Like wildflowers in the cracks

Focusing on moving image, Like wildflowers in the cracks gathers eight films that consider hope through the lens of resistance, rising from cracks in our existing dominant systems. As bell hooks reminds us, “hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the social climate promotes disillusionment and despair”. The project reflects on memory, persistence, resistance and love as deeply human acts that survive within environments promoting uncertainty, exhaustion and apathy. Like wildflowers that push their way through concrete, hope appears where the surface cracks, offering room for new possibilities to emerge and take form.

Curator: Despoina Tzanou

Part A: 15 January 2026, 20:00
Like wildflowers in the cracks: What we carry

Part A turns to the ties between past and present, memory and identity. It looks at how lived experience, oral histories, music, and poetry unsettle official accounts and carry knowledge across generations. Through these shared stories, openings appear that question the structures that shape how we understand the world.

Agape Harmani:
Ρίζες/Roots/Hundee, 2024, 19mins
A mixed-media video collage that weaves original video and audio material, found footage, photographs, and text. The work is part of a lifelong exploration of migration histories of the Alekos Harmanis family and centres on identity and narratives of Irene and Elpida in the Oromo region. The research for Ρίζες/Roots/Hundee was supported by Onassis AiR.

Shuruq Harb:
The White Elephant, 2018, 12mins
An experimental documentary that weaves Israeli internet images from the Gulf War, the First Intifada and trance gatherings. Through these fragments, the artist shapes a portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the
1990s, seen through the lens of Israeli pop culture. Self-produced in Palestine with support from the A.M. Qattan Foundation. Camerawork by Mirna Bamieh, Marwan Assad and online sources. Script, voice and editing by Shuruq Harb with Ameen Nayfeh, featuring Sophia Harb. The work received an award at the Cinéma du Réel festival in 2018 and was nominated at the Hamburg International Film Festival in 2019.

Jala Wahid:
Cry Me a Waterfall, 2021, 14mins
This short film presents a bilingual Kurdish and English song to explore the long-distance relationship between a Kurdish person in the diaspora and Kurdistan. It reflects on statelessness, identity, emotional ties to a homeland, the hybrid identity of the diaspora, and the preservation of Kurdish culture through song and poetry.

Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja:
Deep Sea Rising, 2022, 31mins
A series of stories and poetic reflections associated with different locations on the island of São Miguel, inviting us to reflect on the ubiquity of water and to look at the Atlantic not only as the place of origin of life, but also as a container of memory, a witness of colonial crimes.

PART B: 16 January 2026, 20:00 Like wildflowers in the cracks:
Signals from the otherwise
Part B focuses on word-building and alternative realities that challenge dominant narratives. These works push against patriarchal, capitalist, technological, legal frameworks, as well as linear time. In this meeting
point between myth and reality, identity shifts, and new forms of resistance, care, and collective life begin to emerge.

Phuong Thao Nguyen:
Don’t move, 2024, 4mins
Two successive shots filmed in an isolated village on the periphery of political and economic powers, where inhabitants speak their own language and do not participate in capitalism.

Jonathan Uliel Saldanha:
After the Law, 2020, 26mins
A tribunal of humans and objects is contaminated by an unknown accident that eroded speech and fractured the law. Through a toxic mutation of roles and shapes, evidences and gestures, the court’s
ability for deliberation collapses. Shot as a live performance, using a single camcorder, this system was designed as a cybernetic mechanism for haptic responses where a collective drive collides with a
synthetic voice. The choral voices were recorded through hypnoseinduced states, a broken voice that haunts a political paradox in a reversed bio-engineering.

Tai Shani:
My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, and all the Bodily
Remains that Ever Were and Ever Will Be 2023, 63mins
A fantastical series of filmic tableaux drawing from horror and technicolour cinematic dreams. It follows four protagonists, the two figures called Them who Love who speak of love in a profound and almost spiritual way, The Ghost for Revolution who recounts somatic histories of fascism, and The Reader of The Book of Love who reads historical quotes tied to non-violent action. A poetic meditation on various historical resistance movements and groups, the spiritual dimensions of anti-supremacism, intersectional queer feminism, communism and revolutionary thinking to recognise the emancipatory power of love and pleasure as a catalyst for radical change. The film features an original score composed by Maxwell Sterling and Richard Fearless (Death in Vegas), developed during the Southbank Centre Studio residency, alongside digital animations by Adam Sinclair.

Eva Papamargariti:
Strong, Feeble, Unfixed, 2022, 3mins
Composed as a visual poem, approaching notions of entropy, and “becoming” through a hybrid body that floats between the fragile and recurring conditions of decay and birth. Using CG animated elements
and simulations, the body on screen sometimes resembles a human body, sometimes the body of a plant or tree, and in other moments a fossil-like structure from an indeterminate time. The work was commissioned by PCAI – Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative.