Nuno da Luz

Filipa César, in her films and installations, explores the post-colonial constellations that were spawned by the recent history of Portugal. Since 2011, her research is focused on the film production in Guinea-Bissau, the beginnings of which were closely linked to the struggle for liberation. In February 2014, in Birbam, about three hours north of the capital Bissau, for the period of three weeks she has been documenting, together with the filmmaker Suleimane Biai, the construction of a house that will serve the surrounding villages as a meeting space. Alongside his work as a filmmaker, Suleimane Biai is the régulo in this region and hence has assumed the duties of the head and conciliator of the community.

Yoko Hayasuke's journal is set in the wake of the tsunami and nuclear disaster after the Tōhoku earthquake. Something happened yet life goes on: Tokyo continues to expand, new soil replaces irradiated land.

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.

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.

 “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.

In Brasília, the modern capital of Brazil, an anteater is found dead by the side of a road, a boa constrictor wanders across the suburbs, and foxes prowl vacant streets. Meanwhile, in the city zoo—home to hundreds of displaced and rescued wild species—the animals look back at us humans.

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?