ANGELOS CHARALAMBOUS

“All that is not it” is the second collectively made film by Sessions, produced during the six-month occupation of the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL. Created in a single, continuous eight-hour live session at the end of this occupation, the film is composed of live-edited Instagram stories and an open music jam featuring members of the public.

This audiovisual work insists on duration, exhaustion, and accumulation as political form, resisting clarity and legibility. Bodies enter and exit, rhythms disintegrate and reassemble, attention drifts and intensifies, producing a dense polyphony that exposes the cracks and potentials of shared presence, improvisation, and friction under conditions of collective exposure.

Rather than functioning as documentation, the film operates as a palimpsest: images, sounds, and social media fragments overwrite and haunt one another, turning everyday technologies into unstable, participant-generated archives. Dissonance, opacity, and darkness are embraced as methods for sensing what lies beneath dominant narratives of productivity, coherence, and progress, as well as romanticised notions of collectivity and community—all enacted inside a space that demands order, clarity, and authority.

Following José Esteban Muñoz, queerness is approached not as identity but as horizon or futurity: never fully reached, only rehearsed. Through sustained bodily labour and technological saturation, the film constructs a temporary world beneath institutional and social strata, where knowledge is carried by bodies, voices, and rhythms. As the final gesture of the occupation, it refuses closure, leaving behind a haunted trace of collective presence and still-forming, hopeful realities.

all that is not it
an 8-hour film

State Gallery for Contemporary Art – SPEL, Nicosia, Cyprus

AUDIOVISUAL INSTALLATION 2023