Visite started from a personal desire to watch films together with an audience and to provide screenings within a broader context. Over the years, Visite has grown into a temporary and reciprocal collage of experimental, political, and documentary cinema, bringing together short and feature-length films in which emerging filmmakers are presented alongside historical works, as well as lectures, performances, and exhibitions. Each edition is shaped by a specific context, theme, or collaboration.

Visite has a nomadic character: it is transformable, flexible, fluid, dynamic, and sometimes chaotic, yet it always strives to be a social space for encounters and exchange — a place where people get to know one another and keep coming back for each other, for the artworks, the food, and the conversations.

The name Visite refers to both visiting and inviting and does not translate easily into English. It marks a protected moment in time and space for lingering and reflection. A place for rest, politics, and playfulness — to listen, to catch up, to argue, to reconcile, to flirt, to kiss. For a short time, you are with others, sharing and borrowing each other’s time, space, and presence. You invite someone into your space, or you become a guest in someone else’s. You take care of others, or you are taken care of. You bring something to the table: food, a gift, flowers, drinks, an engaging conversation, or simply your presence. Visite unfolds in this spirit, as a shared space of encounter through cinema and beyond.

In collaboration with Pilar, Visite will delve into Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos. Compiled by Girls Like Us and author Sarah Van Binsbergen, the publication brings together the many forms a manifesto can take — from classical activist formats to more poetic and associative gestures. It unfolds as a collection of texts from different places and times, presented in full or as fragments, glimpses, and summaries. The publication is both an ode to and an acknowledgement of the many writers, thinkers, and activists who have shaped the multifaceted queer and feminist thinking we know today, while embracing ambiguity and polyvocality. It is an invitation to read more, to speak more, to learn more, to question more, to love more, and to care more.

Each evening in the Love & Lightning series, we will read a manifesto together and watch a film that formally or thematically resonates with the text. 

In this text philosopher Astrida Neimanis traces the reciprocal relationship between the constellation of matter and forces, which we call our bodies, and its surrounding environment through the connecting qualities of all the watery exchanges we have with the world. In so doing she asks us to consider the “outline” of the body as a membrane that is much more elastic and malleable, trans-corporeal, porous and leaky than we might at first imagine. 

With a poetic blend of curiosity, humor, sensuality and concern, this film chronicles the pleasures and politics of H2O from an ecosexual perspective. Travel around California with Annie, a former sex worker, Beth, a professor, and their dog Butch, in their E.A.R.T.H. Lab mobile unit, as they explore water in the Golden State. Ecosexuality shifts the metaphor “Earth as Mother” to “Earth as Lover” to create a more reciprocal and empathetic relationship with the natural world. Along the way, Annie and Beth interact with a diverse range of folks including performance artists, biologists, water treatment plant workers, scholars and others, climaxing in a shocking event that reaffirms the power of water, life and love.

Driving force behind Visiste is Eva van Tongeren an artist and filmmaker, curator and educator. As a freelance curator she creates film, art and performance programmes around bodypolitics, feminist perspectives, gender issues, pleasure activism, sex and violence.

In her artistic practice, she incorporates her social and anthropological interests into personal stories with universal themes. While her cinematic works vary in form, they connect through the shared subject of caring. Her films have screened at festivals worldwide such as IFFR, Videonale, Ann Arbor, EMAF, Oberhausen, Courtisane, Images Toronto and others. Her installations were on view in solo shows at Gallery Nadežda Petrović and MAS and in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunsthal Mechelen and Extra City.