23 Apr — 6pm @Córtex Frontal, Arraiolos

The Itch You Can’t Scratch, Short Film Programme curated by Alexia Alexandropoulou / selected  from the archive of Olhares do Mediterrâneo Women's Film Festival

The Itch You Can’t Scratch extends beyond the materiality of textiles into moving images, presenting a selection of short films that explore the complexities of presence, absence, and embodiment. Each film questions how the body negotiates space, memory, and the invisible forces that shape our perception of self and other. Through movement, digital landscapes, and emotional abstraction, the films resonate with the exhibition’s core themes of longing, constraint, and sensory negotiation, echoing Pinelopi Triantafyllou’s engagement with waiting, absence, and the tension between presence and absence.

Petra Mrša’s experimental film deconstructs the experience of a video game player by bringing digital landscapes into physical space. It challenges the viewer to consider how digital environments imprint themselves onto the body, altering physical needs and perceptions of otherness. Blending CGI and hand-drawn animation, the work unravels the tension between immersion and detachment, between the simulated and the real. This oscillation between virtual and physical echoes Triantafyllou’s exploration of bodily negotiation within suspended states.

The Nameless Dance, directed by María Contreras, evokes a choreography of absence. A collective lament for forgotten women unfolds through movement, textiles, and veiled bodies, where anonymity becomes both an erasure and a site of resistance. The friction of fabric against skin, the obscured identities, and the synchronized gestures construct a haunting meditation on loss and collective memory. In a similar vein, Triantafyllou’s practice delves into waiting as an embodied state, where delay and absence manifest as both endurance and protest.

Noura A. Rahman’s short film turns inward, visualizing emotional and psychological states that remain largely intangible. Anxiety and depression take form through experimental cinematic language, rendering the internal struggles of the mind as both visceral and distant. This work aligns with Triantafyllou’s interest in the ways the body internalizes invisible forces, shaping our experience of time, control, and vulnerability.

Together, they articulate a world in which touch is not merely physical but also emotional, mediated, and withheld. They question what lingers when contact is denied, when bodies are obscured, and when presence dissolves into abstraction—much like the choreographed delays and deferred interactions that define Triantafyllou’s practice.