The 5th edition of Videograms—a video art, artists’ films, and moving image festival in Vilnius—is focused on reawakening the traditions of international solidarity that were once alive in our elusive “Eastern Europe” region. With independence seen, smelled, and tasted, we approach it out of free will, need, and desire, not through state-imposed geopolitical internationalisms. We see hope in horizontal, bottom-up initiatives that thread through the world freely and away from diplomatic spectacles of care. With this in mind, we open a new chapter in the Videograms festival, where we aim to present video art from the global peripheries and position ourselves in relation to it.

Videograms ’24 will open with a focus on music and its ever-present power during “the time of the monsters”*: the film Sawt Syria by Yamen Makdad and Juline Hadaya, about the vibrant underground music scenes within Syria and its widespread diaspora, will be followed by a live, vinyl-only DJ session by Beirut Groove Collective. Further, the program will explore solidarity through distinct thematic lines of land and labor, with a multitude of interpretations orbiting them. From the Baltic Sea in Baltic UXO to the Levant’s soil in the short film program by our guest curator, Beirut Cinematheque, via the rebellious mountains of Rojava in Marwa Arsanios’ films—there lies the land that people fought for, loved, left, came back to, and continue to do so. The land leads us to labor, where we learn from Latin American perspectives on work, leisure, and rights in the short film selection by another guest curator, Colectiva editorial Des-bordes. We go on to speculate what to do in a world where the neoliberal system saps our meaningful time through boring jobs, addiction to screens, and consumerism, in Human Surge 3—a genre-, border-, and reality-bending closing film by Eduardo Williams.

* Antonio Francesco Gramsci: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’