5. festival of experimental audiovisual practices
13.—17. may 2025
Overture:The future ahead is going to be weird AF, Part 1
Tuesday/13.may/18.00
at Slovenian Cinematheque
Through the synthetic voice of Adam Curtis, the movie tells the story of how humans may survive in a world that is becoming weirder, harder, and faster: dead celebrities are brought back from heaven, gen AI is rising, millionaires are hiding in the bottom of the earth. We feel stuck in a mediated reality, where love is constantly intercepted by emotional advertising, robots, and deepfakes.
Followed by a surprise screening.
SYNSPECIES: Asbu
Wednesday/14.may/21.15
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
Asbu, the fifth work by the duo SYNSPECIES (Elías Merino and Tadej Droljc) unfolds a fictional and symbolic audiovisual narrative about the genesis of the SYNSPECIES universe within an oblique and disorienting timeline. Whereas the first works showed us the violent ecosystem of these audiovisual entities, Asbu takes us back in time, presenting the creation of this unique world through a cosmogonic myth. This journey describes the beginning of all things, from the emergence of the void’s elementary forces to the ritual of the universe's shaping and the birth of the first objects.
Tadej Droljc: Fracture point
Wednesday/14.may/22.00
Kino Šiška, Komuna
Thursday/15.may/12.00-20.00
Fracture Point, a new audiovisual installation by internationally renowned artist Tadej Droljc, explores the aesthetics of power concentration within complex generative systems inspired by political, social and media dynamics, which the author abstracts in his distinctive style.
Composite Landscapes
“Australian” artists’ film and moving-image
Thursday/15.may/19.00
Friday/16.may/21.00
at Slovenian Cinematheque
In Camera Natura, Scottish painter and convict settler Thomas Watling describes his efforts to make the Australian wilderness conform to the pictorial conventions of the British landscape tradition. Forgoing topographic fidelity for the aesthetic idealism of the Picturesque, Watling is compelled to compose a fictional whole from discrete parts to translate what he sees into a subject worthy of his medium and legible to a foreign audience.
Curator: Sam Mountford
Vistas
Selection of films by the festival team and guests
Thursday/15.may/17.00
at Slovenian Cinematheque
Friday/16.may/17.00
Saturday/17.may/17.00
Vistas is an international programme of short films curated by the festival’s programme team that tries to present to the public the most resounding and innovative contemporary films on the international and Slovenian experimental scenes.
This year, we invited international representatives of film festivals and audiovisual archives to curate the Vistas III programme.
Boris Labbé:Glass House
Friday/16.may/19.30
at Slovenian Cinematheque
Glass House draws inspiration from 20th-century speculative and never made fiction by Sergei Eisenstein's, and the new realities of contemporary societies: the proliferation of communication networks, transparency and data exchanges, the society of control and surveillance, urban utopias, hyper-connectivity, and alienation. Here, the utopias of the early 20th century have transformed into dystopias. In the background of Glass House, the figures of Evgueni Zamiatine (We), George Orwell (1984) and Byung-Chul Han (The Society of Transparency) also emerge.
Followed by a masterclass with Boris Labbé. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the author.
Armand Lesecq: Phosphène
AV performance
Thursday/15.may/21.30
at Slovenian Cinematheque
Phosphène is a film for closed eyes and spatial sound. It uses a projection on the audience’s eyelids, a multichannel sound setup, and motorised directional loudspeakers. Inspired by dreams, neurosciences, and hypnosis, the project aims to explore varieties of inner spaces. It is an attempt to reach those territories we might tend to forget or deny, between the surface of the senses and our interpretation of reality, in the depths of imagination, illusions, and doubts.
WARNING: Strobe lights are used during this performance.
Nataša Prosenc Stearns:Between body and space III:Vertical horizon
Saturday/17.may/19.00
at Slovenian Cinematheque
Nataša Prosenc Stearns is a filmmaker and video artist who works with a wide range of moving image production and presentation, from scriptwriting, filming and editing to spatial installations, video objects and prints. The exhibition of Nataša Prosenc Stearns' film and video oeuvre, entitled Between Body and Space, is a selection of her works comprising four programmes, and at the V-F-X Ljubljana festival, we will present the third one, Vertical Horizon. This series presents works that live double lives, as gallery installations and as film or video objects, with the dramaturgy in the installation happening through the visitor's movement through the space. Her works in the Vertical Horizon programme focus on the body's materiality, which begins to disintegrate into parts, merge with other bodies into indistinct masses through the multilayering of images, and dissolve into basic elements, with water predominating in her oeuvre. Alongside the Cinematheque screening, a parallel programme of her works will be available online at the Slovenian Film Database (BSF, bsf.si), complementing the first three programmes.
Matevž Jerman,Jurij Meden: Alpe-Adria Underground
Saturday/17.may/21.00
at Slovenian Cinematheque
For decades, the rich experimental/avant-garde film heritage of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia (1945-1991) has remained overlooked at home and abroad. Finally visible today, these films prove that the metropoles of the West were not the only hubs of innovative cinema. Between 2013 and 2023, Slovenian Cinematheque preserved and digitized 179 short films created on a tiny stretch of land between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea in the period of socialism (1945-1991), but mostly outside the prevailing state production. Today, we belatedly recognize these films as experimental and as an important, innovative part of the Slovenian film heritage, visible again for the first time after decades. The production of Alpe-Adria Underground! has radically accelerated efforts to preserve, digitize and restore this segment of Slovenian cinema.
What’s Cooking?
Curated selection of student productions
Wednesday/14.may/19.00
at Slovenian Cinematheque
The student programme consists of a curated selection of the latest production in cooperation with ALUO and AGRFT, University of Ljubljana; School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica; and AVA – Academy of Visual Arts.
ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMME /
ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMME /
VR point/Boris Labbé: Ito Meikyū
Wednesday-Saturday/14.-17.may/16.00-21.00
Slovenian Cinematheque (lecture room)
Interior and exterior, transparency and opacity, exhibitionism and voyeurism, feminine and masculine; all these notions oppose or unite in the infinite cycle of a labyrinth with no exit. Life here is like a loom whose living weft is woven from a myriad of branching threads and paths.
EVA (Evil Vibrant Astute) 2.0
Aksioma | Project Space, Komenskega 18, Ljubljana
14.may-13.june 2025
In their multimedia exhibition EVA (Evil Vibrant Astute) 2.0, Socrates Stamatatos and Joanna Bacas invite you to a playdate. The large- scale installation is both a city–similar to the playsets of our childhood– and something that resembles the inner structure of a machine–like motherboard. Within this peculiar city, visitors can interact with a network built specifically for the project. Using it, they can exchange theory and media on topics like girlhood, feminism, re-enchantment and technology, to name just a few.
Curators: Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger
Archives and the search for national (film) identity
Panel Discussion
at Slovenian Cinematheque
Saturday/17.may/15.00
National (and other) film archives hold and manage film collections that are an important building block of the national cultural identities. But the selection of the foregrounded film titles – the ones we restore, digitise and/or show – is often in the hands of individuals or narrow expert groups. Who writes film and cultural history, and how? Do national cinemas even exist as an objective starting point?
From analogue to digital
Exhibition
Tuesday-Saturday/13.-17.may/17.00-21.00
Slovenian Cinematheque Café
An exhibition of film loops created at the workshop of learning about and experimenting with analogue colour film led by the artist Neža Knez. The workshop took place in the facilities of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, the Photography Programme. The shot and developed experiments on 16mm film were scanned and edited in a digital environment and are now exhibited as part of an installation of archival cathode monitors.