As part of Downtown Brussels Art

In dialogue with the exhibition Thresholds, Doors, Portals…, this programme of film and conversation traces another passage. It drifts towards worlds conjured through haunting,  fabulation and speculative rewriting. Where the exhibition lingers within structures we already inhabit—be they spatial, linguistic or social—the practices of Pam Virada, Laura Huertas-Millán and Le Nemesiache lean further out, crossing the threshold to imagine radically other modes of dwelling and relating. Architecture, in its many forms, runs through all three practices—domestic, monumental and cosmic.

In Pam Virada’s Casting A Spell to Alter Reality, home is not a fixed interior but a site of temporal entanglement, where memories overlap, holding traces of intimacy and migration. Spectral presences reveal themselves when Virada finds parallels  between her grandfather’s stories and the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Laura Huertas Millán takes viewers on a fictional journey along the Amazon river in Aequador, where imagined modernist ruins stand as ghostly remnants of former utopias. These structures—abandoned yet still imposing—speak to the ideological ambitions that once sought to master nature and time.

Sonia D’Alto, in her intervention, will explore feminist cosmologies and thresholds in relation to the experimental short films from the 1970s by Lina Mangiacapre and the Neapolitan (trans)feminist group Le Nemesiache. The collaborative cinema of Le Nemesiache forges a radical reimagining of the cosmos itself, unfolding as a delicate play of rememory and political imagination—where filmic images, gestures, and landscapes move toward the creation of a world where many worlds can thrive.

Curated by Ariane Sutthavong.

Biographies

Sonia D’Alto is an art historian, curator, and writer. Her research and curatorial practice explore the connections between superstition and modernity, folklore and taxonomies of power, through feminist gestures, decolonial magical practices, and subaltern cosmologies. She has worked on these topics with institutions such as the Venice Biennale, Museo Madre (Naples), documenta studies (Kassel), Villa Arson (Nice), De Appel (Amsterdam), AWARE (Paris), and Frame Finland (Helsinki). Her writings have appeared in journals such as e-flux journal, NERO, Flash Art, Mousse, and Critique d’Art. She is currently a PhD candidate at HFBK Hamburg, with a practice-based project on Italian feminist art collectives, and she lectures in the Curatorial Studies department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent. A book she has curated is forthcoming with Archive Books, and she is currently working as the curator of the first monograph on Le Nemesiache for Mousse Publishing.

Laura Huertas Millán is a Colombian and French artist and award-winning filmmaker whose work bridges visual arts, cinema, and decolonial research. Drawing from ethnography, literature, and ecology, her films and installations have been exhibited at institutions like MoMA, LACMA, MASP, and C/O Berlin, and screened at major festivals including Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, and TIFF. A graduate of Beaux-Arts de Paris and Le Fresnoy, she holds a practice-based PhD from PSL University and is a former member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). Between 2020 and 2022, she was a Visiting Faculty at the Film/Video Department at Bard College’s MFA and from 2022 to 2024 she co-chaired the department which was renamed the Moving Image Department under her leadership. In 2024, she was awarded the AWARE Prize and the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Award. She is currently developing a feature-length film about the history of the coca plant, after a decade-long research developed between the Colombian Amazon, the United States, and Europe.

Pam Virada (lives and works between Bangkok and Amsterdam) is an artist navigating the cinematic and the temporal in domestic spheres through attunements in the atmosphere and expanded cinema. By reconfiguring familiar narratives and environments, her work explores ephemeral moments and hauntological undercurrents with the use of everyday objects, spatial arrangements, and text as mnemonic devices—where uncanny yet familiar forces linger in space and time.

We look forward to seeing you!