The Moving Image Class presents an artistic curatorial Versuchsanordnung by Hafssa Amina Codraro, Robin Goldbach and Paula Barth with the support and mentorship of Nicole Vögele, Dorothée Billard and Lamia Šabić.
LOST DARLINGS is an attempt to approach film and moving image formats in a new way. 79 filmmakers, editors, producers, and visual artists have contributed fragments of their work from research archives and earlier productions to this project. The term “kill your darlings”, originating from literary and filmic revision, urging creators to cut what doesn't serve the whole, calling for the renunciation of excess, becomes the curatorial principle behind this exhibition.
In this process, discarded and rediscovered material finds new translation within the field of artistic research. What remains outside the final cut, what cinema leaves behind in its process of becoming, returns as a productive residue. Echoing archival conceptions of cinema as a stratified accumulation of traces rather than a closed work, these fragments reveal latent histories, unrealized gestures, and alternative temporalities embedded within the moving image. As Harun Farocki once suggested, repeated engagement with materials may yield new insights, supporting the belief that there is always something to discover at the micro level, within the minute of construction.
The discarded image persists as possibility, carrying within it the unrealized futures of the work it never became part of. Together, these materials float, establishing new parallel dialogues and conversations beyond language, geography, and institutional borders. LOST DARLINGS proposes an archive of potentiality, an archive composed not of completed works, but of traces, omissions, and discarded gestures. Here, the unfinished is not a lack, but an openness, a space where images keep generating meaning beyond the final cut, and where what was left behind remains capable of becoming something else.
