The Future of Reality (Volume 2) (The Future Cinema Conference Series)

Flavia Mazzarino obtained her Master's degree in Visual Arts at the Università Iuav di Venezia and HfG in Karlsruhe with a thesis on Harun Farocki’s observational films. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano under the supervision of Kevin B. Lee, with whom she has also taught courses on video essays, cinema and audiovisual futures, and film festival studies. Flavia organized the Future of Reality Conference at the Locarno Film Festival in 2025. She is involved in curatorial projects focused on experimental and avant-garde cinema, having curated programs featuring filmmakers such as Robert Beavers, Morgan Fisher, and Helga Fanderl. Since 2021, she has been collaborating with Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, producing his last four films, including A Fidai Film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Visions du Réel 2024, and With Hasan in Gaza, which has been nominated at the European Film Awards.

Marine de Dardel is an architect, visual artist, and media scholar. She studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and creative coding at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She is currently a doctoral research member in the research project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF 2024–2027) in collaboration with Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). Her research and practice focus on the semiotics of the grotesque body and the future of corporeality according to emergent VR and generative AI technologies. She has taught international workshops experimenting with architectural language and computational narratives. She has co-authored and edited several books, including Portraits: Architectural Parables (2022), de la Verticalité / Zur Vertikalität (2024), and Elegies (2024) and her work has been published in various journals, including Cartha, trans, Scroope, and the NECSUS Journal. Her work has also been screened at the Locarno Film Festival.