30 May 2024 - Wanderers above seas of fog: public screening of students’ videos

On May 30^th, at the Torresino theatre in Padua, we took part in the DiSSGeA Department third mission event, Il Giardino delle culture [The Garden of Cultures], with a public film screening. This initiative is held every year to showcase research activities in a creative form, as well as to offer cultural events that are inspired by the disciplines and research topics of our department. The common theme of the current 2024 edition was “Relations”. In the second day of this festival, our colleagues Chiara Rabbiosi and Mauro Varotto, together with professional videomakers Giovanna Volpi, Marco Toffanin and Michele Trentini, conducted the screening of a selection of short films created by MA students during the Mobilities Videolab and the Landscape videomaking Lab. This year both the Laboratories employed new MobiLab equipment.

The screening was entitled Wanderers above seas of fog: Mobile gazes and invisible relations to celebrate the 250-years anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich. Moving through physical and social landscapes, the short films were able to convey a dense idea of what mobilities entail: walking through a valley in the lockdown to breathe again, being immersed in the life of Roma people behind the scene of a luna park, observing the poetics of movement on a shore, playing with the complexities and complications of urban mobilities, learning to ride a bike as an experience of empowerment, reflecting on restricted mobilities lived by foreign students as migrant subjects… As wanderers moving across a multiplicity of landscapes, through the experience of the laboratory, our students offered a fascinating, original, multifaceted sense of material as well as existential mobilities.