Movement Lab Fellowship

Azadeh Ahmadi is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose documentary and fiction films explore relations between the individual and the social context represented in memory and absence. In her films, human gestures and movements are substantial visual and psychological elements, revealing neglected and suppressed individual and collective narratives.

Ahmadi’s work has screened at festivals and venues including Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Blow-Up Arthouse Film Fest, Lulea International Film Festival, Boden International Film Festival, 2220 Arts and Archives, and Murmurs Gallery among others. She holds an MFA in film directing from CalArts and a BFA in theater from the University of Tehran.

Reading the Waves—Ahmadi’s interdisciplinary practice-based research project—conjoins theory and cinematic form to investigate the inner qualities of everyday human movements and gestures in private and public domains. Through this work she explores the interrelations between the body and the sociocultural structures placed upon, and how these interrelations create affect in art practice.

Melisa Achoko Allela is a Nairobi-based creative technologist, lecturer and researcher. She merges her background in interactive media, graphic design and animation in artistic and research projects that explore the affordances of new and emerging technologies to position how they can be used to digitize storytelling experiences imbued with elements of traditional African oral storytelling.

Allela is a lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya and cofounder of the interactive media studio LESOStories. Her main motivation is to preserve and celebrate the rich cultural heritage of African storytelling while also using innovative methods to share it with a new and wider audience. She holds a PhD in design from the Technical University, and an MA and BA in design from the University of Nairobi.

Among other achievements, Allela is winner of Digital Lab Africa 2020 Award (Immersive Realities category), is an Electric South 2019 Fellow, a recipient of the 2019 HEVA Cultural Heritage Seed Fund and a 2018 Mawazo PhD scholar. She looks forward to the tipping point moment for African women in tech and their increased participation in the fields of animation and interactive media.

Allela’s fellowship project—Songa, from the Swahili word “move”—explores the digital mediation of performance and non-verbal communication that plays a key role in narrative development in traditional African oral storytelling. This project gives prominence to physically embodied experiences that cannot be adequately conveyed in linear media. It entails the creation of a database of movement forms drawn from curated storytelling performances.

​​Maxime Cavajani (b. 1988, Martinique, France) is a multimedia artist working across video, photography, sculpture, performance and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time in between queer bodies, living and dead, to interrogate the “seen” and “legible”.

Thinking through mnemonic functions, Cavajani’s work uses the slippages between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, space and phenomena, performance and gesture, sound and noise. Rather than capturing what is in motion, the work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces and reflections. A practice inviting publics to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss and love.

Cavajani’s project grounds (chapter 2) is a video, performance and sculpture installation reflecting on queer deaths. A pilgrimage towards disappearance, it revisits the life and death of artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977). This project explores how body and landscape are devices recording both a struggle with absence and a desire for the unseen.