Curator Theus Zwakhals has selected three works which, each in its own way, touch upon themes of control and belonging, and the body as a site where power is exercised and contested. Eoghan Ryan traces how belonging is choreographed in contemporary Ireland, Ghita Skali follows the dead body through borders and administrative frameworks, and Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters propose an intelligence that learns from matter rather than data.

Please note that the event starts at 19:30 sharp, so latecomers cannot be admitted. We Are Public and Cineville members may enter for free. The screenings will be followed by Q&As with the artists.

Programme details

Ghita Skali – What Remains (NL/FR, 2026, 30')

Is it possible and desirable to reflect together on ways of sharing experiences and intentions related to grief? In What Remains, Ghita Skali addresses our relationship to grief and the taboos surrounding it, paying special attention to the ritual gestures of the living that defy logic and accompany us. What mechanisms of circulation, belonging, and constraint continue to exert their influence on bodies after death? What becomes of a body in the face of borders, administrative frameworks, exclusionary laws, and cultural expectations? The choice of whether or not to return to one's country of birth, and the material realities that complicate this decision, make the dead body appear as a space of tension. Mourning then becomes a space where power relations are revealed, but also where possibilities for reappropriation and choice emerge.

Ghita Skali is a Casablanca-born, Amsterdam-based artist. She works with installation, video, and performance to explore how fiction, rumour, and marginal stories can reveal the absurdities of institutional authority and political power. Her practice often intervenes in public discourse, blending critical inquiry with playful subversion.

Eoghan Ryan – Carceral Jigs (IRE/NL, 2025, 27')

How is control choreographed and performed? What is the role of culture, policy, the media, and our built environment in this? How is this spectacle of belonging maintained and who does it exclude? Carceral Jigs (2025) excavates how the re-use of architectures of containment, for example, those outsourced by the Irish state to facilitate direct provision, often complicates and confuses nationalist identification. The film invites viewers to consider how control is choreographed and performed through culture, policy, media, and the built environment and how this spectacle of belonging is continually maintained and malformed by its systematic denial. Children’s television tropes, scenes of musical rehearsal, 3D puppetry, and linguistic tongue twisters are traced across anti-migration protests in Ireland and talking head documentary footage of activist Lucky Khambule, to expose mutations, contradictions, and shifting rhythms within Irish nationalism today.

Eoghan Ryan‘s practice spans video installation, performance, puppetry, text and collage to explore the intricacies of how power is communicated through mediated culture. His process involves long periods of filming and editing; documenting a specific person, place, object, or song and through this developing fable-like takes on the collective and the personal as institutions. His complete video installations and performances often question how personal proximity shapes our understanding of ourselves and others within the structural and socio-political constraints of cultural inheritance, identity construction and belief systems.

Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters, DEEP SOUP (NL, 2025, 18')

In DEEP SOUP, a participatory sci-fi short, Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters appear as post-humanists developing a physical intelligence model that learns from matter rather than data. Working with people from across the planet, they gather recordings of matter to feed the model, and the soup thickens. The film responds to a condition in which screens keep our minds stimulated while our bodies and the physical world recede, and digital systems promise a frictionless perfection at odds with messy, tangible reality. By turning the tables on technology and AI, DEEP SOUP invites viewers to reconnect with the material world and to see matter, movement, and gravity where they would otherwise see people. Participants can contribute to the model’s training by uploading their own videos to deepsoup.io.

Cross-disciplinary designer and artist Luna Maurer blends digital technologies with physicality to explore the characteristics of being human. Currently, she is exploring how AI can contribute to the experience of dancing. Roel Wouters is a Dutch artist, designer, director, and educator, whose work addresses the cultural and social impact of digital technology, often through participatory and rule-based design methods.Together they formed the interactive design studio Moniker.

Header image: Eoghan Ryan, Carceral Jigs (2025). In collection: LI-MA.

This event is made possible with the support of Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.