Curated by Pablo Robertson de Unamuno
from the 18th of April to the 16th of May 2026
Artists: MJ Golzari – Maya Bentley – Sara N. Santos – Dina Yanni – Jolene Mok – Mojca Radkovič – Ajda Zupan – Malaz Usta – Chris Mich – Irene Dionisio – João Garcia Neto – Shako None – Lei Lei – Nim Longley – Guadalupe Arellanes – Sylvie Boisseau – Frank Westermeyer – Indexthumb & Viewfinder – Adam E. Stone – Diana Olifirova
Underneath the Floorboards presents its 15th edition, a programme that brings together a wide range of experimental moving-image practices by artists from diverse contexts and generations. Through intimate narratives, poetic gestures, political reflection, and formal experimentation, this selection unfolds as a journey across fragile states of being, memory, displacement, vulnerability, and transformation.
From domestic spaces overshadowed by distant violence to landscapes shaped by longing, transit, and return, the works in this edition move between the personal and the collective, the dreamlike and the historical, the analogue and the algorithmic. Questions of belonging, freedom, mortality, perception, and identity emerge through dance, found footage, 16mm film, split-screen structures, animation, and speculative narratives.
Bringing together works that are lyrical, critical, and emotionally resonant, this edition of Underneath the Floorboards offers a layered exploration of contemporary video art as a space for reflection, resistance, and imagination.
Part 1
PIN
MJ Golzari
5:10
In a peaceful home shadowed by distant chaos, a woman tends to her quiet rituals. As the winds rise, the boundaries between serenity and turmoil begin to blur.
Behind These Pretty Things
Maya Bentley
4:02
This is a film about a woman who comes to terms with her inner struggles, longing for the days when she can free herself from using what she displays on the exterior to shield who she really is.
She uses luxury items as a symbol of status and aligns that with her identity. Through dance, the movements in this film represent the inner battle she endures.
Suave Mar / Soft Sea
Sara N. Santos
15:00
A man recalls his mother. She used to tell him about a mythical place: the beach.
In Soft Sea, the bath man would immerse the children in the waves amid screams and laughter, lace and swimsuits were in fashion, and people asked the sea to make them live forever. Meanwhile, the photographer walked along the sand, attempting to capture a society on the brink of decay.
Show Me the Money
Dina Yanni
2:53
The often celebrated “Show me the money” and the less noticed “I love Black people” sequences from the movie Jerry Maguire (1996) are replayed in continuous loops and displayed side by side on a split screen.
Both slogans are short, punchy utterances that travel easily through popular culture. Stripped of their original commercial-comedy context, each line reveals a dense ideological load that ties directly to two of the most powerful structuring forces of contemporary society: capitalism and white supremacy.
An Inimitable Place Called Home
Jolene Mok
5:28
This work was created to reflect a constant wanderer’s overdue homecoming before yet another departure.
The numerous possibilities of navigating Hong Kong are truly extraordinary. The film’s basic premise is to show Hong Kong’s unique cityscape, visualised through land, sea, and air. Various mass transit vehicles traverse the city recurrently and are juxtaposed with free-flying sparrows living in their very own humble neighbourhoods.
I am drawn to the poetry found in mundane, everyday scenes in Hong Kong. I wanted to magnify this uniqueness and beauty by using the analogue medium of black-and-white 16mm film.
I hand-processed the film stock myself. The flaws that appeared during the film-handling process, such as dust traces and scratch marks, are important assets that work together with a beautiful poem by Hong Fu to present an orchestrated work to audiences.
Tomorrow When I Saw You
Mojca Radkovič, Ajda Zupan, Malaz Usta
4:30
Three strangers meet in search of a sense of belonging.
MFL
Chris Mich
9:11
Inspired by and constructed according to the mathematical relationships in the Magic Square of the Sun, MFL is “a study in perception of movement, time, space and their correlation to planes, trains, trees, freeways and evening gowns,” as ShortTV.com writes.
MURMUR
Irene Dionisio
6:00
Where are you? Light, funny, and epic. If the horizons weren’t so close, what gusts would you follow?
It is a desire that lifts you, a pain that drives you, a madness that drags you down. Where are you going now? The wind becomes marginal notes, whispers, and applause.
This breath is a sigh in unison. Murmur follows the real and metaphorical flight of a seagull through the gaze of a female figure, suspended in an indefinite time, who investigates its physical and divine mechanics.
Drawing inspiration from Nina’s famous monologue from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Murmur engages, through an imaginative language, in a dialogue with the meaning of a truly free art.
Part 2
A Straight Story
João Garcia Neto
9:40
In A Straight Story, a train journey between Poznań and Lublin, in Poland, becomes an intimate and cinematic photo-filmic essay on memory.
Blue Bird
Shako None
1:20
An interpretation of Charles Bukowski’s poem Bluebird, recited by Harry Dean Stanton, this dance film uncovers the hidden softness within us all, capturing the struggle to embrace vulnerability and the tender act of learning to love oneself.
Break no.1 & Break no.2
Lei Lei
17:30
Photographs, snowy mountains, videotapes.
Two stories of love and death.
休息一下
Episode 1: The Lost Photographs
Episode 2: The Unfound Movie Videotapes
CLAWS
Nim Longley
1:30
CLAWS is a short experimental analogue animation of a game between cat and bird.
Repertoire of Death
Guadalupe Arellanes
5:35
A lucid dream leads to a dance with Death.
Photographed on 16mm, Repertoire of Death blends found sounds with rarely heard music from the personal archives of Yma Sumac, “Queen of Exotica,” in order to blur the boundaries between past and present, dead and alive, and dream and waking.
The Free Man – with AI
Sylvie Boisseau, Frank Westermeyer
7:34
Does the algorithm know us better than we do? How will we behave when access to information becomes permanent and unlimited?
The human is asking, the machine is replying: this is the test arrangement Boisseau & Westermeyer choose for their character ƒ.
What happens when our access to information is optimized even further and becomes permanent and unlimited? Will ƒ’s personality still be recognizable? Will his self-view remain his own, or become the view of an algorithm? Will his attempts incorporate the algorithm?
The thoughts of the Free Man seem endless, but what happens if uncertainty disappears?
COMMUTE
Indexthumb & Viewfinder
5:18
Captured in the Berlin U-bahn during covid lockdowns, COMMUTE is a multichannel work exploring the fragmentation of public space, and a queer, somatic entanglement between two strangers navigating the metro system.
In Clouds Descending
Adam E. Stone
2:00
A poem film about the human toll of political violence, featuring excerpts from Walt Whitman’s poetry about the American Civil War, arranged and read by Adam E. Stone.
Warning: contains graphic historical photographs depicting the aftermath of political violence.
Total run time, including credits: 2 minutes. Available with burned-in English-language captions/subtitles upon request. Use the “CC” button to view English-language captions/subtitles in this video player.
If We Believe in Time
Diana Olifirova
2:15
“What happens when we pause?”
‘Underneath the Floorboards‘ is a platform showcasing the best in Video Art, Media Art, Digital Art, Experimental film, and Documentary from around the world.