Arène-Europe
Etienne Gilly
Etienne Gilly is an architect and urban planner. After studying civil engineering, he turned to architecture—first at ENSA Lyon, then at the Architectural Association in London, where he graduated in 2018. He worked with Philippe Rahm and later with Clément Blanchet Architecture before returning to Paris at the end of his studies to join the office of L’AUC. In 2022, he enrolled at the School of Political Arts (SPEAP) at Sciences Po Paris. In 2023, he co-founded the architecture practice asept operating at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and design.
A graduate of ESRA, Gianluca Gadaleta has worked for over ten years in the audiovisual field, where he has developed a sensitive and experimental approach to storytelling. As Artistic Director and Director at Protest Studios, he has collaborated with major brands, including Dior, for whom he has directed several notable films. His vision—at the crossroads of image and space—naturally resonates with the dialogue between materiality and audiovisual creation.
Gianluca Gadaleta and Etienne Gilly have been working on the Arène-Europe research / film project for more than a year.
Arène-Europe is a research-based artistic and cinematic project that explores how contemporary Europe is being reshaped by two fundamental forces: energy and migration. Initiated by architect and researcher Etienne Gilly and filmmaker Gianluca Gadaleta, the project approaches Europe not as a fixed political space, but as a mutating territory crossed by visible and invisible flows—of bodies, resources, infrastructures, and memory.
Born in the aftermath of Brexit, and deepened by the war in Ukraine and the failures of European migration policy, Arène-Europe examines the contradictions of a Union that celebrates circulation while building new architectures of control. It questions the legitimacy of a European identity built on selective solidarity, exclusionary borders, and centralized energy systems.
Through fieldwork, sound recording, video, and cartographic research, Arène-Europe investigates how energy infrastructures and migration routes are redrawing the continent. It focuses on key territories—such as Teruel province, Rojava, South Tyrol, Messina, or the Danube Delta—each chosen for its geopolitical tension, ecological fragility, and edge condition. These are zones where Europe reveals its fractures, its margins, and its possible futures.
The project culminates in a film that functions as both an analytical tool, an archive and a political medium. Rather than offering answers, it listens to the resonances of a continent in flux. Arène-Europe proposes a new way of sensing and representing Europe—beyond maps, beyond nations—by attending to the friction points where power and resistance meet.
Arène-Europe is conceived as a film and an open research platform, inviting artists, researchers, and institutions to join us in mapping out new imaginaries for a plural and decentralized Europe.