Now showing at LUMA Arles: David Armstrong, Liu Chuang, Maria Lassnig, Philippe Parreno, and Tony Oursler

Now showing at LUMA Arles: David Armstrong, Liu Chuang, Maria Lassnig, Philippe Parreno, and Tony Oursler
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LUMA Arles is pleased to present Delta, a major new film commission by artist and filmmaker Verena Paravel, developed as part of her wider research project, Cosmofonia. Filmed in the unique ecosystem of the Rhône river delta, the work explores the fragile and often invisible lives of the many species that inhabit the wetlands of the Camargue.

In Delta, Paravel approaches the landscape as a dense field of relationships, where human and nonhuman lives are intertwined. Through innovative camera techniques and experimental sound recording, she creates an immersive sensory experience that shifts perception away from human centrality, attuning viewers to other rhythms, other agencies, and other forms of presence. The film reveals a world in which boundaries between species, bodies, and environments are porous, and where life and death unfold as part of continuous processes of transformation.

Paravel’s approach challenges conventional hierarchies of perception, proposing film as a tool to encounter other modes of being. Image and sound operate as instruments of attention, revealing the delta as a space where multiple temporalities and life cycles coexist.

Delta extends Paravel’s radical exploration of cinema as a means to encounter a plural world, a world composed of many voices, and many ways of inhabiting the earth. Paravel asserts film as a medium of contact, advancing a body of work that is fundamentally altering the sensorial and conceptual terrain of contemporary practices.

CosmofoniaCamargues_STILL_260306_01_45_57_24 - 2112 x 1188
Credits
© Faux Dimanche Films, MDAC Productions, Anna Lena Films - 2026

Film stills

CosmofoniaCamargues_STILL_260306_01_18_40_15 - 1920 x 1080
Credits
© Faux Dimanche Films, MDAC Productions, Anna Lena Films - 2026
CosmofoniaCamargues_STILL_260306_01_09_41_00 - 1920 x 1080
Credits
© Faux Dimanche Films, MDAC Productions, Anna Lena Films - 2026
CosmofoniaCamargues_STILL_260306_02_12_49_16 - 1920 x 1080
Credits
© Faux Dimanche Films, MDAC Productions, Anna Lena Films - 2026
Verena Paravel

Verena Paravel

Verena Paravel was in residence at LUMA Arles from September to December 2025.

Verena Paravel (b. 1971, Neuchâtel, Switzerland) is a French filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist. Engaging the limits of perception, her practice explores human and more-than-human worlds through new aesthetic, political, and sensory forms of image and sound. Blending cinematic experimentation with ethnographic, ecological, and philosophical inquiry, she creates immersive works that challenge conventional boundaries.

Paravel’s films have screened at major international festivals including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Toronto, and the New York Film Festival. Works such as Foreign Parts (2010, with J.P. Sniadecki), Leviathan (2012), Caniba (2017), Somniloquies (2018), and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), with Lucien Castaing-Taylor, have received widespread critical acclaim for their radical approach and have been honoured with numerous international awards.

Her moving image works have been exhibited in prestigious institutional contexts, including MoMA, (New York), Tate Modern (London), the Whitney, Venice and Shanghai Biennales, Documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel), and the Okayama Art Summit.

Since 2006, Paravel has been affiliated with Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, where she has taught and developed collaborative research-based filmmaking practices. She has served as Visiting Professor at Harvard and taught masterclasses at Sciences Po (Paris). She has also been guest artist at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (France) and ECAL (Switzerland).