The Blind Owl. 1992. USA. Written and directed by Reza Abdoh. Produced by Adam Soch. With Peter Jacobs, Tom Pearl, Tony Torn, Juliana Francis, Tom Fitzpatrick, Paulina Sahagun-Macias. 84 min

18.30-20.30, Cinema Rouge et Noir, Palermo

Introduced by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Adam Soch

A polymath and self-described member of “a TV generation,” pioneering Iranian-American theater artist Reza Abdoh voraciously incorporated varied references to music videos, variety shows, film, dance, classical texts, BDSM, and more into his work, with equal parts poetry and rigor. Moving images played an essential role in the artist’s large-scale, interdisciplinary productions beginning in the mid-1980s. In his final working years he also turned to the cinematic form; his second feature remained unfinished at the time of his 1995 death from AIDS-related complications

Filmed in parallel with his raging, maximalist stage production Bogeyman (and including many of the same actors), Reza Abdoh’s sole feature film demonstrates an aesthetic vision distinct from his onstage work. Robert Bresson’s 1959 film Pickpocket is prominent among the influences on The Blind Owl, as much for its radically slowed-down cinematography and detached treatment of plot as for its overlapping themes of obsession, transgression, and eroticism. Abdoh’s film loosely follows a group of characters whose activities—among them caregiver, mortician, and prostitute—exist within a disorienting amalgam of illness, companionship, abuse, family, death, and sex. The intertwining narrative threads build a poetic, if ambivalent, study, in which the sorting out of identity and desire coexists with stagnation and mortality. While the film contrasts with Abdoh’s theatrical style, music remains as a marker of rhythm (and the use of Spanish-language songs also reflects the Los Angeles surroundings). The Blind Owl fits into a tradition of independent cinema rooted in 1980s performance culture, and is exemplary of the shift from analog film to video. Auspicious and unique in Abdoh’s body of work, the film poignantly points to an accomplished filmography that might have been (Moma).

Krist Gruijthuijsen was director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art from 2016 - 2023, where in collaboration with Bidoun Magazine, he curated a major retrospective of Reza Abdoh's work.

Adam Soch was Reza Abdoh's producer and the two collaborated frequently, with Soch designing projections for The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, The Law of Remains, Tight Right White, and Quotations from a Ruined City. Soch is author of the 2015 documentary: Reza Abdoh, Theatre Visionary.

Thanks to Negar Azimi and Bidoun

A evening of film and poetry orbiting around the work of Patrizia Vicinelli, with readings by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Tiziana La Melia and Murmur

Co curated by Nuova Orfeo and Lisa Andreani

Patrizia Vicinelli was a prolific poet and a key figure of the italian avant-garde. Her poetic output - from sound and concrete poetry to epic poems - was largely published in magazines and in the form of multiples and editions. She collaborated with mutiple artists and writers from the neo-avant guard from Emilio Villa and Aldo Braibanti to Gruppo 63 and also, worked closely with central figures from the italian experimental cinema scene, both in font of and behind camera, making films on 16mm with Alberto Grifi, Gianni Castagnoli and Mario Gianni.

'In viaggio con Patrizia' explores Vicinelli's filmic output - in particular her relationship to Alberto Grifi - as well as her connection to a new generation of Italian poets: Allison Grimaldi Donahue, (Bologna / U.S.A) Tiziana La Melia (Palermo / Vancouver) and Murmur (Catania / Milano). The programme includes In viaggio con Patrizia (1965) Grifi's love diary, composed of long pauses, written with and for Patrizia (his partner throughout the 1960s) and Errore di gruppo (1973) by Karma Film (Mario Gianni, Elio Rumma, Patrizia Vicinelli) which stars Vicinelli as its protgaonist mysteriously wandering through the city of Lourdes as well as readings and performances by Grimaldi Donahue, La Melia and Murmur.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue(1984, Middletown, Connecticut USA) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. Her work ranges from translation, particularly of feminist experimental authors like Carla Lonzi (Self-portrait, Divided 2021) and Tomaso Binga (in Euforia, Lenz Press 2024) to the creation of poetry performances that include song and printed matter such as in a 2023 performance called  with the authority of suddenness: listening for voices centered around the work of Giuni Russo at Kunsthalle Bern. She lives in Bologna

Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982, Palermo, IT), raised on an orchard-garden on Syilx territories, and living as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples.  Their writing and art practice gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes and symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. Tiziana’s work has taken shape in a wide array of forms from painting, books, collaborations, installation, sculpture, collage, and moving image.

Murmur is a contemporary poetry collective founded by Maria Luce Cacciaguerra (Palermo 1997) and Greta Sugar (Milan, 1998). It was established in Milan in the winter of 2022 with the idea of reviving tpoetic art through connection. Murmur gathers the words, sounds, and visual explorations of artists, thinkers, and anyone who holds poetry dear.

The project is realized in collaboration with Associazione Culturale Alberto Grifi and supported by "Lazio Contemporaneo 2022” promoted by Regione Lazio.

An evening in collaboration with Claire Fontaine and Jun Kebab. Dedicated to the victims of the genocide perpetuated by the Israeli government. Food and drinks provided by Jun Kebab, AI Quds, Studio Terra and Planeta wines.

The srceening will be followed by a Q & A between Kamal Aljafari, Beatrice Gibson and Claire Fontaine.

Studio Claire Fontaine 17:00 til late.

All proceeds from this screening will go towards Medicalaid Palestine e Lebanese Red Cross.

Vinyl copies of Aid for Gaza by Hardcore Unlimited Records (Torino) and freshly printed copies of The Gaza Reader Vol 1. Poetry ed. by Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, WAWOG and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation will be also available.

Deep thanks to Rosalind Nashishibi, Kamal Aljafari Federico Chiari Diego Marcon, Negar Azimi and Tiffany Malakooti

Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office (2002, 7')
Hreash House (2004, 20')
Electrical Gaza (2015, 17’)
by Rosalind Nashishibi

British Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashishibi's three Palestinian films were made over the last twenty years and include Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office, Hreash House and Electrical Gaza. Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office documents a Gazan suburb built originally for the Palestinian Post Office but reality time a no-man’s land between Ramallah and East Jerusalem. A game of football is played and rubbish burns whilst the daily goings on of the barbershop – Sweet Love Saloon for Men plays out in front of the camera. The adhan, or call to prayer is heard amidst a landscape of decay and degradation. Hreash House filmed inside a Nazareth home, documents day in the life of one Palestinian family preparing and then eating a Ramadan feast. The family is expansive and lives collectively. Electrical Gaza was filmed in the months preceding the Israeli operation 'Protective Edge’ that bombarded the Gaza strip between July and August of 2014. Gaza is shown as a place from myth: isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access and electrically charged. An image of life in Gaza emerges counter to the mediated images of rubble and destruction, one in which we see a community managing to operate against unimaginable odds.

A Fidai film
by Kamal Aljafari (2024, 78')

Composed of archival fragments, A Fidai Film reconstructs the visual memory of Palestine, reclaiming images that were plundered from the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in 1982. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israseli Defence Force looted the archive of the Palestinian Research Centre, taking thousands of documents with them back to Israel. These included both still and moving images, that formed an integral part of the visual memory of Palestine. The stolen materials were then used by Israel to create a narrative aimed at bolstering the Occupation. As openly referenced by the title (Fidai refers to the figure of the freedom fighter), A FIDAI FILM is an act of resistance that re-appropriates those images in an attempt to reanimate Palestine’s vanishing history. Aljafari broadens our perspective on the Occupation by bending time: material shot decades earlier grimly resembles the daily contemporary images broadcast from Gaza. Restoring the images to their original meaning, stripping away words and Aljafari reveals the intimidating propaganda work that goes hand in hand with military occupation.

Rosalind Nashashibi is a British-Palestinian filmmaker and painter. She studied painting at Sheffield Hallam University before completing a Master of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art in 2000. She lives and works in London. Her work in moving image, using 16 mm film, explores subconscious and inner responses to moments and events, often addressing the politics surrounding communal relations and notions of an expanded family. In 2017, Nashashibi was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Her work has been featured in numberous exhibitions including 'Documenta 14' (2017), 'Sharjah 'Biennial 10' (2011), 'Manifesta 7' (2008) and she represented Scotland in the 2007 'Venice Biennale'. Nashishibi was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam.

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. Aljafari has taught filmmaking at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. His contributions to the field have been recognised with fellowships at the Film Study Center - Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and most recently at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University, Paris 2024-2025. In May 2024, IndieLisboa dedicated a retrospective to his work. In 2022 he was guest of honor at Sicilia Queer filmfest, Palermo. His film A Fidai Film won the grand jury prize at Visions du Réel 2024, and in currently being show at festivals worldwide, including TIFF, London Film Festival and Viennale. He is currently developing a fiction film set to be shot in Jaffa.

Toute une Nuit (1982) + La Chambre (1972)

Introduced by Lucia Aspesi

Cinema Rouge et Noir
18:30

Ten years apart, these two films approach intimacy through a resolutely cinematic lens. La Chambre, 12 mins, offers a formal study of a room, through repeated 360 pans that finally settle on a woman in bed; the filmaker herself as she listlessly devours an apple. Toute une Nuit (90 mins) offers a series of intense fragments to do with quivering, loving and sexual tension. Over the course of a hot stomy summer night, men, women, children, caught up in their desire and ready for anything, allow themselves be carried away, to the point of vertigo, by the excess of their feelings.

Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels on 6 June 1950. At the age of 15, she discovers Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou by chance, which inspired her to take up filmmaking. Entering the Brussels film school (INSAS) in 1967, she left straight away, rejecting the rigid framework of the school. The following year she made her first short film, Saute ma ville, first expression of a free and radical cinema. Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s, where she discovered the experimental cinema of Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow, which had a profound influence on the films she made there (La Chambre, Hotel Monterey). On her return to Belgium, she directed Je, tu, il, elle and then raised the necessary funds to produce Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. This film about the daily life of a housewife, an essential piece of feminist cinema and presented at the Cannes Fortnight in 1975, brought her international recognition and remains a major cinematic experiment in the history of cinema, studied and admired for decades. Akerman ‘s full filmography numbers fourty odd films and has been widely acclaimed throughout the world. Akerman is considered one of the most important and influential European directors of her generation, thanks to her visionary treatment of images, time and space, and the multiple reflections that run through her films: on identity, belonging, memory, feminism, gender and sexuality.

Lucia Aspesi is a curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, with a particular interest in the status of film and moving image in the field of contemporary art. She co-curated Trisha Baga' s solo show at Hangar Bicocca in 2020 and in 2017, she presented the first solo show in Italy by Ben Rivers at La Triennale di Milano. In 2019 she co-curated the major retrospective on Marinella Pirelli at Museo del Novecento, Milan (2019).

With thanks to Celine Brouwez and the Fondation Chantal Akerman

These films are in french only, however they are largely silent.
Tickets €4, free for students.

Nuova orfeo is thrilled to present an evening with Laure Prouvost

Cinema Rouge et Noir
18:00

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013. In 2019 she represented France at the Venice Biennale.

Find her personal biography here

The srceening will be followed by a Q & A between Prouvost and Nuova Orfeo members Stella Sideli and artist Beatrice Gibson

Language – in its broadest sense - permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations combining film and installation in humorous, generous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost confounds linear narrative, verbal expectation and association between word, image and meaning, placing the spectator in a situation of doubt and incomprehension, as well as wonder, both intellectual and sensorial. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film and video installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality.

Programme
You are the only one, UK, (2008)
Monologue, UK, (2009)
It heat hit UK, (2010)
Wantee, UK, (2013)
We will go far, UK (2015)
They Parlaient Ideale, France, Italy (2019)

Where humanly possible, these films have been translated into Italian! The discussion afterwards will be in English.

Tickets €4

Followed by a conversation between Nuova Orfeo and the curators in residence of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino.

Cinema Rouge et Noir
18:00

Sadie Benning began making experimental videos when they were 15-years old, after their father, the filmmaker James Benning gave them a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera for Christmas. Benning quickly became a pioneer of the genre, recognising its uncanny intimacy and psychodramatic potential. Made mostly in the privacy of the artist's bedroom, the videos offer a window into Benning's teenage world, narrating the discovery of their sexuality and the difficult experience of growing up as a lesbian in a violent, hostile and oppressive society. Using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries, to record thoughts, feelings and images, Benning's videoworks reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity in grainy pixelated black and white. Playfully seductive and painfully honest, Benning’s floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to their intimate revelations and acts as an accomplice in defining their evocative and experimental form. Benning's work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult— with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a person just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy.

Event a collaboration with and supported by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino.

Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1

A New Year (1989)
In a version of the “teenage diary,” Benning places their feelings of confusion and depression alongside grisly tales from tabloid headlines and brutal events in her neighborhood. The difficulty of finding a positive identity for oneself in a world filled with violence is starkly revealed by Benning’s youthful but already despairing voice.

Living Inside (1989)
When they were 16, Benning stopped going to high school for three weeks and stayed inside with their camera, TV set, and a pile of dirty laundry. This tape mirrors Benning's psyche during this time. With the image breaking up between edits, the rough quality of this early tape captures Benning’s sense of isolation and sadness, their retreat from the world. As such, Living Inside is the confession of a chronic outsider.

Me and Rubyfruit (1990)
Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage.

If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990)
Setting their pixelvision camera on themselves and their room, Benning searches for a sense of identity and respect as a woman and a lesbian. Acting alternately as confessor and accuser, the camera captures Benning’s anger and frustration at feeling trapped by social prejudices.

Jollies (1990)
Benning gives a chronology of their crushes and kisses, tracing the development of their nascent sexuality. Addressing the camera with an air of seduction and romance, giving the viewer a sense of their anxiety and special delight as they came to realize their lesbian identity.

Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 2

A Place Called Lovely (1991)
“Nicky is seven. His parents are older and meaner.” A Place Called Lovely references the types of violence individuals find in life, from actual beatings, accidents and murders, to the more insidious violence of lies, social expectations, and betrayed faith. Benning collects images of this socially-pervasive violence from a variety of sources, tracing events from childhood: movies, tabloids, children's games (like mumbledy-peg), personal experiences, and those of others. Throughout, Benning uses small toys as props and examples—handling and controlling them the way we are, in turn, controlled by larger violent forces.

It Wasn't Love (1992)
Benning illustrates a lustful encounter with a “bad girl,” through the gender posturing and genre interplay of Hollywood stereotypes: posing for the camera as the rebel, the platinum blonde, the gangster, the '50s crooner, and the heavy-lidded vamp. Cigarette poses, romantic slow dancing, and fast-action heavy metal street shots propel the viewer through the story of the love affair. Benning’s video goes farther than romantic fantasy, describing other facets of physical attraction including fear, violence, lust, guilt and total excitement. As Benning puts it, “It wasn’t love, but it was something...” It was a chance to feel glamorous, sexy and famous, all at the same time.

Girl Power (1992)
Set to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl band from Washington), Sadie Benning's Girl Power is a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the 1990s. Benning relates their personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes as a story of personal freedom, telling the viewer how they used to model like Matt Dillon and skip school in order to adventure alone. Informed by the underground “riot grrrl” movement, this tape transforms the image politics of female youth, rejecting traditional passivity and polite compliance in favor of radical independence and a self-determined sexual identity.

With an introduction by Claire Fontaine

Cinema Rouge e Noir
20:30

Anna
Alberto Grifi, Massimo Sarchielli
1972, 1973, 1974, 1975
225 min

Shot in 1972, first shown in 1975, and newly restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, Alberto Grifi and massimo Sarchielli’s ANNA is an astonishing nearly four-hour documentary about a 16-year-old homeless junkie, eight months pregnant, whom the filmmakers discovered in Rome’s Piazza Navona. Mainly shot on then-newfangled video (which at times gives the black-and-white images a ghostly translucence), it documents the interactions between the beautiful, clearly damaged, often dazed teenager and the directors, who take her in partly out of compassion and partly because she’s a fascinating subject for a film. ANNA cuts between long, often discomfiting domestic scenes (including an interminable delousing in the shower) and equally protracted café discussions back in the square, where the unruly cross talk among hippies, bums, bourgeoisie, and angry young men touches on the movie’s key themes of obligation and intervention: between filmmakers and their subjects, the state and its citizens, fellow members of society. (Dennis Lim)

An evening in collaboration with Jun Kebab

A screening of Heiny Srour's Leila wal Zi’ab (Leila and the Wolves) 1984 and Jocelyene Saab's Les Femmes Palestiniennes (Palestinian Women)

EPYC

Via Pignatelli Aragona, 42,

17:30

All proceeds from this screening will go towards Medicalaid Palestine and Palestinian Childrens Relief Fund.

Leila wal Zi’ab, 1984, 90mins

Drawing on the Arab heritage of oral tradition and mosaic patterns, Leila and the Wolves is an exploration of the collective historical memory of Arab women. Shot over seven years, and in often treacherous conditions, Srour’s film is a masterpiece of filmmaking, mixing together archival footage, fairy-tale storytelling, aesthetically bold imagery, and dramatisations of situations faced by women in Lebanon and Palestine, from early twentieth century to the beginning of the 1980s. Through the eyes of Leila, a Lebanese student dissatisfied with the official, colonial, male-dominated version of the history of the region, the film reconstructs women’s daily, often unglamorous and silent sacrifices, as part of and in parallel with heroic military actions. The stories told here are fierce and sometimes shocking.

Les Femmes palestiniennes, 1974, 16 mins

Les Femmes palestiniennes was made by Saab in 1973 for the French channel Antenne 2. "I wanted to show images of these Palestinian women fighters in Syria, which were very rare at the time. It was just before Sadat’s visit to Israel, and the situation was very tense. While I was editing the film at Antenne 2, Paul Nahon, then head of foreign correspondence, grabbed me by the collar and pulled me out of the editing room. Les Femmes palestiniennes was shelved and never televised. Sincere thanks to Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, for allowing us reproduce the pgroamme and use their subtitles, Association Jocelyene Saab for their support and Bidoun Magazine (Negar Azimi and Tiffany Malakooti) for suggesting this film to us in 2020!

A collaboration between TB21A Academy and Nuovo Cinema Arabo on the occasion of the exhibitionThus waves comes in pairs at Ocean Space, Venice curated by Barbara Casavecchia

Ocean space, Venice, 18:00

Thus waves comes in pairs takes its title from the poem "Sea and Fog" by Etel Adnan, and refers to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, plurality and exchange. Alongside scultptures by Simone Fattal and a newly commissioned instllation by Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano, the exhibitoin features an expanded public programme focused on supporting situated projects, collective pedagogies and alternative voices along the Mediterranean basin, across art, culture, science, conservation, and activism.

In this context Nuovo Orfeo presents Cinema Arabo Vol 2, an evening of films co-curated by Barbara Casavecchia and inspired by Etel Adnan, including Jocelyne Saab's Beirut Never Again (1976) and Lamia Joreige's Sun and Sea (2021)

PROGRAM

Beirut, Never Again, (35’)

With a child’s eyes Saab follows the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting. A narration written and voiced by Etel Adan accompanies this devastating and extraordinary docu-poem.

Sun & Sea, (17’)

In ‘Sea & Sun’, at Adnan's request, Joreige enters into a hesitant dialogue with the poets first poem, written in 1949. The sound of waves and the golden light refracted on the blue sea present a seeming counterpoint to the intesity of Saab's film, yet Adnan's poem, hints at a hidden conflict between sun and sea. The threat of turmoil is never far away.

Jocelyne Saab (born in Beirut in 1948) was a Franco-Lebanese filmmaker, best known for her documentaries about the Lebanese civil war. She is considered a pioneer of Arab cinema, and built up a monumental body of work comprising 47 films and 6 photographic series. Mainly produced for television, her documentary films were, before her death on January 7, 2019, best known to the Lebanese diaspora who had access to her films broadcast on television during the war.

Lamia Joreige(born in Beirut in 1972) is a visual artist and film-maker who lives and works in Beirut. She uses archival documents and elements of fiction to reflect on history and its possible narration, and on the relationship between individual stories and collective memory. In her practice, rooted in her country’s experience, she explores the possibilities of representing the Lebanese wars and their aftermath. Her work is essentially on time, the recordings of its trace, and its effects on us.

With thanks to Louise Malherbe and Association Jocelyne Saab

Cinema Rouge e Noir
18:30

A programme of films curated by Hila Peleg and Erika Balsom, co-curators of No Master Territories, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image.

Introduced in person by Erika Balsom.
Produced by Nuova Orfeo and Goethe-Institut Palermo

This programme traces a range of audiovisual perspectives from the Italian feminist movements of the 1970's through the presentation of three short films – La lotta non è finita (Collettivo Femminista di Cinema Roma, 1973), Rony (Annabella Miscuglio, 1973–76), and Paola (Annabella Miscuglio, 1973-76) – alongside an excerpt from Processo per Stupro (A Trial for Rape, 1979), a documentary made by a collective of six women, including Miscuglio.

The screening will be followed by  a short in conversation between Balsom and director Beatrice Gibson, co-founder of Nuova Orfeo

The exhibition No Master Territories, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, was produced by HKW, Berlin.

Nuova orfeo is thrilled to present an evening with Laure Prouvost

Cinema Rouge et Noir
18:00

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013. In 2019 she represented France at the Venice Biennale.

Find her personal biography here

The srceening will be followed by a Q & A between Prouvost and Nuova Orfeo members Stella Sideli and artist Beatrice Gibson

Language – in its broadest sense - permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations combining film and installation in humorous, generous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost confounds linear narrative, verbal expectation and association between word, image and meaning, placing the spectator in a situation of doubt and incomprehension, as well as wonder, both intellectual and sensorial. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film and video installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality.

Programme
You are the only one, UK, (2008)
Monologue, UK, (2009)
It heat hit UK, (2010)
Wantee, UK, (2013)
We will go far, UK (2015)
They Parlaient Ideale, France, Italy (2019)

Where humanly possible, these films have been translated into Italian! The discussion afterwards will be in English.

Tickets €4

A collaboration between TB21A Academy and Nuovo Cinema Arabo on the occasion of the exhibitionThus waves comes in pairs at Ocean Space, Venice curated by Barbara Casavecchia

Ocean space, Venice, 18:00

Thus waves comes in pairs takes its title from the poem "Sea and Fog" by Etel Adnan, and refers to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, plurality and exchange. Alongside scultptures by Simone Fattal and a newly commissioned instllation by Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano, the exhibitoin features an expanded public programme focused on supporting situated projects, collective pedagogies and alternative voices along the Mediterranean basin, across art, culture, science, conservation, and activism.

In this context Nuovo Orfeo presents Cinema Arabo Vol 2, an evening of films co-curated by Barbara Casavecchia and inspired by Etel Adnan, including Jocelyne Saab's Beirut Never Again (1976) and Lamia Joreige's Sun and Sea (2021)

PROGRAM

Beirut, Never Again, (35’)

With a child’s eyes Saab follows the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting. A narration written and voiced by Etel Adan accompanies this devastating and extraordinary docu-poem.

Sun & Sea, (17’)

In ‘Sea & Sun’, at Adnan's request, Joreige enters into a hesitant dialogue with the poets first poem, written in 1949. The sound of waves and the golden light refracted on the blue sea present a seeming counterpoint to the intesity of Saab's film, yet Adnan's poem, hints at a hidden conflict between sun and sea. The threat of turmoil is never far away.

Jocelyne Saab (born in Beirut in 1948) was a Franco-Lebanese filmmaker, best known for her documentaries about the Lebanese civil war. She is considered a pioneer of Arab cinema, and built up a monumental body of work comprising 47 films and 6 photographic series. Mainly produced for television, her documentary films were, before her death on January 7, 2019, best known to the Lebanese diaspora who had access to her films broadcast on television during the war.

Lamia Joreige(born in Beirut in 1972) is a visual artist and film-maker who lives and works in Beirut. She uses archival documents and elements of fiction to reflect on history and its possible narration, and on the relationship between individual stories and collective memory. In her practice, rooted in her country’s experience, she explores the possibilities of representing the Lebanese wars and their aftermath. Her work is essentially on time, the recordings of its trace, and its effects on us.

With thanks to Louise Malherbe and Association Jocelyne Saab

18.00-20.00, Cinema Rouge et Noir, Palermo

Supported by Istituto Svizzero and TBA21-Academy

Nuova Orfeo presents New Arab Cinema, a new ongoing, experimental film and artist moving image programme strand that explores and expands on Palermo’s connection to the Arab world by centring Middle Eastern and North African artists and/or subject matter. Vol. I focuses on the work of Basma Alsharif and Jumana Manna, who are joined in conversation by Barbara Casavecchia at the end of the screening.

Basma Alsharif (1983). Working nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America, and currently based in Berlin, Basma Alsharif—an artist and filmmaker of Palestinian heritage—explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and nonplace, she confronts the legacy of colonialism and the experience of displacement with satire, doubt, and hope.

Jumana Manna (1987) is a visual artist and filmmaker raised in Jerusalem and based in Berlin. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law.

Programme

Basma Alsharif, We Began By Measuring Distance, 19', 2009

Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.

Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle, The Goodness Regime, 21 min HD video, 2013

An experimental documentary exploring the myths and images that have enabled an understanding of Norway as a nation of peace and benevolence. The binding element is a series of enactments by children that recount the myths, historical events and cultural personas that have propelled the image of Norway as a peace nation. These are weaved together with archival footage, political speeches and voiceovers from Hollywood films. In a satirical deconstruction of the Goodness Regime that permeates Norwegian society, Manna and Storihle explore the moral dilemmas embedded within the history of one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

Basma Alsharif, The Story of Milk and Honey, 10 min, 2011

Narrated by an anonymous voice, the details of attempting to write a love story in Beirut, Lebanon are told through a delicate weaving of fact and fiction. A tale of defeat transforms into a multi-layered journey exploring how we collect information, perceive facts and recreate history to serve our own desires.

Jumana Manna, Blessed Blessed Oblivion, 21 min HD Video, 2010

A portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the video uses visual collage and the musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry or unashamed self-praise.

Nuova Orfeo and Sicilia Queer present:

The Human Surge (2016) Dir. Eduardo Williams

+ The Canyon (2021) Dir. Zachary Epcar
Cinema De Seta
Palermo, Sicily

Nuova Orfeo are totally delighted to present two fabulous films in the context of the wondrous Sicilia Queer exploring youth, alienation and the sublime.

In Epcar’s The Canyon we travel through an urban residential development until it slips into oblivion. The boxy architecture and cordoned greenery of a luxury housing developments gives way to an architecture of dreams, which it depicts through a sequence of precise frames, stock gestures, and pre-programmed phrases, drifting into entropy.

Winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno, Eduardo Williams' debut feature, The Human Surge, is a mesmerising, sinuous and queer exploration of millennials, technology and the disorientating, fractious nature of the present. The paths of four listless interconnected protagonists -pressed for cash and inseparably attached to their laptops and phones - entwine, across continents and landscapes, via bodies, chat rooms and ants.

The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation between Eduardo Williams, Dennis Lim, director of the New York Film Festival and Beatrice Gibson.

The screening begins at 6.30pm

Cinema De Seta
Cantieri Culturali
18:30

Nuova Orfeo are delighted to present a screening of films celebrating the work of cult artist, activist and feminist film maker, the late Barbara Hammer.

A pioneer of experimental queer cinema Hammer produced over 90 films and installation during the span of her 50 year career. This screening focuses on earlier works: (from 1974-1987) super 8, 16mm and video pieces, many of which orbited around Hammer's personal life, tackling broken relationships, periods and aging, whilst lyrically exploring sexuality, female pleasure and the body in formally radical and innovative ways.

Introduced by Beatrice Gibson

Programme:
Psychosynthesis 6 mins
Menses 3 mins
Sync Touch 10 mins
Sappho 6 mins
No no nooky TV 12 mins
SuperDyke meets Madame X, 20 mins
Audience, 32 mins

Throughout September 2021


Arena La Sirenetta, Via Azalea, Mondello

Palermo, Sicily

Orfeo on the beach was the inauguratory event of Nuova Orfeo as an entity!

It was comprised of a season of radical, feminist, cult film, experimental cinema and artist's moving image at the historic open air cinema La Sirenetta. The programmed features cult feminist classics such as Barbara Loden's Wanda and Nina Menkes' Queen of Diamonds as well an evening with the artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, the Italian premiere of Gibson's Dear Barbara, Bette, Nina and a curatorial collaboration with the collectives Nomadica and ৺ ෴ ර ∇ ❃﹌﹌ on film, feminism and the Italian South.

Orfeo on the Beach was supported by Società italo-belga, Institut Français Palermo, and Sinergie Group


Project Partners:

Nomadica

Sicilia Queer

Written and directed by Barbara Loden, Wanda (1970) is a milestone of American independent filmmaking that has seen little distribution since its release. The film stars Loden in the titular role of Wanda Goronski, a woman who leaves her children and abusive husband to embark on a series of unfortunate encounters, ending up as an accomplice to a robber and petty criminal. Shot unflinchingly on 16mm in Pennsylvania coal country, and inspired by a news report of a woman who thanked a judge for sending her to prison, this sometimes brutal and often harrowing portrait was described by its director as 'semi-autobiographical'. A film about women, actresses, landscapes, what drives us to change and what keeps us in place.

Wanda is accompanied by Dear Barbara Bette and Nina (2010), a 16mm short by Beatrice Gibson. Dear Barbara, Bette, Nina, (2021) was commissioned as part of a project by Punto de Vista Film Festival in which several filmmakers were asked by curators Garbiñe Ortega and Matías Piñeiro to film a letter to a filmmaker they admired. For Las Cartas Que no Fueron Tambien Son – The Letters that weren’t and also are - Gibson wrote a love letter to three filmmakers – Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes & Bette Gordon, women whose voices and characters have influenced her deeply in the last few years.

৺ ෴ ර ∇ ❃﹌﹌ is a feminist collective dedicated to feminism and the southern question, consisting of Claudia Gangemi, Sonia D'alto, Sofia Melluso, Naomi Morelloand Susanna Gonzo.

Programma della serata:

- Follia come Poesia (Dir. Le Nemesiache, 1977)

- Il piacere del testo (Dir. Adriana Monti, 1977)

- Serie di brevi ritratti in Super 8 delle collaboratrici al collettivo di cinema femminista di Roma: Maitreya, Rony, Paola, Anna’s Textures (Dir. Annabella Miscuglio del Collettivo di cinema Femminista di Roma, 1973-1976)

- Narciso, film esperienza (Dir. Marinella Pirelli, 1966-67)

- Medusa and the Abyss (Dir. Felicity Palma, 2019)

Widely hailed as a feminist masterpiece, Queen of Diamonds stars sister Tinka Menkes (a regular presence in her films) as a disaffected Las Vegas blackjack dealer whose life unfolds in a series of often-surreal encounters framed by the bleak desert landscape and glittering lights of the strip.

Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain. Restricted from visiting Gaza for a period, Alsharif practiced self-hypnosis in an attempt to locate herself in several places at once and filmed this work while in a trance state. Appearing in the video as her own double, dressed in all-white, she walks through unidentifiable ruins, holding a recording device. Here, Gaza is called upon, reinvented through the lens of the artist’s personal relationship to Palestine.

Bette Gordon’s Variety, (1983)scripted by the late Kathy Acker, follows Christine a bright and unassuming young woman, who gets a job selling tickets at a porn cinema, in downtown NY. Emerging from the underground NYC arts scene, Variety is a snapshot of the NY scene at the time, includes cameos from Cookie Mueller and Nan Goldin, and is utterly ground breaking in its treatment of female voyeurism and desire.

Event in collaboration with Civico Museo Castelbuono + Sicilia Queer

Terrazza dell’Institut Français,
Cantieri Culturali
20:00

During the late naughties Crystabel Riley toured Japan and Europe using drums, electronics and make-up in noise trio Maria and the Mirrors. This was the start of her interest in patterns on skins - human and drum. This interest in dimensional patterns existing on (and off) different surfaces has continued to evolve through exploring the idea of 'care and uncare' of the skin, self, others, and the world, across all of Crystabel's practices as an Artist (Make-up, Drum). Crystabel has been a long term collaborator of Sue Lynch as well as the London Improvisers Orchestra. She is currently working on the multi-format duo project @xcrswx with Seymour Wright. She recently played at LCMF (London Contemorary Music Festival)

Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique ­– actual and potential. Seymour's solo music is documented on three widely-acclaimed collections – Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) and Is This Right? (2017). Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.

Flora Pitrolo is an academic and DJ. Her research investigates experimental performance and music cultures of the 1980s, with a special focus on Italy. Her latest book, Taroni-Cividin, documents the avant garde duo's performance, video and expanded cinema output from 1977-84. She is active as a DJ in multiple experimental music scenes

Mario Adamo is a Dj and sonic explorer whose work embraces ambient music with post punk roots. With a DIY approach based mostly on improvisation, sampling and sparse looping, the attempt is to dive into the unknown through atmospheric digital sounds, audio manipulations and field recordings, setting the possible ground for the appearance of musical. Mario’s latest works include audio-visual collaborations with Landescape 2015, Ortigia Sound System Festival, Wesh Studio & Maat Festival.

@xcrswx created the soundtrack for Dreaming Alcestis, a hologpaphic installation, co-directed by Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon, co written by Maria Nadotti and produced by Okta Film. Dreaming Alcestis is commissioned by the Museo Civico of Castelbuono and Hayward Gallery Touring for British Art Show 9, and supported by the Italian Council (X Edizione 2021), Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.

The exhibition Dreaming Alcestis, at Museo Castelbuono is curated by Laura Barreca and runs through 10.11.2023.

This event is promoted by Civico Museo Castelbuono in collaboration with Sicilia Queer and curated by Nuova Orfeo. It is supported by The Italian Council (2021) Direttorato generale creatività contemporanea, Ministero della cultura.

A last minute performance with Elvin Brandhi

Followed by DJ set by A Colder Consciouness, Bloody Mary's by Marta, Tramezzini by Masu (Emanuela!)

Sunday Afternoon
Palerma
17:30 - 21:00
Via Gangini, 59

Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist, originally from Bridgend in Wales. Brandhi studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her audio practice builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument and voice. Using sound and voice as an expansive language transgressing intrinsic systemics and inherited syntactical etiquettes, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where caustic streams of consciousness cavort with restless, glitched out heaviness. Her creative momentum comprises a range of collaborations and an endless nomadism via Vienna. Kampala, Berlin, Cairo, Dakkar, Marseille and Newcastle. Brandhi has participated in numerous international festivals including CTM (Berlin), Borealis (Bergen), Kraak Festival (Brussels), Umlaut festival (Paris,) Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), and Counterflows (Glasgow). Among her stable collaborations are the low-fi noise pop duo Yeah You with her father Gustav Thomas, the interdisciplinary duo BAHK with Daniel Blumberg, the INSIN duo with Bashar Suleiman, and Bad@Maths. She released her solo EP Shelf Life (C.A.N.V.A.S), and the LPs Villaelvin (Hakuna Kulala) and Elvin Brandhi (Krai). In 2017 she was awarded the PRS Oram Award for Innovative Musicians, with a production commission at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In 2024 she attended a 3 day residency at London's Cafe Oto.

A workshop for Supervoid in collaboration with Landescape

Part of the Supervoid / Instituto Svizzero summer school, 'AULA BUNKER architecture, justice
 and media in 1980s Palermo'

17:30 - 20:00 Tour curated by Pietro Airoldi in collaboration with Landescape

20:00 Lecture/performance by Leonardo Ruvolo (Landescape) with food and drinks by Green Code Farm (Francesco Stabile) at Studio Pietro Airoldi - Largo Sanseverino 29 

21:30 Screening curated by Nuova Orfeo, presented by Beatrice Gibson

Programme:

Someplace in your Mouth, Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon, 5 mins, 2024
‘Some Place in Your Mouth’ is shot in the Forum car park on the edge of Palermo. Young men sit on bouncing mopeds; cars overloaded with sub-woofers pound with base. The camera registers male posture. But it also captures moments of being together, of unspoken courtship, of physical, sonic encounters.

Mery per Sempre, Marco Risi, 102 mins, 1989 
Mery per sempre is set in Rosaspina, a fictional juvenile detention centre (based on a real facility named Malaspina) in Palermo, Sicily, during the 1980s. Marco Terzi (Michele Placido), the teacher at the prison has difficulty in establishing a rapport with his young, hostile students. Terzi's situation is further complicated when Marilyn Libassi (Alessandra Di Sanzo), a trans prostitute, nicknamed Mery, falls in love with him.

Civico Museo Castelbuono
14:00-17:00
Ages 7-12

An event in collaboration with Civico Museo Castelbuono

A workshop for kids dreamt up by Obie and Laizer Gordon.

A 16mm horror movie to be shot on location at Museo Castelbuono, with participants as cast and crew. "We will make scary masks and special effects using UV paint and torches. We will create hell inside the exhibition. Then we will film what we've created. There will be a party"

With the support of artists Adriano La Licata and Cristina Giarnecchia.

Event promoted by Museo Civico di Castelbuono on the occasion of Dreaming Alcestis. Dreaming Alcestis, curated by Laura Barreca is on display at Museo Civico di Castelbuono until 10.11.2023. Realized thanks to the support of the Italian Council (X Edizione 2021) Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.

On the 29th of November, we presented the first edition of Orfeo Books, a new publishing project by Nuova Orfeo that accompanies its program by exploring the relationship between experimental film, music and printed matter.

‘In Viaggio con Patrizia’ is dedicated to the work of Patrizia Vicinelli, a prolific poet and a key figure of the Italian avant-garde. It takes its title from the eponymously named film by Alberto Grifi (1964), a love diary he made with and for Patrizia - his partner throughout the 1960s. The publication includes various archive materials kindly provided by Associazione Culturale Alberto Grifi in collaboration with Lisa Andreani: typescripts, unpublished documents, parts of the poems that appear in Grifi’s film, as well as personal and private letters highlighting the role of the printed page and the relationship between text and voice in Vicinelli’s poetic output. In Viaggio con Patrizia, presents fragments of Vicinelli’s oeuvre in dialogue with materials from a new generation of contemporary Italian poets, including Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Tiziana La Melia and Murmur.

*

Orfeo Books edition n.1 In Viaggio con Patrizia is published in collaboration with Associazione Culturale Alberto Grifi and printed by Nuova Orfeo in Palermo on the occasion of In Viaggio con Patrizia, an event co-curated with Lisa Andreani as part of the project ALBERTO GRIFI: CORPO COLLETTIVO.

Credits / Crediti

Texts by / Testi di Patrizia Vicinelli, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Tiziana La Melia, Murmur

Archive materials / Materiali d’archivio Associazione Culturale Alberto Grifi Lisa Andreani

A cura di / Edited by Beatrice Gibson, Beatrice Zerbato (Nuova Orfeo)

Graphic Design Nicolò Pellarin

Logo HIT Studio, Berlin

Orfeo Books is produced by / prodotto da Nuova Orfeo

Nuova Orfeo is a not-for-profit experimental film and music initiative with a focus on site-specific programming, founded by Beatrice Gibson, Flora Pitrolo, and architect Pietro Airoldi in 2021.

Nuova Orfeo takes its name from Palermo’s last remaining porn cinema as a symbol of rebirth of the city’s cultural life, this time in a feminist, polyphonic and radically inclusive key: flipping the idea of porn, in which there is an object of the gaze, and focusing instead on work in which the authorial gaze belongs to those who tend to be in the position of objects – art made by and about women, non-binary, trans and queer people, migrants and people of color. From object to subject, from fetish to agent, from looked-at to looking.

Nuova Orfeo's approach to site responds to one of Palermo’s main social and aesthetic facts: an abundance of majestic but abandoned, unfinished, unused or underused spaces, from cinemas to gardens, from decaying palazzi to the new ruins of the unfinished. Nuova Orfeo’s site-specific imperative is to use these spaces, reactivating lost spaces and reimagining old ones so they can be experienced in a completely new light.

Nuova Orfeo is programmed by Beatrice Gibson. Produced by Stella Sidelli and Beatrice Zerbato. Orfeo Books is curated by Beatrice Zerbato