We’re happy to bring S.P.A.C.E. EXPANDED to EMAF 2025—an exhibition and performance program featuring works developed through the S.P.A.C.E. residency (Nov. 2022 – Oct. 2024), initiated by LaborBerlin as part of the SPECTRAL project. This unique European collaboration between six artist-run film labs supports analog projection as an artistic practice, offering resident artist’s studio space, equipment, and access to LaborBerlin’s film lab.
At EMAF, we present expanded cinema performances and installations that emerged from this intensive, hands-on environment. These works rethink the relationship between image and sound, transforming projection into a shared, immersive experience—underscoring the living vitality of analog film and its ongoing artistic potential.
As part of our commitment to this tradition, LaborBerlin has also launched Unburdened Recollections, a long-term initiative to create a living archive of Expanded Cinema. Through reinterpretations of historical works—staged with available documentation and in dialogue with the original artists or their estates—the project reflects on the ephemeral nature of these performative film experiences.
Program:
April 23-27
S.P.A.C.E. Expanded Installations
April 25 19:00
Unburdened Recollections program, 3rd edition:
→ A reenactment of Shelter 9999 (1968) by Takahiko Iimura & Alvin Lucier
April 26 19:00
S.P.A.C.E. Expanded Performances
S.P.A.C.E. Expanded Installations
- Haz de mi rostro un líquido (2024), 5-channel 16mm installation loop
Melina Pafundi, Marin Marie
Hands up, hands down, tongue roll, self-touch: the tide rises, water waters, a plant showers. To the marginalised sexualities, we proposed a visual representation of self-pleasure and playfulness adopting more than one gendered performance. Gender fluidity and queer desires naturally flow, coming together authentically to the material world. This project attempts to softly disrupt normative patterns and to open a range of possibilities within the viewers and in society. - Negotiations (2024), Super 8mm – slide projector installation
Milica Jovcic
The potential mining of lithium threatens to cause an ecological disaster in Jadar, fertile fields in western Serbia. The Serbian government‘s decision to support mining led to social mobilisation, road blockades, and protests all over Serbia. By treating the film image as an “act of subversion” and adopting the philosophical concepts of resistance from Deleuze‘s “toolbox,” this work aims to establish negotiations and thus delay the defeat as long as possible. - with a camera, we can freeze memories in time (2024), longitudinal installation, single-channel Super 8mm
Jules Leaño
with a camera, we can freeze memories in time is an auto-destructive film installation exploring the feedback loop of climate change. Over the past 300 years, industrialisation, manufacturing and warfare have steadily released chemicals into the environment. Some of these contaminants have been accumulating and sequestered by glacial ice. As global temperatures rise, this ice melts, releasing these historic pollutants back into our environment, causing further environmental damage and risk to the natural world.
Unburdened Recollections
- Shelter 9999, 16mm projection and slide projection, 4-channel sound
Takahiko Iimura, Alvin Lucier
Re-staged two times consecutively on this occasion by Juan David González Monroy, Martin Moolhuijsen, Julian Ross
For the third edition of the project, we present a restaging of Shelter 9999, a multi-projection performance by Iimura Takahiko (1937–2022) in collaboration with Alvin Lucier (1931–2021). Iimura was a pioneer of expanded cinema in Japan, beginning his explorations of the form in the early 1960s and continuing to develop his practice after moving to the United States. There, he met Alvin Lucier, and the two began a collaboration that resulted in Shelter 9999.
S.P.A.C.E. Expanded Performances
- Berliner Gewässer (2024), 16mm
Deborah S. Phillips
Other people go on holiday; I headed off in search of places in Berlin where I could look at water. This resulted in my Bodies of Water in Berlin project. - movements to resist (2025), 16mm
Clara Bausch
We see everyday moments flash before our eyes. Fragmented images of a child dancing, shadows on a wall. Sometimes in black and white, sometimes in colour. A voice accompanies the projection. It guides the performance, communicating with the images and beyond them into the room. At the same time, a shadow play merges with the projection so that image, voice and movement intertwine in a poetic reflection on resistance and time.
- The Unchanging Sea (2025), 16mm
Luisa Greenfield
Focusing on a segment from D. W. Griffith’s 1910 film The Unchanging Sea, this film reflects on gesture in early cinema and the act of waiting. It connects waiting to the process of making this film frame by frame on an animation camera and a lost poem by black feminist poet Michelle T. Clinton.
- où la nuit tombe un bruit sourd . interlude illimité, 16mm
Sophie Watzlawick, Vincent Laju
At the heart of the human being, in the air and under the sea. Beyond these tableaux, the worst is happening. A human-made desolation which, if it doesn‘t kill, demands an opening to other realities. An invisible off-screen disaster leading to a musical interlude in dark matter.
Join us in celebrating expanded cinema as a space of experimentation, memory, and collective experience.
The event is supported by the Creative Europe Program and the Senate of the City of Berlin in collaboration with the European Media Arts Festival.