Desperate Times

In February 2019, in Southwest Philadelphia, a Real Estate developer escaped an amateur guillotine made from a butcher knife taped to a crutch that was hidden in one of his properties, apparently designed to kill him. Although the physicality of the guillotine-object stands out, so does the trap-like quality of gentrification and the Real Estate market, which raises questions on what safety means and for whom it is intended. Desperate Times displays the functioning of a series of domestic traps, miniature reproductions of cartoon-like machines, taken from a number of different sources: trapping manuals, survivalist journals, cartoons–like Tom and Jerry, Wile E Coyote and Road Runner–and pieces of architecture. The traps are shown in their mere mechanics: set in motion by an invisible presence, they endlessly repeat their movements without making any victim, betraying their premise. What is left is a catalog of violent and yet clumsy actions, at once abstract and familiar, comedic and tragic.

This screening is part of Paradoxical Sleep, the third chapter of the film program TUTTAUNANOTTE, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, and unfolding in four chapters between November 1, 2025 and December 26, 2025, with the films of each chapter streaming for two weeks.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.