As part of WHO FILMS WHO?, a programme series by Rotterdam based collective and project space for artists’ moving image, WET which explores the ethics and power dynamics invoked when filming others, we collaborated with artist Rosa Aiello to present the programme Vanishing Point.
Vanishing Point looks closely at the portrait film as a site of tension, duration and psychosocial exchange. Through works by Annika Eriksson, Dudu Quintanilha, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Leslie Thornton and selected film fragments, we trace how the filmmaking encounter produces flickers of control, shame, pleasure and flight. The evening takes shape as a lecture‑screening with text and discussion.
“The face as the extreme precariousness of the other…” —Emmanuel Levinas as quoted in Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
Vanishing Point begins with a sequence of faces, each shown for a fair duration, enough to occasion a blooming. The viewer may claim, through the development of each expression, to follow the internal states of the subject on screen. A connection is established through projection and identification.
The face on screen can be used as the receptacle for the viewer’s emotions, and so too can the individual be used as the agent of cultural traditions of barbarism. Routines, tradition, recurrence, re-enactment: repetition has many faces—it creates continuity and disrupts it. The face, before and after. We return to what is unresolved, repeat it, in order to imagine what could have been and what could be—an alternate version by comparison. Expressions of grief show a tragedy has occurred in the environment. Expressions of relief show the tragedy was averted. A movement in the form of a re-enactment oscillates between impulse and compulsion, going forward and being stuck, in the face of what cannot be changed. Extreme distance as well as extreme proximity propose possibilities for flight, failure to encounter or to be legible. Flight breaks the projection. The recurring motif of a subject walking away from the camera until she is a mere speck in the frame becomes a reclamation of agency. A vanishing point can also be flesh so close it becomes a flat surface. “Hey, where did you go? I was using you.”
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Rosa Aiello is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She often works with collaborative methods and with editing as a creative practice. Her focus on moving image is also a focus on conditions of film production, and the relational dynamics which emerge from the filmmaking process: roles, hierarchies, and states of observation and performativity. She has had solo shows and screenings in numerous venues, most recently at Westfalischer Kunstverein, Muenster (2025), Mint, Stockholm (2024), Anorak e.V, Berlin (2023), Galerie Drei, Cologne (2023), Kevin Space, Vienna (2022). Her video works have been shown at Kasseler Dokfest, Matatabi Moving Image, Centre Pompidou, The Whitney Museum, SAAG Lethbridge, Cittipunkt, and SculptureCenter among others. In 2026 she published Room Tone in Distanz Verlag’s Kontext series.
WET is a Rotterdam-based collective and project space for artists’ moving image, founded in 2019 by Marta Hryniuk, Erika Roux, Anna Łuczak, Nick Thomas and Sophie Bates. WET provides a platform for public events, with a focus on artworks which challenge existing orthodoxies and propose alternative perspectives, and supports the production of moving image works.
