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Carlos Sfeir’s practice is inspired by his interests in magic, science, territory, and cultures. He strives to create new bridges between human perception and natural phenomena. He believes art is a tool for questioning our certainties, discovering new meanings of nature and decolonising ourselves from ageing preconceptions.
Sfeir’s work ranges from sculpture, painting and installations, and is marked by a continuous dialogue between memory and experimentation. The data, objects and phenomena observed in the field research, which forms the basis of all his work, are constantly being recreated, intertwined and challenged in the subsequent studio manipulation.
Not constrained by the urge for completeness that often drives the artist&#8217;s act, Carlos Sfeir’s works are rather interactive prototypes. Without finiteness, but alive and imperfect, they invite people to be accomplices in processes of uncertain outcomes, embracing the unexpected instead of fearing it.

Carlos Sfeir Vottero

&#8220;Steel Life&#8221; aims to explore how the challenges of the steel industry can be transformed into a new narrative that addresses the current planetary crisis. The convergence of iron and carbon, which propelled human industrialisation, has also accelerated our detachment from the natural world, resulting in our subjugation of the environment and its resources. Too often, we have viewed ‘nature’ as a commodity to be exploited, with steel serving as a powerful tool in this process.
The installation wants to uncover the imaginative possibilities at the intersection of science and art, demonstrating how minerals can be coaxed into flourishing. By replicating the electrochemical methods employed in the refining of stones, the project gives rise to a fresh form of iron that blooms into dazzling crystalline structures. This metamorphosis symbolizes our ability to generate unpredicted growth and aesthetics, inspiring us to reimagine our relationship with the world we inhabit.
The project is part of research conducted in Wallonia, the French-speaking region in southern Belgium. During the Industrial Revolution, these territories were second only to the United Kingdom in Europe&#8217;s drive towards modernisation. Vast deposits of coal and iron brought wealth to the region and made the culture and economy of the entire country flourish. In recent decades, following the nation&#8217;s transition to a service economy, Wallonia&#8217;s industry has decayed into a rusty wasteland of flourishing remains.

Steel Life

Delta

The immaterial and intangible character of light, colour and motion forms the starting point of Nicky Assmann&#8217;s spatial installations, in which she endeavours to heighten our perception. With a background in Film and ArtScience, she combines artistic, scientific and cinematographic knowledge in experiments that use physical and chemical processes, such as turbulence and fluid dynamics. Topics that serve as a metaphor for the turbulent and fluid times in which we live.
By implementing natural and optical phenomena she creates visual compositions for a sensorial experience and often ephemeral macro universes.
Her work takes shape in the form of kinetic light installations, video-installations and performances and is embedded in a context of expanded cinema, visual music and the concept of synaesthesia.

Nicky Assmann

Solaris is an apparatus consisting of several soap films that can be lifted manually. It is a machine that explores the mental process and physical activity of seeing and creates soap films as a spatial intervention. Solaris shows 6 screens placed behind each other to fully experience the play with light and reflections that occur between the different frames of the soap films. Through precise lighting the inner movement of the soap film is revealed, showing a turbulent choreography of iridescent colors and fluid motion. As gravity slowly takes hold of the membrane, the viewer can be mesmerized by the phenomenon, until inevitably the fragile film bursts.
Solaris is embedded in a context of visual music, extended cinema, synesthesia and what Nicky Assmann calls hypercolours, which characterize her work and are brought out in this work through the use of light. In creating her own screens made of thin soap films and the specific use of light, she plays with the different elements of the cinematic apparatus in the lineage of expanded cinema. The analog visual language that arises in Solaris refers to abstract and experimental film.

Solaris

Jan van IJken is a filmmaker and photographer in Leiden, the Netherlands, working on the interface of art and science.
In his latest works, he reveals secrets in nature like the murmurations of starlings, the genesis of life and the unseen world of microscopic plankton. He is interested in microscopy, nature, biology, evolution, and embryology.

Jan van Ijken

Planktonium is a short film about the unseen world of living microscopic plankton. It is a voyage into a secret universe, inhabited by alien-like creatures. These stunningly beautiful, very diverse and numerous organisms are unknown to most of us because they are invisible to the naked eye. However, they are wandering beneath the surface of all waters around us and they are of vital importance for all life on earth.
Jan van Ijken filmed the plankton through his microscopes, revealing the beauty and delicate structures of the minute organisms in the finest detail. The film is without any voice-over or explanation.
Renowned Norwegian artist Jana Winderen made a sound composition for the film. She is recording audio environments and creatures which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear.