding with Algerian culture, to which I was not invited. I sublimate it through dreams, memories, spiritual heritage and the laundry room as a popular place of transformation, purification and socially perceived as feminine. Capturing a suspended time, the fabric is eternally bathed in water that retains its memory, as opposed to washing it. The passport format of a photograph symbolizes identity. Here, it's frozen, the only link I share with him.

FINE ARTS

FILM STUDIES

FINE ARTS

FILM STUDIES

Archive as a Creative Act: The Absolute Cinema of Gregory J. Markopoulos and the Temenos Utopia

with François Bovier

Artists who produce archives from their own work approach archival activity as a creative gesture: here, the archive literally becomes a work of art. In parallel with the “archival impulse” that has run through contemporary art since the 1960s, this research project examines the “performative agency” of archives when they are constituted from “image acts”. The selected corpus is based on an extremely singular case, the cinematographic work of Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992) and the Temenos archives.

UNITE DE THEORIE

FINE ARTS

The Raving Age. Histories and figures of youth

with Vincent Normand, Stéphanie Moisdon

This research project questions what has come of youth – a conceptual, aesthetic, and political figure that was born with modernity – in the visual arts, popular culture, and the humanities. Conversely, the project addresses what the problematic category of “youth” has brought about in contemporary art and thought.

FINE ARTS

Claudia Mangone – Diagrams

by Claudia Mangone

This series of drawings is the result of a process in which the amount of information is continuously dosed. Communication is partially silenced; the structure of the shapes is blurred and lost, like a clouded mind or a hidden secret. Breaths in the room or manifestation of thoughts, they represent nothing more than what comes to the eye; the work thus becomes malleable under the gaze of the viewer, highlighting the unspoken. Made on paper, cut out, reassembled and then veiled by the milky surface of plexiglass, their manifestation is elusive. The colours are calibrated according to the surface’s capacity to hold or enhance them. The three pivots that support the drawings move around the four sides to find points of stability.

FINE ARTS

Simon Pellegrini – The Time of a Song

by Simon Pellegrini

The Time of a Song is a mute confession between a child and a melting snowman, a melancholy dream. A vision in an inner place of constructed memory, between fever dreams and flashbacks. We cannot deny a willingness, or predisposition, to invest energies, of any kind, by virtue of uncertain results. Compressing thoughts like snow to give shape and different weights to something unclear, playing with a silent audience, sharing intimacy with an inanimate object, creating with an absence.

FINE ARTS

Yoonjae Lee – Umwelten: Four Humans

by Yoonjae Lee

Umwelt (pl. Umwelten) refers to the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. This installation visualises subtle differences in the Umwelt of four human beings. Eight live streaming cameras face one LED through bespoke camera filters that are shaped based on four individuals’ corneas. Specifically, the four individuals here are Yoonjae Lee herself and people she cares for. She tries to understand the fundamental differences between her dear ones and herself by discovering the morphological differences in each vision. By focusing on the fact that each person’s perception is different due to their bodily differences, before their experiences, this work questions the implicit agreement and undisclosed biases in visual arts that assume everyone sees an artwork in the same way.

FINE ARTS

Sofia Fresey Angelopoulou – Juggler

by Sofia Fresey Angelopoulou

Juggler is an installation that consists of four large prints on micro-perforated tarpaulins, which are suspended from the ceiling. Viewers are welcome to walk around them and appreciate their see-through qualities. In many instances the juggler shares its identity with the magician, the jester and the fool. It is a duality: folly and non-folly, order and disorder, a joke and a warning. It is an entity that creates amusement with implements and in some cases with a physically deformed body. Through that, it generates patterns that describe the bizarre. Combinations of incompatibility, fantasy and reality, caricature and plausibility, alogicalness and hyperbolism. A big part of this project consists of images generated by an AI trained with pictures of freaks in sideshows.

FINE ARTS

Simon Colliard – Celle-ci je voulais la chanter au bord du gouffre

by Simon Colliard

Celle-ci Je Voulais la Chanter au Bord du Gouffre talks about having dreams and getting lost in the process. Celle-ci Je Voulais la Chanter au Bord du Gouffre is what remains when you have been looking within for too long. Celle-ci Je Voulais la Chanter au Bord du Gouffre is a 17-minute musical performance that tells a fragment of a story.

FINE ARTS

Juri Bizzotto – Shy Opener, Transfarmer Miniconcert

by Juri Bizzotto

Shy Opener, Transfarmer Miniconcert consists of a live set and presentation of the first single + video clip Shy Opener, made for the Transfarmer Series project. The concert stage is transformed into a window into the world of Transfarmer, where sound, performance and stage elements recreate the bucolic ecosystem of a rediscovered periphery. Transfarmer is a long-term research project, which is committed to creating intersectional critical thinking with respect to the condition of queer, trans* subjectivities in the rural context – imagining metamorphoses of them and their landscape. The practical project includes drawings, texts, sound compositions, videos and props, and aims to produce an EP that will narrate the cosmovision of the character of Transfarmer.