Lavinia Xausa

Lavinia Xausa 

Lavinia Xausa (1992) studied between Bologna and Berlin and earned her bachelor’s degree with honours in Visual Culture and Media Studies in 2015. She accomplished her master’s degree in photography at AKV St. Joost in Breda in 2017. She works, lives, and struggles in learning Dutch in Rotterdam. She makes interdisciplinary works with several communities inviting them in reflecting on identity and sense of belonging. 99% of the time these works end up becoming films.

Her first short Roundabout Love, Roundabout Tehran, about secret love and sexual life of Persian youth in Iran, premiered at Organ Vida (Zagreb, 2017), and was screened at the Open Doek Festival (2018, Rotterdam). And her work Further Than Hip Hop, about identity and spirituality of youngsters with a diaspora background, which was presented as Solo exhibition at TENT (Rotterdam, 2020), at the Noorderlicht International Photography Festival, (Groningen, 2020), and was part of History Matter’s film program during Ketikoti at Lantaren Venster (Rotterdam, 2022). Her last musical documentary So Loud The Sky Can Hear Us is about diversity in the Feyenoord Club, which premiered at IFFR (Rotterdam, 2022) and traveled for several festivals in the Netherlands and around Europe, NFF (Utrecht, 2022) included.

Onderzoeksvraag

In Vrijplaats I’m seeking a safe and diverse environment to research and unfold the story lines of my personal documentary project Mountain Cries. I want to explore a visual and sensorial language that seeks to construct in fiction an emotional and sensory reality that the simple act of documenting struggles to represent.

Photo by Elena Prosdocimo