This program of short films is the result of the desire to build a complex narration among artists from Italy and from the Greater China: Video languages and sensations going beyond the artists’ geographical origins, building a fragmented story that blurs and blends these distant worlds into a continuum of echoes with no logic.

The project, curated by Chiara Bertola and Davide Quadrio, is presented by Fondazione Querinini Stampalia, Venice, and Arthub Asia, Shanghai, in collaboration with the luxury shoes Made in Italy trademark Ballin, historically rooted in the territory of Venice.

The artists participating in the project with their short films are: Yuri Ancarani, Chen Chieh-jen, Ra Di Martino, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Invernomuto, Kan Xuan, Li Ran, Lu Yang, Adrian Paci, Roberto Paci Dalo’, Mariateresa Sartori, Wu Junyong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Peili.

The title “Off course” – taken from “Carnet de route” by Marc Augé – emphasizes how being off course, following unexpected roads, creating confusion by opposing different topics, in essence, going off the established itinerary, can reduce the geographical and cultural distance between two Countries so different from each other.

Through disorientations and diversions in the distance, there is a mixing of visions, desires, sufferance, ironies which reveal a proximity a lot stronger than the distance normally measured on the linear road which leads from one geographical watertight compartment to another.