At the invitation of art cinema OFFoff, Courtisane is very pleased to present a program composed of films made and chosen by artist and filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta (EC/US). Inspired as much by Walker Evans‘s reticent street photography as by Bruce Baillie’s sensuous film poems, her work manages to strike a delicate balance between the mundane and the poetic, the material and the intelligible. Public places and urban landscapes are observed in their splendor and singularity through the abstract and vernacular figures of everyday life, exploring the constructions of space and structures of time that can be found in the order and disorder of people’s daily movements and environments. These filmic portraits in motion, elegantly composed of textures of light and fragments of bodies, are reminiscent of an approach that Flaubert once referred to as an “absolute way of seeing things”, manifesting the sensible intensities of the most ordinary things, on the point of disentangling the connections that make them into functional objects. It is precisely in this point of tension that the sensibility of Alexandra Cuesta’s work is situated, perpetually oscillating between a fleeting play of correspondences and a surface of percepts and affects that is there for us to engage with.

Jeanne Liotta will introduce 7 of her films in the ETNA lab. The screnning is purposed and programmed by Filipe Afonso. 

Primarily described as a filmmaker, Liotta is also a researcher, professor and a multi-media artist. Her latest body of work takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape at a curious interesection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Her film "Observando el Cielo" received the Tiger Award for Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was named TOP Ten 2007 on Artforum Magazine as well as Top Ten of The Village Voice and one of the ten best experimental films of the decade by Film Comment. Her work has been represented in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, The New York Film Festival, KunstFilm Biennale, Cologne; The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art; and The Sundance Channel among others. She has received awards from The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and The Museum of Contemporary Cinema.

As part of the Free to Love: Cinema of the Sexual Revolution series
Filmmaker Barbara Hammer will appear in person to introduce her work and hold a post-screening discussion.

Programme:
- A Gay Day (USA, 1973, 16mm, 3 min.)
- Menses (USA, 1974, 16mm, 4 min.)
- Dyketactics X 2 (USA, 1974, 16mm, 8 min.)
- Women I Love (USA, 1976, 16mm, 27 min.)
- Multiple Orgasm (USA, 1977, 16mm, 10 min.)
- Double Strength (USA, 1978, 16mm, 15 min.)
- No No Nooky TV (USA, 1987, 16mm, 10 min.)

Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

Miloš Tomic is a multimedia artist whose projects span film, photography, collages, and sculpture. Tomic studied directing and then  animation—experiences that continue to influence his practice. His subjects are either comprised of or preoccupied with disposable or disposed objects. In fact, his doctoral thesis was titled “Preciousness of discarded objects, i.e. trash as the material for film, photography…” His object-based works are modified quotidian objects, like shoes sewn shut or brushes with thorns instead of bristles. Tomic also has a category of sculpture called “Pearls” which, as he describes, are “to be understood as things that are precious, wrongly forgotten or lost somewhere, but now found.” Together with Vladimir Peric Miloš Tomic represented Serbia at the Venice Biennial 2013.