is a workshop, festival and film screening club developed by Reem Saleh and Noam Toran, now running in its third year.
This collaborative and ever-expanding initiative explores the following themes:
Monstrosity, Alienhood and Coloniality
We critically examine how perceptions of alienhood and 'otherness' are indelibly shaped by colonial and imperial legacies. The platform endeavors to disrupt these legacies by exploring alternative imaginaries.
The Power of Low Budget/Low Brow Expressions
Embracing the ethos of no/low budget and low-brow film-making and art production, and by valuing the aesthetics and expressions that society deems ‘trash’, we harness the power of peripheral genres to forge new paths towards liberation, representation and social critique.
Challenging Modernism and Its Value Systems
The project helps us to confront the dominant value systems of colonial modernity and question their various manifestations.
Workshop participants are invited to imagine and bring to life, through short films, performances, and installations, intimate encounters with alien or monstrous beings. While this prompt may seem innocuous, it is through the illuminating potential of exploitation, trash, sci-fi and horror fictions that the workshop endeavors, in its modest way, to confront and deconstruct colonialism's defining of 'THE OTHER’, and the sustained, organized assault such a definition has wrought on beings, bodies, consciousness, and imagination.
The methods employed are directly inspired by low-budget and 'low-brow' film production, connecting participants with the vibrant yet criminally marginalized histories of subaltern and counter-hegemonic filmmaking. During the workshop, we dive hand and head-first into the politics of monstrosity and alienhood by setting up a gore-fest lab. Here, we concoct no-budget SFX recipes and contribute to a Collective Cookbook for No/Lo-Fi & No/Lo-Budget Productions. Participants learn horror and sci-fi makeup, analog special effects, cinematography, soundtrack creation, and editing, enabling them to craft intimate —and very messy— encounters.
The 'making' aspect of the workshop is complemented by lectures, screenings, guest collaborators, and an openly accessible database containing screening films, a bibliography, and articles.
has been hosted at institutions such as ZHdK in Zurich, ENS-Saclay in Paris, HEAD Geneva, and Central St. Martins in London. Notable guests who have enriched the workshop include Fatou Dravé, Joseph Popper, Noemi Castella, Keith Jones, and Fatima Wegmann. In 2020, a public seminar marked the launch of the workshop, featuring speakers Nisi Shawl, P. Djeli Clark, Muhammad Jabali, Grace Dillon, and Tabita Rezaire.
