AFTER THE IMAGE IS THE PRESENT
Program of experimental short films
curated by Pebbles Underground and Les Boîtes Explosives
Presented by Visualcontainer[.BOX]
September 26, doors at 18h00, program duration: 1hr
Via Passerini 18, 20162 Milan, Italy
The stories reflected [here] do not belong safely to the past. The division of Cyprus in 1974, the crimes against humanity committed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Artsakh, and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are all unfinished political histories. Their consequences, like ripple effects, change how, by whom they are remembered, denied, documented, or erased.
These histories do not belong to a concluded sequence of regional catastrophes either. They belong to a political geography in which earlier wars, occupations, and acts of destruction continue to shape what can be seen, said, and believed now. The current war of the US against Iran, although not represented in any of the films directly, is an “elephant in the room”, the tragic continuation of the program in real life.
Who records the evidence? Whose story is believed? Who gets to disappear twice: first physically, and then through the erasure of their history and culture? What happens when the present produces huge numbers of images, but they don’t necessarily lead to accountability?
The multiplication of evidence does not resolve the struggle over reality. Side-by-side the struggle for preserving political memory, the films almost embody the need to rebuild, to resist through ritual anchored in one’s own body. A fight against the Present that became an incessant producer of its own archive in real time, pouring out military statements, satellite images, phone footage, testimonies, casualty figures, intercepted communications, destroyed targets…
The open-ended finalé of the program is not a conclusion, but a refusal to conclude it. For the curators, for the artists, for the viewer.
– Text by Pebbles Underground and Les Boîtes Explosives –
FEATURING
GET READY AGAIN by Andreas Savva | Cyprus | 2011 (02m20s)
Silent, Color
THE SIGHT IS A WOUND / دیدن، زخم است by Parham Ghalamdar | Iran, UK | 2025 (06m48s)
Sound, Color
THE NAKBA ACROSS GENERATIONS / النكبة عبر الأجيال by Nour | Palestine, Germany | 2024 (11m)
Sound, Color
FIBERS / ԹԵՒԱՎՈՐ ԼԱՐԵՐ by Anna Grigorian | Armenia, Canada | 2025 (15m30s)
Sound, Color
TESTIMONIES FROM MOUNT SINJAR / دیدەڤان ژ چیایێ شنگارێ by Huner Emin | South Kurdistan (North Iraq), USA (04m55s)
Silent, Monochrome
AN ELEGY IN A DREAM by Nima Nikakhlagh, Iman Tash, Amir Sharif | Iran, USA | 2022 (18h36s)
Sound, Monochrome