Writing on Water is a program of artists' films exploring the technological as ecological. The films examine the planetary costs of technology beholden industry and proposes revolutionary categories towards a more elemental technology that consider the life and logics of minerals, plants, animals, and future ancestors.
Curated & hosted by Jo-Lene Ong with Bo Wang.

Beamclub takes place in the Theory Stairs of the FedLev building.

Jo-Lene Ong is an independent curator working from The Netherlands and Malaysia. She was program advisor for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023). Her long-term research engages with resilience and other possible futures with countercolonial worldviews on territory, time, and community. Jo-Lene teaches at the Rietveld Academie, co-curates the Amsterdam film club Canal++ and is co-initiator of CounterArchive in Malaysia.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Wang’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Image Forum Festival (Tokyo), among many other places. His film An Asian Ghost Story won the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2023. Bo is also teaching at the Rietveld Academie.

Jan 17

Tellurian Drama (2020), Riar Rizaldi

In Tellurian Drama, archives from colonial West Java collides with personal narratives on the history of technology, nature and colonisation. A shaman’s breath-taking zither performance brings us a moment of clarity.

Riar Rizaldi (Indonesia) is based in Hong Kong and works as an artist and researcher. His main focus is on the relationship between capital and technology, extractivism, and theoretical fiction. Rizaldi has also curated ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary Experimental Film Festival − Penal Colony (2017). He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His works have been shown at Locarno Film Festival, the National Gallery of Indonesia and IFFR. Tellurian Drama is his second short film, with its European premiere at IFFR 2021.

Jan 24

Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot (2019), Ayoung KIM

Porosity Valley 2:Tricksters’ Plot is a speculative fiction that revolves around the recent arrival of Yemeni refugees in Korea. The event has evoked a nationwide anti-Islamic sentiment and xenophobia, which portray migrants as sorts of malware or viruses that threaten the immune system (this could also be considered a “pure blood mythology”). All of a sudden they have become fictitious.This piece expands upon the previous work through a fictionalized depiction of the migration of the mineral/data cluster known as Petra Genetrix. Juxtaposing refugee migration with data migration, both of which characterize migration in the 21st century, the work creates an imaginary space-time by interrogating the “ways of existence” and the “ways of representation” of the Yemeni refugees who recently arrived in South Korea.

Ayoung KIM (South Korea) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Kim adopts the devices of speculative storytelling to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening and thinking about the conditions of the world by focusing on unlikely encounters of ideas. Her projects take the forms of video, sonic fiction, VR, text, performance and game simulation and are presented as exhibitions, performances and publications. Kim exhibited and screened at Venice Biennale (2015); Palais de Tokyo (2016); Korea Artist Prize (2019); Sharjah Film Platform (2019, 2020); Berlinale (2020); Asian Art Biennial (2021); Videobrasil (2021) and Sharjah Biennial (2023).

Jan 31

Piña Why Is The Sky Blue? (2021), Stephanie Comilang, Simon Speiser
Into the Violet Belly (2022), Thuy Han Nguyen Chi

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? is an affirming techno-feminist vision of a future in which ancestral knowledge and new technologies converge. This speculative documentary narrates the story of a spiritual medium known as Piña. As a form of artificial intelligence, Piña is able to receive and collect inherited knowledge, messages, and dreams from people around the world in order to secure their survival.Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? features footage shot in the Philippines and Ecuador, where Comilang and Speiser, respectively, have family histories. Its video component includes interviews with activists and healers from local organizations such as the Indigenous feminist collective Cyber Amazonas in Puyo, and Las Martinas de Piedras Negras in Quito, both in Ecuador; as well as with a shaman or Babaylan, in Palawan, Philippines.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost:2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another—ranging from writing, sculpture, and printing to video and VR installations—Speiser’s work expands the possibilities between art and science fiction. He has exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, MMK Frankfurt, CAC Quito, Oracle Berlin, Croy Nielsen, MMCA Seoul, and Robert Grunenberg Berlin, among others.

Into the Violet Belly interweaves the story of the artist's mother fleeing Vietname as a refugee during the war with myth and science fiction.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Berlin- and London-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of sculpture, installation, moving image and interdisciplinary research. Her work explores imaginations of freedom at the intersection of film-making and film theory, critical refugee studies and postcolonial studies, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories.
Nguyen-Chi studied Fine Arts at Städelschule (2010-2015) and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017-2019). Currently, she is pursuing PhD research in Film at CREAM, the University of Westminster

Feb 7

Core Dump (2019), Francoise Knoetze

Core Dump consists of 4 short films: Kinshasa (2018), Shenzhen (2019), New York (2019) and Dakar (2018), and explores the relationship between digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism and the reenchanted notion of a Non-Aligned Humanist Utopia.

Francois Knoetze is a scavenger, sculptor, performer, and video artist with an interest in the connections between social histories and material culture. His roaming costumed performances and experimental videos pick at the socio-spatial force-fields that attempt to rigidly order the contaminated, folded, and entangled worlds of people and things. His videos create narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of a global digital machine at the brink of collapse. Knoetze is a co-founder of the Lo-Def Film Factory and is based in South Africa.

Feb 14

Last Things (2023), Deborah Stratman

Last Things unfolds along a science-fictional / science-factual spine. Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric and speculative subjects—sci fi before it was a genre. The film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also central are Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy.

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker who explores landscapes and systems. She’s exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), and Whitney Biennial (NY).Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom.

Feb 28

Heat Waves (2022), Kent Chan
Club Ate (2015), Ex Nilalang: Balud, Dysebel, Lolo Ex Machina
Heat Waves (2022), Kent Chan

Heat Waves examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat. Aesthetics that stems from regions of the globe coloured by their solar relations bestowing heat in abundance. Aesthetics that are oft generalised - charged with vibrancy, vitality, and visual complexity - that are increasingly mined at a time when the earth is simultaneously warming.

Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. Recently he was a resident of Gasworks (2022), Medialab Matadero (2022), Jan van Eyck Academie (2019/20), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017/18). He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, National University Singapore Museum, and de Appel.|

Ex Nilalang consists a series of work by the artist collective Club Ate and uses myth as a form to explore the intersections of queer identities of the Filipino diaspora.

Club Até is an art collective based on the unceded lands of Sydney, led by interdisciplinary performance artists Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra. They frequently collaborate with associate artists: Matthew Stegh, set and costume designer; Tristan Jalleh, digital video artist and music video director; and Corin Ileto, composer and electronic music producer, as well as their LGBQTIA+ artistic community. The work of Club Até is informed by the artists shared Filipino / Australian ancestry and the collective is invested in creating their own Future Folklore.

Mar 6

Constant (2022), Beny Wagner & Livintseva

Constant is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power.” (Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner)

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively since 2018. Focusing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organising and perceiving the natural world. Their collaborative work has been presented globally, including at the Berlinale, Rotterdam, and CPH:DOX. Their films have won numerous awards including the Silvestre Best Short Film at IndieLisboa and Best Short Documentary at Guanajuato Film Festival. They are the authors of All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press: 2021).

Mar 13

Ningwasum (2021), Subash Thebe Limbu

Set in an Indigenous Yakthung nation in Nepal, Ningwasum follows two time-travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, who return to the present from a future where interplanetary civilisations are thriving and living sustainably by adopting Indigenous knowledge and technology. The fragility of our current ecosystem is portrayed in aerial shots and documentary footage of Himalayan glaciers, imbued with an ethereal blue filter. These are woven with digital cosmic landscapes and an immersive soundtrack, which includes electronic sound, spoken word, and folksongs. Ningwasum – which loosely translates as ‘memory’ in Yakthungpan – explores notions of time, memory and space, and how these shape reality.

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as eastern nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. His Yakthung name is ᤋᤠᤱᤛᤠᤱ Tangsang (Sky). Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Migration, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works.