Filmed in his home in Paris one late summer, the philosopher and political figure Antonio Negri takes as a starting point a short story — a parable written by Marine Hugonnier — and transforms it into a political hypothesis. It is the story of a community of children who live in roofless houses in a world where two suns shine permanently. When an eclipse is about to take place, the children get scared. They are terrified as they do not know the darkness, they’ve never seen the stars. To cope with their fear, they decide to burn their houses to generate light. From there Antonio Negri weaves anecdotes, evokes Alexis de Tocqueville and Saint Francis of Assisi, protests against biopolitics and formalises arguments which reveal his unconditional engagement for activism, absolute democracy, the need to recreate communities, and his restless quest to find joy in the heart of “the multitude”.

Antonio Negri

Shot in Claude Monet’s Garden in Giverny (France) this film is a search for its cusp — a possible point of passage, set at the limit of the scope of representation and at the beginning of the animal and the vegetal realms. The film shows the microscopic ecosystem that constitutes Monet’s “pictorial Garden”. It is an attempt to capture it from a non-perspectival point of view.  Shot as a single sequence running the duration of a 400-foot reel, it features views of the edges of water-lily’s leaves and of Monet’s iconic green bridge, until the lens of the camera is intentionally removed to place the analogue film directly in contact with the environment, recording its presence with no interface. The abstract image resulting from this process captures the shimmering lights and movements of all beings during this quiet summer night.