Film Festival: The Time of the Moon, 8Albe 2026
A film festival of artists’ film and video, hosted by Dimora delle Balze, curated by Lucia Pietroiusti. In 2026, the festival addressed the emergence of the spiritual in moments of ecological and cultural crisis.
Assistant Curator: Danai Giannoglou
Colectivo Los Ingravidos, Tonalli (still), 2021
What happens to us in moments of rupture? When the ground begins to shake beneath our feet, politically and ecologically, what changes in the ways we perceive, how we gather, how we listen, and how we make sense of our present? Across histories and geographies, times of environmental and social instability have often coincided with a renewed sensitivity to forces that exceed the individual: spirits, landscapes, ancestors. Forms of knowing that sometimes appear marginal, from ritual to prayer, to ecstatic vision, return to demand our attention. We seek intensity, the sublime, a different kind of connection.
The 2026 edition of 8Albe continues the investigation that began with Tramonti, the 2025 edition, which concerned itself with beginnings and ends of the world. This year, the festival gathers films that propose altered registers of experience as a way of making sense of the present time. The works bring together ecological breakdown and spiritual intensity as intertwined conditions of living in a world that is changing faster than our languages can describe it. The spiritual is a direct experience: something lived through bodies, movements, transformations, landscapes and collective gestures. Continuing an exploration of geomythology, the films also interrogate the deep interconnectedness between myth, storytelling and environmental change.
As a physical, metaphysical and symbolic force, the moon re-appears to us powerfully in these moments. It proposes cyclical time, moving tides and bodies. To turn to the moon, in this sense, is to search for new coordinates when familiar frameworks no longer hold. In this collection of films, psychedelia, mysticism, ecstasy and metamorphosis become modes of attention: ways of lingering with contemporary instability, of inhabiting a world that is fragile, volatile, and profoundly animate. New communities form, or reform, around ecstasy and ritual, both on and off-screen. They suggest that if those certainties that held us in place are now falling apart, it may be because they were holding on too tight to begin with, leaving very little space for the murmuring rest.
The fourth edition of 8Albe opened with a performance by Nicole L’Huillier.
Programme of The Time of the Moon
30 June 2026: Vibrations, Resonances, Raptures
Performance by Nicole L’Huillier
Patricia Domínguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2022
Collectivo Los Ingravidos, Tonalli, 2021
Jeremy Shaw, Quickeners, 2014
Fredj Moussa, Solar Noon, 2022
6 August 2026: Synthetic Sublimes
Himali Singh Soin, Silicontology, 2017
Cao Shu, Acheiropoieta, 2025
Metahaven, Chaos Theory, 2021–2024
Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser), In the Spirit of the Fountain, 2020
Jeremy Shaw, Liminals, 2017
Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser), In the Spirit of the Fountain, 2020
13 August 2026: Storying the Cosmos
Sammy Lee, Ecophony Gaya, 2023
Tabita Rezaire, Mamelles Ancestrales, 2019
Fredj Moussa, Solar Noon, 2022
20 August 2026: The Unstable Real
Floris Schönfeld, A Brief History of the Damagomi Group, 2016
Monica Ursina Jäger, Liquid Time, 2022
Jeremy Shaw, I Can See Forever, 2018
27 August 2026: O Profeta
Ique Langa, O Profeta, 2026 (Italian première)