Memory endeavors to keep the loss motionless, so that it stays with us and remains open to the future. Remembering does not prevent destruction, but preserves it, and what we remember is never what it once was. Our memories disrupt the coherence of absence with fragments that form patterns under our deciphering gaze.

Acts of resistance in Pinochet’s Chile come to life in a chemical bath. Darkroom routines resonate in the rhythms of a Chinese-American restaurant kitchen. Distinct image formats and processes catalyze intergenerational closeness. Beyond image-making, conversations, both casual and staged, make space to process and preserve the memory of our elders.

An examination of labor, capital, and displacement in modern America through the lens of one city’s trash — in sewers and streets, waterways and workplaces. A gritty dive into the inner workings of a city’s infrastructure that embraces different formats, weaving newly digitized archival material together with surveillance footage and contemporary vignettes of people at

Masked images, faulty memories, material memorandums, and formless histories question the shape of what is to come. Echoes reflect off the walls, destabilizing the equilibrium of our spatial awareness. Is knowledge contingent? Are we sitting in a room?

Oil refineries bloom into nocturnal infernos, swallowing darkness with hideous hypnotic grace. In the quiet fractures of community and the melancholy of spaces once brimming with possibility, these works ricochet between aspiration and collapse. Beneath drought-stricken wells and coal-scarred fields, specters inhabit our abandoned territories, living among the remnants of a society consuming itself.

In this workshop, Featured Artist Melissa Langer leads a conversation on experimental filmmaking as an expanded process of gathering media for building a world over time. She shares methods for exhibiting multimedia installations and micro-screenings during the years-long process of making a feature-length film, recounts her experiences working as part of an artist collective, and

Normalization of inequality is enacted with bare bureaucratic fists. Hiding in plain sight, the deficit of care for the social body elicits protests across generations. Abortion clinics, needle exchanges, and collaborative communication point to mechanisms of resistance against the ache of violent pressure.

Across the flyway, cigar-shaped swifts cover the sky in aerial maneuvers, drawn from afar by instinctual desires. They find night rest in the vertical plane above a seasonal migration of young humans. Their remote wish for new horizons is fledged, morphed, and curtailed as the promise of summer slides into reality. The doldrums of everyday

Turn on the radio. Tune in to a station that shouldn’t exist. Sense the air thicken with thoughts and words from below. Witness the emergencies of war, rampant capitalism and inequality, colonial aftermaths, and environmental decline. Filmmakers hone our ears to underground frequencies of dissent, liberation, and restorative justice.

This performative screening will be followed by a conversation with festival artists. Sunset Seduction Sunset Seduction stars a liberal philanthropist yearning for his next fling with radical politics. Made as the Palestine solidarity movement escalated in 2024, the work unfolds in essayistic fragments considering ideas of freedom, violence, and the seductive capture of revolutionary ideology. This