Some childhood wounds never heal. Once primary school boy Tsubasa and Kyotaro make friends, their dreary existences as outsiders finally come to an end: they see each other, they understand each other. Tsubasa actually prefers origami to pursuing dreams of being a football star and is under a lot of pressure to excel by his mum, who barely gives him any affection at all. Kyotaro lives with his old, impoverished grandmother and likes nothing more than drawing dinosaurs. Together, they wander through the neighbourhood, they play, they are inseparable. Yet Kyotaro’s impulsive, nerdy manner and the other children’s mean tongues sow the seeds of mistrust in Tsubasa – is his best friend perhaps an alien? One little misunderstanding and a bigger confrontation lead to everything falling apart. Kohei Kadowaki’s debut takes its time in crafting the perspectives of both children: the camera often lingers close to stunned, horrified or crying faces that sometimes morph into aliens – the director uses rotoscoping to make the emotions particularly tangible. This empathetic emotionality is also a distinguishing feature of the narration, which seems to be pushing the “coming of age” principle to the realm of absurdity: trapped by society’s masculinity conventions, both protagonists are condemned to grow up eternally wounded, perhaps never to fully arrive in the here and now.

Marie Ketzscher

A duet for two church organs, played by AI-driven robots, and a score composed live with the audience. In this site-specific installation, visitors are invited to both guide and experience a composition which collapses time and flips musical traditions on their head.

The two organs of the Heilandskirche have only been played by human hands, but that’s about the change. Trained on two edges of a musical spectrum – on music from the European Middle Ages, and contemporary electronic music – the AI players imagine hypothetical musical realities somewhere in between. As visitors enter the space, they begin to explore an invisible map, which conducts the AI players in one musical direction or another in search of a musical bridge between past and present. Ever-changing and unique, the piece is a singular audio experience felt with the entire body, and the body, in return, guides this musical composition. Played twice only, for three hours at a time, nothing is pre-determined nor repeated.

Dana Melaver