“We step into and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.” Heraclitus ; if not our model, then the radiant thought, a precursor to the experimental work. Plato recounts this in the Cratylus: “Heraclitus says that everything flows and nothing remains; and, comparing things to the current of a river, he adds that you cannot step into the same river twice.”

This suits the ever-changing approach of the one who makes experimental art and of the one who engages with it, who receives it. “I is always an other.”
We could, or perhaps could not, list – for there are so many – the 2,119 artists, some of whom were among the great pioneers of experimental art, who inspired countless emulators and, at the same time, turned a crazy idea from an audiovisual professor – an idea driven by a desire to share – into a multifaceted reality that has continued for 30 years. The project aimed to stir the emotions and the mind with UAVOs – unidentified audiovisual objects – at a time when the cultural landscape was not yet open to the experimental and there was an urgent need to introduce it to the public.

The first took place in 1997, over the course of an afternoon in the auditorium of the Arènes Highschool – where one or two rooms were being set up and the hallways were filled with photography that was different – and featured a videoconference from Sweden with Magnus Wallin, who questions norms and the attempt to exclude the dissimilar; and while this concerns bodies, it also touches on a characteristic of the experimental – in shifting, in defense of difference – starting with that of writing and medium, spanning the wide gap from film, from eco-cinema to AI – when it does not abandon “accidental figurations” and the trace of an author’s singularity.

The 29th edition took over some thirteen venues, drawing audiences into a five-day marathon featuring some 147 films by 53 artists from numerous countries. It further embraced the diverse “faces” of this artistic inclination, which is always seeking to go beyond transformations and the unheard-of

However, Traverse Vidéo’s approach encourages it to link the experimental nature of the works with the experience of its aficionados audiences – those who are eager or searching for what lies between and beyond the conventional image. In the pleasure of discovering experimental art that questions the very practices it engages in – the very conditions of its existence – which takes shape gradually, through uncertainty, in a future yet to come but in co-knowledge with what has already occurred. Eco-cinema borrows the concerns of expanded cinema; performance loves to transform itself into a happening within the acute consciousness of the audiences. The experimental as art in imbalance, its subversion – to borrow from André Breton – remains the great reservoir of new forces.

The essays, artworks, performance proposals, photographs, and installations presented will be rooted in this oblique approach to the experimental. The works will not be slogans but will trust in the chosen medium. The performance will not be a skit or a staged concert but will retain its status as “never the same.”
And must we, since thirty years have already passed, still quote what defines us and drives us to carry on with the winds and the tide, this March event:
“Never miss an opportunity to experiment; without experimentation, cinema loses all value; without experimentation, cinema ceases to exist”— Cavalcanti; It is up to you to add to “cinema” the other forms of experimental expression.