Deborah Viegas

Made for Somewhere From Here to Heaven, exhibition at Askuna Zentroa, Bilbao.

Shot entirely on day for night, this wildlife eco-horror follows the trajectories of endangered species fleeing to escape extinction, in a sombre plot in which the animals look back at us.

Mal di mare is a gasp of air, a shout sung in waves moving through a body nauseated by the confrontation with the violence of the ever swirling world. This improvised singing tries to break the invisible glass that separates the gaze and the realities of those who can observe from afar and those who are observed, but who are mostly prevented from returning such gaze. Who/what’s missing in the room? The film was shot during the 2019 Venice Biennale and built around a performing action carried out by the filmmaker himself in the exhibition space.

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.

Apiyemiyekî? addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s, when during the Brazilian dictatorship indigenous lands in the mid-west were invaded for the construction of the national road BR-174 and the installation of a mining company. Illustrations about the period, created by the indigenous population, including children, reveal a traumatic history, referring us to the present day.

Антонио сбегает из дома, чтобы переночевать у своей бывшей девушки. Однако у той появилась новая соседка-бразильянка. Джонни пытается поставить на сцене в Лиссабоне свою первую пьесу, но его дружба с молодым электриком доставляет ему много проблем. Дебора останавливается в городе на день, чтобы с утра улететь домой. Вечером она идет в театр, где засыпает. Одна и та же история раскрывается в трех измерениях.

 “Look closely at the mountains!”: the phrase was coined by artist Manfredo de Souzanetto during Brazil’s years of dictatorhsip. Mining activities were destroying the environment in the state of Minas Gerais in the south west of the country. Through editing, Ana Vaz draws parallels between this region and the very distant Nord-Pas-de-Calais in northern France, also marked by over three centuries of mining. On one side, eroded mountains plague its inhabitants with deadly landslides. Hollow and gutted, these mountains become the receptacles of a ghostly memory. On the other side, in France, mining waste stacks become mountains and reservoirs of biodiversity, where the frontier between nature and technology is now indiscernible.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

A close look at nature.

A close look at nature.

A close look at nature.

A close look at nature.

Presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

Obstinate Daniel’s grumpiness is evident. He really doesn’t want to accompany his mother to an oncology conference. However, an unexpected meeting makes it an interesting weekend after all. Shot on grainy film stock, with camera work as uncompromising as Daniel is.

Among ruptures of memories, geographical and affective displacements, we revisited with Bruno the incursion into a city full of noise but that still emits a minimal murmur of love.

Jair’s courtship is over.