GAMeC continues its participation in Artists’ Film International, the prestigious video art network established in 2008 by the Whitechapel Gallery and now curated by Forma. The initiative brings together sixteen international contemporary art institutions, along with artists from around the world.

The 2025 edition of the program, Dream States, explores the liberating power of dreams, altered states, and cinematic illusion. The program brings together the works of artists selected by sixteen international institutions that break the linearity of time, blend truth and fiction, and cross the boundaries between memory, myth, and fantasy in order to imagine new possible scenarios.

Through highly diverse visual languages—from analogue film to CGI, from archival materials to special effects and AI-generated imagery—the works presented in this edition use moving images to question established perspectives. Their dreamlike, surreal visions, suspended between utopia and dystopia, between the intimate and the collective, restore cinema’s nature as a space of dreaming and a tool for transformation.

For this edition, GAMeC curators Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni have selected the film SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo (2023) by Raffaela Naldi Rossano (Naples, 1990).

Developed and filmed in Belvì, Sardinia, the work takes its cue from an encounter with a gongilo, a skink—a small reptile resembling a snake with short limbs, mentioned in Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison—Gramsci himself being Sardinian—and preserved at the Belvì Museum of Natural Sciences. Suspended between scientific narrative and popular belief, the film links the archetype of the gongilo with the cult of the Mother Goddess, intertwining local oral narratives about the reptile with those from the Mediterranean basin tied to the theme of the sacredness of nature.

With a background in psychoanalysis, Naldi Rossano embraces the tradition that historically connects cinema to an understanding of the psyche and works through intuitive thought, blending personifications of mythological figures and archetypes with personal experiences. This opens the way to an understanding of time as an archive of intuitions and a reflection on how we structure memory.

Challenging the perception of conventional time and the hegemony of linear narratives, the film weaves together scenes depicting the abandoned Belvì Museum of Natural Sciences with those documenting a collective initiation-action involving the village’s women’s polyphonic choir. Symbolically, the action becomes the starting point for a proposal for an alternative natural history museum in the village—a place that acknowledges the ancestral knowledge of its inhabitants, one which emerges as a generative force for a new beginning in a community decimated by depopulation.

From December 12, 2025 to January 18, 2026, SERPENTINA. Per un mūsēum senza tempo will be on view to the public in GAMeC’s exhibition spaces; at the same time, the films proposed by the other institutions participating in the 2025 edition of Artists’ Film International will be available on this page.

Levitations (2024) by Dalia Al Kury
Selected by mmag foundation, Amman

Levitations stems from a tragic and complex historical moment, in which the realm of dreams becomes a vital force for hoping in a different future. Two sisters, united by the experience of diaspora, find themselves traveling through a liberated, mysterious, dreamlike Palestine during a psychotherapy session. The short film explores the idea of dream states, both literally and metaphorically, examining the concept of freedom within a context marked by an ongoing genocide and growing oppression. The film addresses the profound difficulties of imagining a liberated Palestine in the present, while also underscoring the vital importance of maintaining hope — of envisioning a future in which these dreams, however improbable, might one day become reality.

Look up! I’m No Canopy – I’m a Messenger (2022) by Sanja Anđelković
Selected by Cultural Centre of Belgrade, Belgrade

The work intertwines zoology, speculative entomology, and Orthodox chants, creating a kind of insect-morphic speculative prophecy that serves as an invitation to love and care for the Earth in an era marked by severe climate crisis. At the center of the prophecy is a small insect, Magicicada septendecim, a cicada that cyclically reappears in the eastern United States after spending 17 years underground as a nymph. Its last emergence was documented in 1954. Imagining its reappearance, the cicada brings news about the climate and a profound knowledge of the Earth that calls for listening to multispecies narratives.

Rehearsals for Peace (2023) by Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan
Selected by Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin

The film draws on various folk traditions meant to ward off evil spirits, such as the Transylvanian custom of Urzelnlaufen. In a pastoral landscape, the rhythm of grazing intertwines with that of military training, creating a surreal coexistence of sheep and armored vehicles — the everyday reality of Cincu, a Transylvanian village in the heart of Romania that today hosts one of NATO’s main combat training areas in the country.
Within this landscape, Rehearsals for Peace recounts and updates the legend of Ursula, a woman disguised as a man who managed to drive away the Ottoman invaders using the sound of a whip. The contemporary Ursula portrayed in the film wields the sonic power of the whip’s crack like a spell cast before modern armored vehicles, weaving elements of military lexicon, such as tactical signals, together with this ancient practice.

Dear Chalam (2024) by Babu Eshwar Prasad
Selected by Project 88, Mumbai

Dear Chalam can be read as a funeral eulogy for a dear friend and as a journey through the world of cinema. Structured as a poetic assemblage, the film explores Chalam Bennurkar’s powerful documentary practice, his involvement with the Odessa Collective, and his commitment to film as a grassroots movement. These elements take shape within a letter that forms the core of the film. Beginning with shared personal memory, the work opens onto a broader reflection on cinema and its potential within a process of constant recalibration and reimagining. Through layered imagery and a reflective tone that runs throughout, Eshwar Prasad shows how dreams and memories blend, triggering the sensation of being immersed in a dream.

Dyke Dreams (2024) by Anette Gellein
Selected by Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø

Shot on 16mm analog film, Dyke Dreams takes the form of an erotic commercial that gradually transforms into a horror film. Drawing a parallel between a supposed extractive activity in Stavanger and the visual language of commercial advertising — which, like a siren song, enchants and seduces us, turning dreams and desires into commodities that ultimately consume us — the film, shot between Norway and Canada, takes inspiration from Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) and can be read as a homage to his iconic work. It addresses themes such as the local oil industry, the Americanization of Norwegian culture, and queer loneliness.

Colorless (2020) by Abdul Hamid Mandgar
Selected by CCAA in EXiLe, Frankfurt

Telling the story of an Afghan boy with a deep passion for dance, the film tackles the conflict between individual desires and social constraints. Opposed by his older brother, who embodies traditional beliefs and social norms, the child’s dream is hindered along with his innocence. With a minimalist visual style and subtle narrative, the film portrays a stifling atmosphere in which individual freedoms are restricted by unwritten social rules. Focusing on the child’s perspective, the film offers a poetic and critical view of a society in which personal dreams are easily repressed, while the hope for change remains alive in his eyes.

Leymusoom Garden (2024) by Heesoo Kwon
Selected by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles

The film retraces Heesoo Kwon’s spiritual and personal journey from late 2022 to early 2024. Created entirely with artificial intelligence, the project intertwines 3D scans of her grandparents’ land in Gongju-si, South Korea, with her home studio and garden located on the ancestral territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone people (today San Francisco). This garden-sanctuary becomes a space in which Kwon reflects on relationships, life values, acceptance, and healing, while facing sudden losses and profound transformations in her artistic path.
Exploring Korean shamanic traditions — through the myths of the Dokkaebi (legendary figures of Korean folklore) and Mago, a powerful female creator deity and sovereign of nature — together with the creation story of the Skywoman from Indigenous North American traditions, the artist confronts her family history. In Leymusoom Garden, Mago is reimagined as the artist’s paternal great-grandmother, transforming myth into an affective and familial archive.

Untitled (2022) by Cocoy Lumbao
Selected by MCAD Manila, Manila

Using archival footage from a 1994 recording of his parents, Cocoy Lumbao investigates how technology affects human relationships. Conceived as a sort of video love-letter to the children left behind in the Philippines, the couple’s message interweaves everyday advice with the wonder of experiencing a “new technology”: a newly purchased handheld camcorder. Lumbao uses nostalgia and memory as a dreamlike state in which the past becomes a way to reinterpret the present and imagine the future. He slows the film, silences the protagonists’ voices, and entrusts the narration to subtitles: the tension between the fictional dialogue and the desire for those words to be real creates an emotional short-circuit that opens space for reflection on how technologically mediated relationships shape our lives.

Dystopian Patterns (2019) by Isabelle Nouzha
Selected by argos centre for audiovisual arts, Bruxelles

Dystopian Patterns is a city symphony that reassembles the debris of a city reduced to ruins. It might be Beirut, marked by a long history of military assaults, but it could also be any other city emptied of human presence. Through an eerie black-and-white time-lapse video, Isabelle Nouzha brings to light mysteries that seem to elude our desensitized senses, offering not so much a dream as a true “waking nightmare.” With Dystopian Patterns, the artist seeks to question dominant ideas of power, success, and progress, using speculative and fictional narrative to help us “see” futures worth fighting for.

Wild Geese 2: Wilder Geese (2023) by Elinor O’Donovan
Selected by Crawford Art Gallery, Cork

Filmed in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, Elinor O’Donovan’s work is a playful response to Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese (1935–2019), which reflects on whether the universe truly cares about our personal struggles. The artist asks: “What if, instead of being indifferent to our existence, as many believe, the universe were actually too interested in us?”
O’Donovan’s works often offer glimpses of speculative worlds where things might be different if we asked different questions. In Wild Geese 2: Wilder Geese, the question becomes: what if humanity were the one excessively worried about the planet’s existence?

The Pond (2023) by Ahmet Rüstem Ekici & Hakan Sorar
Selected by Istanbul Modern, Istanbul

The Pond explores the relationship between transformation, memory, and interactions between human and non-human beings through a metaphor-centered narrative. Inspired by 5,000-year-old votive vessels depicting frogs carrying one another and by the contemporary migration of frogs crossing highways to reach the Palazoğlu pond, the film intertwines traces of past and present through artificial intelligence tools. It constructs an imaginary world generated by AI yet appearing as real as a documentary, blurring the line between dream and reality to prompt reflection on the creative potential of AI technologies — which open unexpected spaces of imagination — as well as on themes of memory, transformation, and permanence.

The Fortress (2024) by Sin Wai Kin
Selected by Forma e Southwark Park Galleries, London

Commissioned by Forma and the Lahore Biennale Foundation, The Fortress deconstructs the archetype of the rational “Man” of Western Enlightenment, revealing the fragile foundations of his dominance and the consequences of the paradigm he embodies. Moving between the Alfalah Theatre and Lahore Fort, Sin Wai Kin uses a dreamlike narrative to explore the dissolution of boundaries between self and world, confronting their double and fragmented stories. Inspired by Mathnawī by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rūmī, the film invites viewers to dismantle the “walls” of otherness, revealing existence as plural and fragmented, and opening reality to the possibility of being dismantled, reinvented, and remade. In doing so, it challenges hegemonic narratives of human experience and knowledge systems centered on the West, making room for multiplicity and variability.

Neyinka and the Silver Gong (2024) by Kialy Tihngang
Selected by Tramway, Glasgow

Historical films like Braveheart portray a completely white and idealized precolonial Scotland. This narrative is radically challenged by 9th-century records of the fir gorma: an Old Irish term for Black people — fir gorma literally means “blue men.” Historians and folklorists trace the presence of these people to North African populations brought to Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides by Vikings in the 9th century after being enslaved. As a Black English woman living in Scotland, Tihngang wonders how this uprooted community might have built its own Scottish identity.
Drawing inspiration from Braveheart trailers, Tihngang presents warriors painted blue — symbolically associated with courage, honor, and chivalric romance — to show how nationalist narratives opportunistically select the most seductive moments of a film or national story to construct an idealized self-image. The work also recalls the deliberately dissonant visual effects of Nollywood cinema, linking the fir gorma to the contemporary African diaspora.
By interrogating contemporary Scottish identity, the film contributes to the wider debate on the rise of nationalism in Western Europe.

Lullaby’s Fault (2025) by Mykolas Valantinas
Selected by CAC (Contemporary Art Centre), Vilnius

The film explores the interiority of a fragmented and incoherent psyche. Set in the Lithuanian countryside, it follows two twin brothers whose vivid imagination turns innocent play into violence. Instead of directly showing violent acts, the film shifts attention to their consequences. Alternating between past and present, it investigates the surreal and fractured logic of a mind struggling to process trauma and find a path toward healing.

Sobre si mismo (About itself) (2023) by Melisa Zulberti
Selected by Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires

In the film, the body becomes the focal point for exploring movement in relation to the surrounding environment. Its motion does not follow a linear trajectory or fixed destination, but unfolds in a shifting rhythm of oscillations, falls, and suspensions — instability as a constant state.
The contact with water, earth, and gravity does not merely frame the action; it transforms it. The interaction with these elements dissolves the boundaries between solid and liquid, between ephemeral and lasting. Movement is not simply a reaction to the environment, but an active force that reshapes it, challenging known spatial and perceptual structures.
The setting changes unpredictably, as if guided by an internal and dreamlike logic. The sequence unfolds in a fluid terrain where landscapes continuously reconfigure: earth becomes water, the horizon bends, bodies emerge and disappear in transitions that seem arbitrary yet suggest an underlying coherence.
Time no longer flows in a straight line but folds into cycles, in which each fall marks a new beginning. This recurrence is not mere repetition but subtle variation — a space in which change becomes possible.