Meet the 2024 LEF New England Flaherty Fellows

Maxime Cavajani is a multimedia artist working across experimental video, photography, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time that is in between queer bodies, questioning the “seen” and the “legible”. Thinking through mnemonic functions, their work uses the slippages in between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, performance and gesture, sound, and noise to challenge modes of address. Rather than locating what is in motion, their work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces, and reflections. In doing so, the artist asks the public to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss, and love.

Pauline Shongov is a filmmaker whose work explores oral, historical, affective, and haptic senses of place as well as local and diasporic forms of community belonging, particularly in the Balkans. Her latest film Couple More Shovels for a Few More Levs (2023) premiered at the German International Ethnographic Film Festival and was selected for the Visions du Reel Film Market and Ji.hlava New Visions Market. Her practice-based work has been supported by the Harvard Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Cornell Council of the Arts. She is a PhD candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University, where she is a Presidential Scholar. She is also the co-founder of the curatorial research initiative Off-site. Currently, she is co-directing/co-producing Borá: a film that follows foragers, treasure hunters, foresters, and clairvoyants on their journeys through a mountain that unearth a cryptic landscape ripe with fables, legends, and apparitions.