Mateo Vega

Movies

Center, Ring, Mall
Director
A multi-vocal triptych through peripheral sites of urban infrastructure: a data center, a ring road, and a run-down mall. All three sites were built with certain worldviews: visions of the future and US-influenced promises of progress that didn't turn out to be the utopias they presented themselves as. Through multi-lingual texts, a site-specific soundtrack, 16mm and 3D images, the spaces and their implications are subjectively mapped, poeticized and questioned. A poetic materialism of decay, renewal, remembering and projecting, "Center, Ring, Mall" is perhaps a mourning, but one that desires and demands a rebirth.
Incendios
Screenplay
After finishing secondary school, two teenage friends hang out in the industrial margins of their rapidly changing hometown. It's the middle of the summer, the last summer the boys have to explore their relationship before one of them is forced to move away.
Incendios
Director
After finishing secondary school, two teenage friends hang out in the industrial margins of their rapidly changing hometown. It's the middle of the summer, the last summer the boys have to explore their relationship before one of them is forced to move away.
Er is een geest van mij / Hay un fantasma mío
Director
An attempt at mourning both personal and political futures that never arrived, organised around a broad interpretation of the trope of the ghost. We see depersonalised figures, urban ruins, consuming fires and microscopic images of decaying bodily matter — set to a poem that shifts between Spanish and Dutch.
Radio Voorwaarts
Director
Threatened with eviction, the inhabitants of an alternative community give one last party to simultaneously mourn and celebrate the end of their beloved space.