Cemetery [Archive Works]

A visual sound work with live soundtrack in a 6 channel stereophonic sound.

At the tip of Italy’s heel, lies la Vucca de lu puzzu, the gaping “mouth of the well”. Vucca (2016) is the intimate result of the artist’s field recordings inside the cave. Saline and pluvial water merge through an underwater tunnel, refracted sunlight challenges obscurity, while the rock stubbornly resists the passages of civilizations. The multilayered soundtrack and visuals echo the dizziness of the space.

In 1907 Herman Hesse spent a few days mediating and fasting in a cave near Monte Verità. During these days he collected the visions and insights that went on to be very influential in his thinking and shaped some of the most important works of his literary career. The images and sounds of this film were shot there and are a homage to this cave and its possible invocations. Grotta is part of Fieldworks, an ongoing experiment with ambient video and radio frequencies.

A visual sound work with live soundtrack in a 6 channel stereophonic sound.

Faro is a portrait of the lighthouse of Leuca (Italy), one of the last lighthouses in the south of the Mediterranean. The lighthouse illuminates the unknown, embraces the borders of the extreme lands. Casas portrays its spirit, its behaviour and its evocative power.

A visual sound work with live soundtrack in a 6 channel stereophonic sound.

A visual sound work with live soundtrack in a 6 channel stereophonic sound.

A double-screen film captured on location along the coast of the Bering Strait in the Chukotka region of Northeastern Siberia-- At once, a look into the lives of a band of reindeer herders and a stunning, ambient portrait of the tundra.

A documentary film about the three remaining generations of fishermen in the Aral Sea-- Their everyday struggle to survive in one of the most dire and inhospitable places on the planet.

An indigenous tradition in the highlands of Peru where three key players take part: a wild condor, a raging bull and brave young men.

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra, his mahout, are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. The group of poachers following them will die one after the other under mysterious circumstances and spells.

Composed of footage from Central Asian film archives, Swan Lake addresses the period running from a decade before to a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film includes familiar visual markers of the era: long queues outside shops, popular television programs hosted by healers and hypnotists, ballerinas performing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1876). This was a typical television intermezzo in the late Soviet empire, when high culture often filled the airwaves during moments of political uncertainty, whether the death of another elderly leader or an emergency declared in Moscow. What may be less familiar to Western audiences is the footage drawn from Central Asian films of the same period. These fragments extend the usual visual aesthetics of perestroika into a different regional context, introducing other ethnicities, landscapes, and urban spaces into what is often remembered as a predominantly Russian narrative of late-Soviet culture.

Elephant journey_folded series

A Javanese fisherman experiences the greatest volcanic eruption of all time. Stranded on a deserted island, in search of food and water, he draws closer to the depths of the earth. A visceral and psychedelic odyssey.

According to the 12th century mystic Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, the world we live in is only one of the 18,000 that make up the universe. The film 18,000 WORLDS is conceived as a video story that draws attention to a world that is losing contact with its ancestors, and where the danger of losing forms of knowledge is real.

A man lives alone inside a closed labyrinth like space which seems to reflect his state of mind. The windows open into his subconscious to illuminate the desolate and mysterious spectacle of his solitude as if this were the last day of the world, and he the last man able to testify.