Video Box

The identity shadow

Enabling the encounter between artistic practices and dialogues that are generated between works made through different formats and supports, is one of the great motivations of SWAB Barcelona. That is why, thanks to the collaboration of SWAB with Aesthetica Magazine, this year SWAB Video Box was born, a space exclusively dedicated to the exhibition of video with an interesting selection of titles that have gone through the official selection of the Aesthetica Film Festival. 

The program is an entrance to diversity and artistic exploration through video. The short films explore the possibilities of audiovisual language, creating interesting reflections on the tensions between human relationships. From the recognition of cultures that have been oppressed for years and whose struggles are still alive and are still necessary, to the smallest relationships in everyday nature, in the home or the neighborhood environment.

The images unfold with the complexity of the human being; between the deepest layers of identity and the image that is projected, The identity shadow arises, the space where images that oscillate between the interior and the exterior are born, between being and belonging, between presence and absence. 

These films have had an important participation in renowned festivals such as the Rotterdam Film Festival and Clermont Ferrand, which is perhaps the most important short film festival in the world. SWAB VIDEO BOX will be the opportunity to see them for the first time in the city of Barcelona.


REBIRTH IS NECESSARY, Jenn Nkiru

Rebirth Is Necessary

“This film explores the magic and dynamism of Blackness in a realm where time and space are altered. The now, the past & the future are rethought and reordered to create something soulful and mind-bendingly visceral.”

The film is an exploration with the audiovisual editing, taking iconic and representative images -from others films or filmed by her- that generate new discourses and readings of the history of black struggle. Thanks to the careful musical accompaniment, the film becomes an audio-visual journey through the images of this world for many unknown. The voice of the black culture becomes stronger and more solid and finds in the short film a possibility to be heard. 

The filmmaker Jenn Nkiru, was named as one of the 200 women redefining the creative industries in 2018 by The Dots and included in the list of 100 Global Creative Superheroes forming culture by Utopia in 2018.


Drop out bodies, Ludivine Large-Bessette

Drop Out Bodies

Thanks to the construction of time, this stimulating film allows us to see more closely and with greater attention the social interactions of the everyday world.

The naturalistic environment in which the action unfolds throughout the film turns out to be an impulse for the spectaror to relate these bodies in particular interaction with their own habitual surroundings. With an important share of dance and performance, the characters of the film manage to transmit to the spectator body those tensions that the same film proposes. 

In the work of Ludivine Large- Bessette, the represented body becomes a mirror that can destabilize, question and move the public. Her works have been exhibited and projected in TanzFilPlattform in Berlin, in the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art of Bentonville in La cité internationale des Arts in Paris, etc.


I have Sinned a Rapturous Sin, Maryam Tafakory 

I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin

“What cures women of sexual promiscuity? Eat lettuce, of course.” Thanks to a balance between oral, written and visual poetry, I have Sinned a Rapturous Sin is a piece with powerful claim and poetic character.

The film confronts the poems of Forough Farrokhzad with the warnings of islamic clerics against female promiscuity, making the construction of poetic images and sound, a struggle in itself. Tafakory, an iranian filmmaker whose work explores allegorical forms of visual narrative, refers to the poems of the also iranian Farrokhzad, who is still recognized for her feminist struggle, generating a space of encounter of times, struggles and poetries. 

The link between these two iranian filmmakers, made possible through cinema, means not only the meeting of two poets at different times, but also the confrontation of different contexts and sociopolitical moments that are read through their works, generating -in addition to a profoundly poetic work- a possibility to see in perspective and reflect on the role of women in islamic society. 

Seeking the claim through poetry, I have Sinned a Rapturous Sin is a piece that manages to direct the viewer on a journey of words, voice and poetry. 


For Real Tho, Baptiste Penetticobra 

For Real Tho

For Real Tho it’s a film that explores the relationship of their own characters with fiction, generating a game of interlocution between characters, actors, spectator and director. 

Through them, we enter the dynamics of a film that loses control and we enter a journey oscillating between the script and the reality of its characters. The film allows the viewer to question the stories, the images and his role in art. In For Real Tho, power relationships are generated not only between the director and the actors but between the viewer and the narrative. What do we demand of the stories? What do they give us and how do we receive it?

Penetticobra’s short films have been programmed at multiple festivals and exhibitions around the world. For Real Tho was recorded and premiered an the Centre Pompidou in Paris.