Image: Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo
Bergamo’s GAMeC will present 'A Practice of Freedom – Cortometraggi d’artista' on Friday, September 11, bringing together short films by six artists under the umbrella of a program that examines resistance, freedom and imagination. The screening is announced for Sala dell’Orologio, with the newsletter listing the start time as 9 pm and the event page recording 8 pm UTC, and the museum describes the films as exploring how individuals and communities confront rules, institutions and systems of power.
The program is framed as part of GAMeC’s broader 'Pedagogia della speranza' season, but the focus of this event is the film selection itself. According to the museum’s announcement, the works trace how marginal experiences can generate vital and creative alternatives to rigid, oppressive hierarchies, with imagination becoming a space of freedom even within narrow confines. The project title, 'A Practice of Freedom', signals that the screening is not a single-author retrospective but a curated encounter between different artistic approaches to moving image.
The six artists named in the announcement are Karimah Ashadu, Jonathas de Andrade, Ane Hjort Guttu, Driant Zeneli, Pauline Curnier Jardin and Harun Farocki. GAMeC’s email outlines the films individually, linking each to a distinct situation or figure. Ashadu’s 'MUSCLE' reflects on the construction of masculinity in Nigerian patriarchal society through bodybuilders training in the slums of Lagos. De Andrade’s 'Sorelle senza nome' looks at the radical choice of a group of Brazilian nuns in the 1960s. Guttu’s 'Freedom Requires Free People' follows a child’s daily confrontation with a school system inclined toward uncritical obedience.
Curnier Jardin’s 'Adoration' turns to women detained in the Giudecca women’s prison, where they rediscover the history of a centuries-old women’s community in an attempt to suspend the rules of confinement, even briefly. Zeneli’s 'How deep can a dragonfly swim under the ocean?' presents a dragonfly trapped in the brutalist architecture of Tirana as a metaphor for the experience of a man who spent 21 years in solitary confinement in an Albanian prison. Farocki’s 'Bedtime Stories: Bridges, Ships, Cats' follows two girls telling bedtime stories in a dialogue that plays with the reality captured by the camera.
GAMeC’s website gives the event location as Sala dell’Orologio in Piazza della Libertà, Bergamo, while the linked event listing on Eventbrite places the performance-lecture by Alessandra Ferrini elsewhere later in the month at Performatorio. Those are separate items in the museum’s September newsletter and should not be conflated with the film screening. For 'A Practice of Freedom – Cortometraggi d’artista', the verified details are the Friday, September 11 screening, the Bergamo venue, and the six participating artists.
The museum’s description presents the program as a sequence of films working between archive, memory and fiction, and as an exploration of how stories from the margins can become forms of resistance. The screening is one of the September appointments listed by GAMeC, alongside later workshop and talk programs connected to the same season.
