Look On the Bright Side

A man, that animal which shapes its environment, which also shapes its brain. A fog, a bit harder than the air – the dust of stones. A hexagonal structure, like a monolith of which one dare not ask questions. Two hundred kilometres from Beijing I found a sculpture factory where men lived amidst rocks that were waiting to be broken, cut, polished. The same gestures come back again and again to write a history of deterioration and repair. This history is obliterated in the making of monuments. With the wind that inexorably scatters the traces of these actions.

Through a 3D virtual universe simulated by a game engine intertwined with historical pictures, a lost moment of history can be experienced. The story revolves around the memory of a Chinese survivor of Khmer Rouge. This tragedy, which took the lives of 2 million people, continues to reshape our present in virtue of today's narration.

Departing from the traditional factory lines of production on the plastic plant manufacturing industry. From there, the film expands into the realm of synthetic nature, portraying a highly engineered landscape,developed by startups. The images appear to be bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence as a connection to the strange and gory logics of petro capitalism and global territories of extraction.Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, serves as a temporal vector: it is the raw material for plastic plants, Revealing the absurd techno-solutionist vision of the future.

Just before the launch of artificial moons, a retired couple finds their harbor in the fading darkness. Trying to catch up with the pace of modernity, their daily life traces this forthcoming brightness back to its earthly origins.

Filmed in Amazonas in 2021, on Estrada Fantasma BR-319, Transamazônica BR-230 and in the real city of Realidade, “Curupira and the Machine of Destiny” documents the encounter in the present time between a curupira and the incarnate ghost of Iracema, a character in the movie “Iracema – an amazon sex”. Open as wounds during the civic-military dictatorship that entangled Brazil in the cries of order and progress, the asphalt rebars that crisscross the country were built, destroyed and are now drowning in a process of reconstruction. Warm ruins of an addicted future. In love, Iracema ghost sets off at the crossroads of the straight roads of the Amazon to find Curupira and avenge the future.

A spell breaking, Quebrante traverses the caves, ruins and phantasmagorias of the Transamazon BR230 Highway, portraying its stones and its ghosts. Set in tiny Rurópolis, the very first town ever built on the road, Quebrante follows Ms. Erismar, a retired elementary school teacher known in the region as The Cave Woman.

In the appropriation mode, the video proposes a deviation through a succession of interiors taken from horror films. Without any narrative, this circulation forms a mental architecture. A meditation session plays in the background, focusing on searching for the fullness of the present moment.

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro-events from "satisfying video" that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through an appropriation way by referring to trance and minimal music. It's about a desire for groundless waves, blended with today's inexorable entropy of our information societies.

Film by Lola Gonzalez.

As gripping organs, intimately linked to actions, the hands shake, shake, grasp or tear in an infinite round of expressive attitudes extracted from their context. This hypnotic breviary is a reminder that hands cannot remain inert and that they act without the control of the person to whom they belong.