Curated by Davide De Lillis
In collaboration with ScreenDance Festival Stockholm
From June 22 to July 22, 2026
VisualcontainerTV is delighted to present the online streaming of Screendance@VisualcontainerTV.
This year’s curatorial focus centres on more-than-human relations, exploring the connections, tensions, and forms of coexistence between humans, living beings, and material forces. Coming from diverse geographical contexts and employing a wide range of aesthetic approaches, the selected works investigate how bodies move within entangled worlds. Plants, animals, landscapes, and elemental forces emerge not merely as backgrounds or metaphors, but as co-generators of choreographic encounters. The programme invites audiences to reconsider notions of embodiment and relationality, reflect on structures of power and interdependence, and imagine ways of being that acknowledge the complex networks of relations through which life forms and material forces co-shape our world.
Program
Human Habitat – Flavia Devonas Hoffmann
Ramita Seca. La colonialidad permanente – Masi Mamani
Matalapaine – Vilma Tihilä & Kauri Sorvari
Stork Fiction – Mehdi Sli & Nourddine Sli / d-o-t-s
Mer. Of Oceans and Bodies – Katrina Piacek & Sarah Rose Mercer
Clear Creek – Kate Elias & Ellen Smith Ahern
Cave Aquam – Davide De Lillis
The Rider – Sebastián Lelio
Away From Here – Katrina McPherson & Frank McConnell
Flavia Devonas Hoffmann – Human Habitat, 2020
Human Habitat originates in the clash between untouched nature and growing industry in the Arctic and explores the oscillation between human resistibility and fragility. A female dancer takes us on an associative, non-narrative journey through emotional states, facing the changes from a sustainable to a destructive relationship between humans and the landscape.
Masi Mamani – Ramita Seca. La colonialidad permanente, 2019
Through the drag persona Bartolina Xixa, Masi Mamani dances in an open-air landfill in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, an Indigenous territory in northern Argentina. Wearing traditional Andean chola dress, Bartolina performs amid waste, dust, and environmental degradation, exposing the enduring effects of colonial exploitation. Through choreography, music, and symbolism, the work invokes ancestral knowledge and Indigenous resistance as forces for healing colonial wounds.
Vilma Tihilä & Kauri Sorvari – Matalapaine, 2025
A dance film about the moment where the body senses and understands that the winds are about to change. It is a dance film where a human crawls on all fours, as low and humble as possible, incapable of escaping, incapable of arriving. In the film, the landscape is a fold in the skin, an interrupted breath, a wave that is inevitably about to break, a morning returning to a night, darkening. It is yet impossible to predict what is beginning, what ending – which form are the clouds taking.
Mehdi Sli & Nourddine Sli / d-o-t-s – Stork Fiction, 2023
Can art help us understand the ways of inhabiting the world of other-than-human animals so that we might establish new manners of cohabitation with them? Stork Fiction is a dance-film in which humans from the near future commemorate – through dance and the symbolic construction of nests – the annual migrations of the white storks that inhabit the Charente estuary (France) and that have stopped their transcontinental flights due to Climate Change. This work is presented in collaboration with ScreenDance Festival Stockholm.
Katrina Piacek & Sarah Rose Mercer Mer. Of Oceans and Bodies, 2025
Mer. Of Oceans and Bodies investigates the impact of patriarchal systems of exploitation on the fertility of both oceans and bodies, blurring the boundaries between them. By exploring the correlation between the moon’s influence on ocean tides and femme reproductive cycles, the piece reflects on how extractive forms of development disrupt the cycles between nature and bodies. Through movement, it invites a reimagining of our relationship with bodies of water. This work is presented in collaboration with ScreenDance Festival Stockholm.
Kate Elias & Ellen Smith Ahern – Clear Creek, 2019
Clear Creek follows two women as they dance through iconic western images, from dust storm to shoot out, creek bed to endless horizon. Inviting viewers to feel space and distance, taste dust and wind, and empathize with moving bodies, the film offers a portrait of home, land and memory as illuminated by the voices of a rural Wyoming community. Featured voices represent perspectives from ranching, teaching, rangeland conservation and life within the Crow Nation.
Davide De Lillis – Cave Aquam, 2023
Cave Aquam draws attention to the ecological consequences of travertine quarrying in central Italy. The work takes place in the so-called Travertine Basin (Tivoli, Rome), where extractive sites were first opened by the Romans, systematically reactivated under the Fascist regime, and are now nearing exhaustion due to contemporary industrial extraction. Mining has caused several environmental hazards. How to repair the wounds of this territory?
Sebastián Lelio – The Rider, 2023
Created for Matthew Herbert‘s track The Rider, from the album The Horse – which explores our musical heritage and relationship with the natural world – the video centres on the Doma India technique: a method of building trust and connection between horse and rider. Through this relationship, the work invites reflection on interspecies connection.
Katrina McPherson & Frank McConnell – Away From Here, 2011
Set in the dramatic North West Highlands of Scotland, Away From Here examines the fleeting relationship of people to a sense of place and belonging. A desire to consider the natural environment not just as background, but rather as a mutual presence, even performer in the work, lead to this engagement with an ancient landscape as a collaborator in the creation of this screendance.
Davide De Lillis is a curator, multidisciplinary artist and somatic educator. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Roma Tre University and the Accademia Nazionale di Danza (Italy) within the doctoral programme Cultures, Practices and Technologies of Cinema, Media, Music, Theatre and Dance. He holds an MA in Choreographing Live Art from the University of Lincoln (UK) and a postgraduate degree in Environmental Humanities from Roma Tre University.
Note: Screendance@VisualcontainerTV2026 is part of Davide’s research for the PhD program in “Cultures, Practices, and Technologies of Cinema, Media, Music, Theater, and Dance” – promoted by Roma Tre University and National Academy of Dance.