CYFEST 17 Video Screening Program: Reimagine the Landscape, 2026
CYFEST 17 Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape.
Video Program “Reimagine the Landscape / Data Traces / Land of Memories”
3 program screenings
curated by Victoria Ilyushkina
31 October, 7:00 PM
“Reimagine the Landscape”
Reimagine the Landscape approaches landscape not as a fixed backdrop, but as an active and constantly changing field shaped by natural processes, human memory, and computational systems. Geological time, digital technologies, personal experience, and artificial perception intersect across the works in the program. Here, the digital is neither separate from nature nor simply a tool for representing it. It becomes another way of sensing, recording, and transforming the environment — revealing its fragility, preserving traces of what is disappearing, and proposing new ways of understanding our place within it.
Grigor Khachatryan’s video diary “City TV series” (“Sayat Nova”, “Beatlemania”), produced at AR TV from 1996 to 2000, managed to grasp the everyday life of the city and survives precisely because it captured fleeting, imperfect moments of 1990s Yerevan that are now gone: buildings that have already vanished, clothing that has changed, movements and gestures we will see no more. Here the digital footage becomes “conceptual poetry” recalling a lost Yerevan, and the glitches and distortions of the medium become part of the surface of that landscape. The work by Studio Above&Below “Critical Landscapes – Series One” explores the dynamic relationship between human technological systems and the living processes of the Earth, explicitly treats “code, data, and material as co-creative agents,” reimagining the landscape as an “interconnected, evolving system” shaped by both geological forces and computational intervention (using the DeepMind GNoME model). Anabela Costa “Wind” translates the physical sensation of wind into a “poetic spatial image” embedded within an abstract three-dimensional digital landscape, where sound intensifies human sensory memory, highlighting the friction or harmony between biological and systemic perception. Sayler / Morris “The Amazon is Elsewhere” reflects on the Amazon as both a real place and a symbol shaped by outside ideas. Inspired by a crumbling university building in the Ecuadorian jungle, the work explores what happens when modern dreams fade and nature reclaims space. The Landscape as an Ephemeral Archive in the collaborative work “Twin of Earth” by Sid Iandovka & Leslie Thornton explores affinities between the two idiosyncratic artistic archives — calling out to each other across intervening decades and mediums. Garush Melkonyan “Ubi sunt” depicts a purely organic landscape that requires human gestures and proto-language to restore harmony. Within this context, it serves as a vital counterpoint — representing the natural world that exists outside digital intervention, yet is acutely threatened and desperately needing preservation.
Places
Cafesjian Center for the Arts
Special Events Auditorium
10 Tamanyan Street, Yerevan 0009, Armenia
Artists
Soundtrack: «Yes Qo Ghimete» (Յիս Քու Ղիմեթըն Չիմ Գիդի), set to a poem by the great Armenian ashugh Sayat-Nova, performed by Charles and Seda Aznavour (https://youtu.be/0eyZO-7ciis). Two episodes from the television project “City”, which Grigor Khachatryan made for Armenian television — a video diary of the city, a mirror of self-knowledge. In Armenian the word for city is the root from which the words for citizen, politics, civilisation are formed.
“City” is a documentary TV series by Grigor Khachatryan, realised at the AR television company in 1996–2000 with the celebrated cameraman Souren Ter-Grigoryan, later with Mkrtich Malkhasyan, Andranik Nerkararyan and Artak Margaryan. The series had a short life on television, although the authors managed to grasp the everyday life of a city that is now disappearing. A hunter-like way of observing and shooting made it possible to record things that would otherwise have been impossible to document: buildings that have already vanished, clothing that has changed, movements and gestures we will see no more. “City” is conceptual poetry allowing us to live through intimate moments of what our life once was, and to recall the lost Yerevan of the 1990s praised by so many poets”. — Vardan Jaloyan, cultural critic.
Bio: Grigor Khachatryan is an artist, performer, actionist and writer, a founding figure of Armenian video art and the founder of the “Fools’ Party” and the “National Center of Contingency Planning” — he juggles irony and paradox with ease. His works, whether abstract canvases, provocative actions or paradoxical texts, challenge settled assumptions. “Nobody, not even I, can make anything new; we can only draw attention, like a child pointing with a finger … except perhaps from a slightly different angle.” — the artist.
“Critical Landscapes – Series One” explores the dynamic relationship between human technological systems and the living processes of the Earth. Focusing on past, present, and future critical mineral extraction, the work reimagines landscape as an interconnected, evolving system shaped by geological forces and computational intervention. Incorporating outputs from the DeepMind GNoME model, the series treats code, data, and material as co-creative agents, reflecting on how technologies participate in the self-organizing logic.
Bio: Studio Above&Below is an award-winning art and technology practice based in London, founded by Daria Jelonek (GER) and Perry-James Sugden (UK) after graduating from the Royal College of Art. Since 2018, the duo has developed a distinct voice in the immersive art space, crafting multi-sensory experiences which blend digital art, Mixed Realities (XR), and live data to reveal the unseen layers of our umwelt. Rooted in a research-driven methodology, their practice draws from fields such as ecology, human-computer interaction, critical and sensory design. Their installations often use real-time environmental data to translate complex systems into visual and spatial experiences. Their projects have been exhibited internationally, including at the V&A, Royal Academy of Arts, SONAR+D, UCCA Shanghai and Transmediale Studio Berlin. Recognition includes the STARTS in the City Prize, Bloomberg Bursary, and UCL Creative Fellowship.
In our era of environmental change, Anabela Costa turns to a phenomenon that is felt before it is seen: wind. Wind as a movement of air, felt on the face as a caress or, when strong, as an aggression. A poetic spatial image is embedded in an abstract three-dimensional landscape, where the sound of the wind intensifies the perception of human memory.
Bio: Anabela Costa (b. 1958, Lisbon) is a visual artist living in Paris. She studied Fine Arts at Lisbon Fine Arts University (1980) and from the 1980s moved progressively towards the digital image. Since 2000 she has conducted research in experimental film along two axes: the moving image and the aesthetics of representing movement, and the formalisation of thematic and scientific concepts. Her experimental animations Web, TIME, LIQST_liquid state, Landscape and In Motion have been programmed and awarded at international festivals. Based in Paris since 2010, she has worked with Le Cube Art and Creation Center and with the Aviz research team at INRIA Saclay, whose experimental image-generation software she uses in her recent films, shown and awarded in Philadelphia, Sydney, ISEA, CODAME San Francisco, CURRENTS New Media, Miami Media Art Festival and PYR. Her current research extends into interactive 360° VR video art and moving images for LED screens in public space and for the performing arts.
The Amazon is Elsewhere is part of a larger body of work titled Crystal Forest that reflects on the Amazon as both a real place and a symbol shaped by outside ideas. Inspired by a crumbling university building in the Ecuadorian jungle, the work explores what happens when modern dreams fade and nature reclaims space. The project includes this short film, as well as collage, photography, and animation. These pieces ask: How do we imagine the Amazon? Who gets to define it? Using images from archives, AI, and the forest itself, the artists invite viewers to consider the Amazon not just as “the lungs of the Earth”, but as a living home full of meaning, memory, and mystery.
Bio: Sayler / Morris (Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris) work with photography, video, writing, installation and public art to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their work is often place-based and focused on historical research. They have been awarded numerous fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), New York Artist Fellowship (2016), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2014), and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2008). Their archives are collected by the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Center for Art and Environment. They are represented by Robert Mann Gallery and have exhibited broadly in a wide range of art and non-art spaces.
At the center of Sid’s and Leslie’s common interests is a question about narratives, new forms of visualization and exploration of the complex intricacies of memory, place, and technology. The artists share a penchant for that which cannot be spoken and for open-ended projects, developing and taking multiple shapes over many years. In this collaborative work, they explore affinities between the two idiosyncratic artistic archives created under vastly different circumstances — calling out to each other across intervening decades and mediums.
Bio: Leslie Thornton is an American filmmaker and artist. In a career spanning nearly five decades, she has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Her work has been exhibited and widely screened internationally at documenta 12, Kassel; the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1 and Artists Space in New York; Tate Modern and Raven Row in London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; and at the Rotterdam, Berlin, Buenos Aires and New York film festivals, among many others.
Sid Iandovka is a visual artist and musician, originally from Novosibirsk, lives in NY. His work has developed independently, produced entirely outside institutional structures, and spans moving image, sound, and new media. His films have been presented at festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Courtisane and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, among others.
Ubi sunt finds a time when language had no shape yet, and when the emotions appeared naked. Two women are trying to preserve what seems to be left of the world: nature, lush but fragile, their harmony, necessary but precarious. The threats to this environment erupt in internal conflict; gestures and words become the only recourse — last aid to restore harmony to the world.
Bio: Garush Melkonyan (b. 1993, Armenia; lives in Paris) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice examines the methods and structures by which we communicate. Working across moving image, installation, and sculpture, he stages environments for his characters and audience to consider how we form language and the invisible societal codes that influence how we engage with others. His work has been presented internationally in solo exhibitions at Rencontres d’Arles (FR), Jean Claude Maier Galerie, Frankfurt (DE) and Lasecu, Lille (FR), as well as in group exhibitions, screenings and festivals at institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (KR); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (AUS); Palais de Tokyo, La Villette and Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris (FR); the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (USA); Nordenhake Gallery and Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City (MX); and La Panacée, Montpellier (FR).
