Anton Bialas

Providenza.

I came alone

I saw the utopia

I drank

my thirst and beyond

I laughed

I wrote dizzy

I wrote sharp

I fell in the waterfall

I lost a bet

I listened to the owl

I confessed to the heat

I devoured

some things

I missed

someone

I played along

the scent of flowers

I danced

with new friends

I screened a history of darkness

I dove

in the cold well

I said

goodbye

I saw the utopia again

I saw it better in the dark

better in the dark better in the dark

During my residency at Providenza, I worked on the screenplay for a feature film entitled Agony in the Palace (co-written with Guillaume Bréaud). Set within the confines of a declining autocratic regime, this chamber drama explores the mechanisms of power, its staging, and its toxicity. The film approaches power as a disease, immersing us in a contaminated organism as it progresses toward its terminal stage.

The video Be Careful What You Wish For, created during the residency, echoes the themes that run through Agony in the Palace. Conceived as a triptych, it juxtaposes the fascination exerted by power and its theatrical pageantry with its inevitable decay and fundamental moral ambiguity. It features Marilyn Monroe, a Western dictator, an emperor with a charred face and body, a birthday cake, and a nuclear explosion—figures and motifs that form a single constellation in which spectacle, desire, power, and catastrophe become inseparable.

Credits

Portrait : Doriane

Video : Be careful what you wish for by Anton Bialas - 2026 - 02:08