A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

Tszzzzidd – skin and adhesive tape separate slowly, almost lasciviously. From a sober physical point of view, forces between molecular bonds are being overcome. Yoriko Mizushiri composes brief, highly sensual variations on pain and pleasure based on this phenomenon. Restrained, calm and scalpel-sharp, she creates two-dimensional drawn animations in subdued colours, accompanied by cool electronic sounds that explode in one’s head only to scatter into the anxious but curious body.

A voice speaking the Aztec language Nahuatl and a ritual song accompany the children’s games in the Mayan rain forest. They put their ears to the trees which seem to speak to each other and to the universe. They listen to an ancient love story that continues today. A myth of Mesoamerican culture is invoked. Animated sequences and extreme backlighting visualize the tree’s inner life. What images may emerge in the children’s mind’s eyes?

Click, click, she virtually recreates a cluttered, narrow kitchen on her computer. Lady Di smiles with creased photo edges from the refrigerator, a half-opened chocolate bar lies on the table. The technical-looking, detailed digital reconstruction runs like a fingertip along remembered images, tracing their nicks. The images feed off a blurred video in which the grandparents and their kitchen-cum-living-room live on – a nostalgic place in the distant Ukraine of childhood.

Four creatures wobble like marionettes in the black void. An alien power tries to subdue them, police voices strike like truncheons. Bent, with bulging or thread-thin limbs, their skin turned inside out – human anatomy has mutated. But these vulnerable bodies start to fight back … “Scum Mutation” takes us into the battle zone without protection, into an indelible energy field of radical feminist protest – and becomes a resounding beacon of reconquest.

Coupledom has its own dynamics. Her professional obligations do not tick by the clock, his cooking and love are extraordinary, but, alas, precisely timed. This all too familiar incompatibility is condensed into murky, acrid roast fumes and ends civilized, but bloody. Špela Čadež gradually slows down the pace, creating a space for the absurd goings-on to penetrate deeper and deeper. Black humour, “well done”.

Photographs are dusted, records cleaned, insects removed from books and everything is digitized for eternity. The matter-of-fact shots of fastidious archival work, though, are combined with the voice of a young woman who reports on the collapse of civilization, the fragile artefacts of which she secures as the last human being left in the “Congress”. In the field of tension between image and sound a space for our imagination opens up.