At the Suspension Points exhibition in A Lab, Sophie Wright, Misho Antadze, Alberto Delgado de Ita and Federico Sande Novo will present installation works that share their research through different forms. A performative installation, a leporello publication, an immersive film experience, and conversation about film in a temporary bar. At A Lab you can also dive into the five research publications and see the short visual abstracts that introduce everyone's research.

Bar Saturn
By Misho Antadze

One of the many things I, Misho, missed was going to a cinema, and following up with talking about it in a bar. Because cinema is not just making or watching films, but also discussing them, in conversations that go beyond film. With Bar Saturn I’m trying to revive this experience together with several guests, and create an open space for discussions.
Saturday 18.30 - 19.30 with Neil Young | livestream via this link. 
Sunday 16.00 - 17.00 with Yulia Elias | livestream via this link.
Monday 14.30 - 15.30 with Huib Haye van der Werf | livestream via this link. 

In Vetta (On the Top) 
By Sophie Wright
Collaboration with Giorgia Piffaretti 

Sparked by the discovery of a family photograph taken on the top of Mont Blanc, this mountain grew when I started looking for the ‘truth’ about who the first woman to climb the mountain was. I stumbled into an avalanche of fragments from our collective imagination; an archive of our obsession with recording our arrival in time, frozen and preserved in europe’s highest mountains. 

On the Top invites visitors to see a different kind of view: the final moments of an ascent to a metaphorical peak related to images, desire, and the narratives built around these excursions. When planted like seeds together, images can grow into a wilderness of different stories. 

Walk up and see the vast horizon, look down on details and into deep frozen caverns. Every step leads you to another piece of the puzzle: a moment on the top, splintered into different perspectives. Nothing in this constellation of storied images is fixed. Everything has emerged in relation to its context, unfolding to create a new ‘view’ on the top.  

Journey To The City Of Light
By Federico Sande Novo

Looking for a film; a diary of uncertainty.

During the process of researching for his film Lightseekers, Federico traveled to a community his mother once belonged to, in Northern Argentina. There, a cult to an absent guru is still celebrated even after his imprisonment 5 years ago.

From the pages of the diary he kept while he wandered among a landscape marked by religious symbols, a sometimes desperate inquiry into the concept of authorship emerges. 

Acting alone, with an uncertain agenda, what he found was light and darkness. As if inhabiting a tale, he got mesmerised by the natural environment, sometimes getting lost into a suggestive atmosphere, where reality looks permanently veiled, reflected by a set of mirrors that pushes him to deep ethical and existential questions. He is not only surrounded by followers who are blinded by devotion but also by the ruins of a utopian project, one that hey don’t want to give up.

By describing how if feels like to be exposed to a context of unquestionable certainty, his text stresses the contrast with his vulnerable position as an author who is looking for a film he wants to make. Where does this hypothetical film lie? And where the authority to create it? Who is in control of its trajectory and how?

Dark Paradise
By Alberto Delgado de Ita

This video installation portrays Acapulco, a Mexican coastal city by the Pacific Ocean, under a suspicious gaze that is seductive and sinister at the same time. For Alberto, Mexico is a country where some of the most dangerous places are surrounded by beautiful landscapes. In his installation, he creates a new narrative from a place that was initially presented as a harmonious paradise, but over time became one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

The visitor enters a dark room, which resembles Alberto’s family summer house in Acapulco. A birds-eye-view of the ocean where bodies were dropped during the Mexican Dirty War (1970's) is played in a loop on a screen. A chair in front of a pool drawn on the floor can be used to browse through the 1st edition of the book where the imagery of Acapulco as a paradise was first promoted: Acapulco in the dream (1951). A TV monitor shows some of the changing images of the port. In the background, three big screens are projecting the image of a shadowy tree, which became the sole witness of Alberto’s uncle's assassination. The sound influences the way we inhabit the space and the way we see the tree and the ocean. An atmosphere of mystery is built through sounds of things that won’t be seen but can be imagined. It is an attempt to use the tree and imagine what does it hide? What does it show? And let the sounds that come from inside the tree to speak to the subconscious and tap into the emotional memory to ask the brain, not to look for accuracy on the shapes of the tree or the sea, but to imagine. 

What else?

• Visual abstracts (short visual research presentations of the 5 MA of Film Graduates)
• Research publications