The 2025 Sluice expo revolves around the concept of world-building as a means to explore how we build worlds within our own. How these re-imagined, alternative worlds reflect back at us our dissatisfaction with the world as-is and points towards utopic/dystopic alternates. We recognise the danger of the current historical moment, and also its potential.
World-building, re-worlding, worlding-worlds or simply worlding.
World-building describes the creation of other, speculative-until-summoned worlds. These worlds are a chimera, falling apart just as easily as they fall together. Located at the head of a fjord on the far side of the remote island nation of Iceland in the harsh North
Atlantic Ocean, often cut off from outside supply routes – Seyðisfjörður is only accessible via the Fjarðarheiði mountain pass or the weekly (summer months) ferry arrival. In a country whose geology and climate seem to actively reject human colonisation, Sluice 2025 uses the theme as a jumping-off point to explore our relationship with the world, and the stories we tell ourselves about our place within it.
Artist-led culture. Artist-powered culture.
Selected Films
GODSPEED Klāvs Liepiņš
ABSENCE | PRESENCE Christina Bennett
PLASTICINE Liz Blum
NATIONAL GRID Disinformation
FIVE STONES Paul Vivian
PANGAEA DREAMING Marie Therese Ross, Marcia Teusink
ORCHARD ASYLUM Nicolas Middleton
THE CLOG Fran Hayes
TRANSPORT_ENDPOINT Seán Talbot, Sophia Archontis
ASPARO SEASONS user07453677
FRUIT Rieko Whitfield, Jesse May Fisher
SCAT MAN Zach Oakman
THE FLATLANDS Simon Lee Dicker, Liberty Smith
THE JOY OF COOKING Coleman Stewart
STRANGE ATTRACTORS Sandra Crisp
WORD OF IMPORTANT EVENTS Alex Pearl
THE SIGHT IS A WOUND Parham Ghalamdar
Sluice Film is an itinerant artist-led film festival, adaptive to place and responsive to the cultural, social, and environmental contexts it encounters.
Sluice Film allows us to focus this specialised strand of programming on artists working with the moving image. Sluice Film is a new initiative focused on delivering innovative artists short films to new locations and audiences around the world.
Best in Show will be awarded by judges David Blandy and Kamilla Gylfadóttir. Directors Choice will be awarded by Sluice Film directors Sarah Wishart and Karl England and LungA School director Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson.
For screening details - see PROGRAMME below.
Selected Audio
Without Appeal Will Gresson + Iulia Boșcu
National Grid Disinformation
Yare Expansion Jay Goodbrave (comm.Possible Worlds)
Space Junk Corridor8
Urban Encounters TMLE
Sonic Material Cos Ahmet
The Maintenance Ruth Jones
Injury (and other works) there are no birds here
Pink Slice Beth Ross
Céad míle (fail)te Con: temporary Quarters
Living, Dreaming, Going Jim Ricks
Subduction Ari Kerssens
Sizewell Oliver Payne + Tazelaar Stevenson
Sorry elena botts (unknown sound collective)
Llao Llao Squuezes, Sweet Sweet Suck Nicola Colclough
Ingredients - Sourcing, Missing, Sorting Meitheal
Sonic Landscapes Kimbal bumstead
Common Staithe Wrestles Ambitions Graveyard
Takeover Yarmonics
Butterfly Effect tlk (Od Arts Festival)
Podcast geography of colour
waterfall LungA School
Out of Stuck Sarah Wishart
The course of our lives are shaped by infrastructure that both sustains and controls us. Infrastructural Futures uses Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps as a loose framework. By mapping existential threats against infrastructural systems, or the means that systems endeavour to postpone dying, against he fragility of those systems.”
The Sluice State Emergency Management Agency will transmitt
The future
of the world is at stake.
The public must be warned.
Seyðisfjörður Community Radio is a shared digital and analogue broadcasting platform located in the village of Seyðisfjörður on the east-coast of Iceland - hosted, nurtured and initiated by an open-ended international community.
Listen online here, via the Seyðisfjörður Community Radiowebsite, or if in Seyðisfjörður… please tune in on FM 107.1
THURSDAY 22 MAY
7 - lateHeimaExpo launch (incl performances tbc)
FRIDAY 23 MAY
10-11HerðubreiðThe inaugral Sluice Run Club will depart from the steps of Herðubreið.
10-12Netagerðin Workshop. Create a communal sculptural land artwork. Drop-in. Workshop led by Ren.
12-1.30HerðubíóFirst screening of the Sluice Film Festival
book free tickets
2.30-3.30LungA at HerðubreiðExploded Art School: open discussion. How can you make a place an art school? Why would you want to? What could it look like?
2-5Netagerðin Workshop. Create a communal sculptural land artwork. Drop-in. Workshop led by Ren.
SATURDAY 24 MAY
10-12Netagerðin Workshop. Create a communal sculptural land artwork. Drop-in. Workshop led by Ren.
12-1.30HerðubíóSecond screening of the Sluice Film Festival + panel with selected film-makers.
book free tickets
2-5Netagerðin Workshop. Create a communal sculptural land artwork. Drop-in. Workshop led by Ren.
3-4SkaftfellTalk. Ra Tack will be giving an artist talk about their show 'Everything with Tenderness'.
8 - lateSkaftfell BistroCommunal meal for participants and host venues.
SUNDAY 25 MAY
10-12Netagerðin Workshop. Create a communal sculptural land artwork. Drop-in. Workshop led by Ren.
12-1.30HerðubíóThird screening of the Sluice Film Festival (out of competition films) + award presentations
book free tickets
2-5Netagerðin Workshop. Create a communal sculptural land artwork. Drop-in. Workshop led by Ren.
Friday 23 – Sunday 25
May 2025
Free entry to all venues
(Some events may require booking) see programme
Sluice is a non-profit initiative based in the UK, led by artists and curators. Since 2011 Sluice has collaborated exclusively with other artist and curator-led projects, collectives and non-profit initiatives. We create multi-faceted events around the world, focusing on the local in a transnational context in order to examine artist-led culture.
Sluice Seyðisfjörður was developed in partnership with LungA School...
The LungA School is an independent, artist-led institution and situation where we experiment with artistic and land-based practices as a way of doing, thinking and being in order to cultivate, disturb, distort and transform our notions of aesthetics, learning, perception and good judgement.
As the name implies it considers itself a school, but if we imagine that we did not only call it a school, but something else such as 'a work of art', or 'a commune' these terms seem to be able to fit as well, and not only do they fit, but they seem to be able to describe some aspects of this place which we consider to be essential.