A video game takes some entertaining and philosophical wrong turns: the tennis player figure slides from the centre court into a parallel world and is robbed of his racket. The quirky “Pong” setting gradually evolves into the course of a desperate search for identity outside the rules of the game. The pathetic polygonal Roger Federer stumbles over glitches. Rowdy supporting characters offer first harassment, then help. The design, this undead relic from the past of games, is a subversive fellow player.

A collage in black and white, positive and negative, with dancing lyrics, skipping thoughts and ambling sounds. Inspired by the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, this experimental homage celebrates three poets and their passion for sound recording devices: Thomas Pynchon (thought recorder), William S. Burroughs (tape recorder) and Rainer Maria Rilke (phonograph).

Our hovering gaze circles a free-standing rock on a wide plain. The recording gets stuck. At ever shorter intervals the massive rock formation breaks out of the solidifying background until data smears and artefacts accumulate as fine digital sediment layers and congeal into new formations. The video signal interference acts like a primal force of geological history.

Socio-geographic explorations on the periphery of Addis Ababa, run through by a variety of borders and rifts – between agrarian and urban spatial practices, between economic and linguistic floes, between perspective and dilemma. A polyphonic audiovisual narrative of people who are forced to experience the impetuous urbanisation of African societies the hard way, recorded as a case study that expands into a complex allegory.

Addis Ababa (Finfinnee in the language of the rural Oromo people) is a rapidly growing East African metropolis. “Rift Finfinnee” evolves from the concrete observation of main and side effects of urbanisation in four extremely different settlements, located within sight of each other on the eastern outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, to an expansive composition about the dynamics of an urban turbo modernisation. The Great Rift Valley currently still (!) constitutes a both natural and symbolic barrier to limit the further tentacle-like expansion of the megacity into agricultural territory – across this and other rifts. This interim report on the situation at the rifts probes the field of tension created by unstable pasts, unreliable futures and a contested present.

“Guess what we’re doing! We’re going to practice swimming.” Hanan accompanies her brother to classes in the public pool. The first swimming badge is called the Seahorse, their instructor explains, because it “stands” in the water and doesn’t drown. When Hanan’s family came to Europe in a rubber dinghy, she couldn’t swim. To forget this experience, she learned not to go under in the water – like a seahorse.

A voice from nowhere proclaims life instructions: “Take a deep breath, say YEEES! … and stop being boring!” But rules and authority gradually elude the anonymous instructor. He becomes a chattering, contradictory flâneur through the universe of his problem-fraught private affairs. Those therapy units have a really sneaky design.

Asude lives in Lower Bavaria. Her grandparents came to Germany from Turkey in the 1970s. She’s currently studying for her school-leaving examinations and, at the same time, training for her dream of becoming a kickboxing champion. Unreservedly supported by her sisters, Asude competes in the European Championship in Skopje. It is her first fight in the jersey of the German national team.

Katharina’s father used to work for the GDR secret service. In the mid-1990s he was arrested for a murder ordered in connection with his former job … and released. Ever since then, Katharina has feared that the doubts about her father’s innocence might throw a shadow on her life, too. A film about family secrets and the question whether some things hadn’t better remain hidden.

A young man meets a young woman and both fall for each other. A house is built, children are born, the fairy tale story of boundless love takes its course. A grandson sets out to explore the myth of his grandparents’ romance and tries to honour his deceased grandfather on film, assisted by all the surviving relatives. Not an easy undertaking when things may not have been exactly as the family tradition would have it …

In his search Rocco Di Mento unearths old 8mm home movies, an unpublished novel, various love letters and a whole host of long-suppressed feelings. It’s hardly surprising that this mixture begins to develop a dynamic of its own. Suddenly the issue is no longer only the search for the love of one’s life but also the questions of what holds people together above and beyond their relationship status and degree of kinship and how forgiveness is possible even though you have long since lost faith in it. An ingeniously constructed family constellation full of Italian temperament, in which tension, emotion and truthfulness are inextricably linked. Because: “Even if you leave you will always be part of your family.”

Welcome to the Anthropocene. Welcome to an age entirely shaped by humanity’s actions. This multiplayer VR ritual arranges a meeting with Mother Nature. We get the chance to become reconciled with her, re-establish lost connections to the world and re-achieve some harmony with the earth and ourselves.

Covid-19 has made quarantine and self-isolation the everyday experience for many. This project, developed at the CPH:LAB, invites people to scan their most personal places and moments. The resulting VR experience is a walk-in archive and time capsule, the collective memory of a state of emergency which also preserves forgotten virtues like deceleration and the spirit of discovery.

The gaze follows a line of trees and tries to visually order near and distant branches. A jumble of lines sketchily leaves behind what is and sketchily captures what can be assembled from the remnants of perception. Hand-drawn lines conquer the third dimension with digital crackling. A pylon waves its tentacles.

What’s the parallel between a Leipzig allotment club and the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Greece? Alert to historical lines of connection, outstanding archive material and enchanting images of the austere Cretan landscape, the complex links between silkworm breeding here and German war crimes there are laid bare. The focus is less on settling questions of guilt than on depicting the inner dynamics of war, resistance and forgetting.

An Instagram user surface ripples, turns into a feedback vortex and attempts to impress in virtual space. Every segment is an aesthetically arranged repetition. We catch a brief glimpse of the alleged visual content: in a film studio, equipment and a white background are lurking for their photographic object. Absence is staged as a motif that feeds the vain social media channel.

A jumble of emerging history is contrasted with the present efforts to optimise profit through ventures and ominous business ideas. In the midst of this labyrinth is a duo of artists who only want to make films. Their misfortune: the German film funding system allows only those who work in an artistic-documentary style to realise science fiction films. Cause enough to find true science fiction material on real German soil instead of looking for a fiction.

Rothenstein, south of Jena. A mountain, hollowed out and built on. Labyrinthine corridors cast in concrete spread over a distance of more than five kilometres. The film precisely constructs – stone by stone, image by image – a story which, composed as a mirror of German history, touches on archaeological finds from twelve thousand years ago and at the same time projects into the uncertainties of the future. Bizarre energy fields, myths and tales of dragons, plans of U.S. preppers fleeing from the end of the world meet facticities of National-Socialist exploitation and forced labour, stories of flight from the 1930s, and the military history of the GDR.