Under the Sky of Fetishes responds to the complexity of colonial archives. It reinvents the specters of a haunting gaze to tell the story of Mauritian sega – a cultural practice born during colonization and slavery, now mainly seen in tourism. How do we project, literally bring out of ourselves, the narrative of the oppressor? Mixing fiction and ethnography, the film sanctifies the power of the projection as a mental as well as intimate enigma to release ghostly and alienated bodies, including our own.

In her new video work, choreographer Meg Stuart explores the Vorklinik, a modernist building erected in 1971-76 for the University of Graz’s medical faculty, that has meanwhile been demolished, as it was considered too dysfunctional for further use. Together with two dancers, Stuart attempts to mark this brutal transition through a sensorial processing of the building’s vast, empty spaces. Like the modernist project, the attempt to fit their bodies into the architecture of the Vorklinik is slated to fail. With tenderness and sensuality, they connect past and future, dream and decay.

Saba, an Iranian girl, is a dancer. She wants to be indifferent to her surroundings and manifests this self-being and freedom with her body. She is in love with the art of dancing, the art of letting go and living away from conventional bonds. But this art of being is forbidden in an ultimately religious state that ignores the very basic human rights. The film is an honest portrait of the daily oppression women have to deal with in Iran towards the path to freedom.

This film is part of the online program but accessible only in the Netherlands.