Ana Vaz

From September 2 to October 23, 2021

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This program brings together five films by Ana Vaz that explore how colonial legacies and the ecological crisis intersect through ethnographic and speculative means, using human and non-human perspectives. Environmental degradation disproportionately devastates communities around the globe, prompting reflection on how certain persistent political and colonial forces feed this catastrophe. Vaz interrogates the narratives pertaining to this issue through found footage and her own images, always granting the camera an active role in the narrative she creates. Throughout history, the camera has been used as an invisible weapon. Vaz, in her work, gives it the presence of a protagonist whose dramatic movements, often vertiginous, testify to its particular role in the narrative it captures.

Incorporating mythical elements into her cinematography, Vaz leads an anthropological reflection on this moment in history, referring to the Anthropocene. Vaz's work evokes a sense of urgency and incites us to take action so that there is a future to imagine.

Programme (screening room)

The programme starts on the hour

Occidente (2014) － 15 min. 15 sec.

In search of what would be the "originals" of our colonial history, while shooting this film in Lisbon, Vaz found only copies. Here she gathers an ecology of signs that speaks of a colonial history repeating itself, where subalterns become masters, iconography found on Chinese porcelain announces the colonial hybrids to come, exotic birds are luxury currencies, exploration is an extreme sport, and monuments are geodata. “Ouro novo” reads new money. Like a poem without pauses, like a breath without respiration, Occidente proposes journeys through East and West marked by cycles of expansion, highlighting power and class relations where all seek a place at the table.

Amérika : Bay of Arrows (2016) － 9 min. 29 sec.

It is said that in 1492, the first European caravel led by Christopher Columbus disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic. The ship was greeted by a rain of arrows thrown by the Taino, an Indigenous people of the Antilles. Today, Lake Enriquillo, named after the chief of the Tainos, is the witness of profound ecosystem alterations, leading to forced evacuations, species migrations and a coral desert that reveals its geological past. Using the camera as an arrow, Amérika: Bay of Arrows seeks various ways to vibrantly animate, awaken, and actualize this gesture.

A Film, Reclaimed (2015) － 19 min. 36 sec.

The ecological crisis is simultaneously a political, economic, and social crisis. It is also cinematographic since the arrival of cinema coincides, historically, in a critical and technological way, with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay, which proposes a reading of the global environmental crisis through cinema, with the help of the beautiful and terrible films that have accompanied it.

Pseudosphynx (2020) － 8 min. 3 sec.

Pseudosphinx is the scientific name for the fire caterpillars that are about to turn into butterflies. They are commonly called (and without bad omen) witches. These butterfly witches are associated with several myths, one of which tells that during the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, it was believed that witches mutated into butterflies according to a theory of evolution, real or imagined, based on transformism. Another legend, dating back to before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, tells that the black witch moth, Ascalapha odorata, is feared throughout the Americas because her presence is associated with death. For the Guajiros people of Colombia, the white butterfly symbolizes the spirit of an ancestor visiting the living. The pseudosphinx is therefore both sphinx, a kind of inhuman monster with a threatening enigma, and pseudo—as in artificial—as it is deceptive, unreal and illusory. Pseudosphynx keeps its meaning veiled, like a secret kept by those whose retinas retain the haptic impression of its fight.

Work in gallery

Atomic Garden (2020) — 7 min. 34 sec.

Atomic Garden is a stroboscopic reflection on the transmutation, survival, and resilience of myriad life forms in the face of toxicity. Exploding and expanding past, future, and present, the film calls for the anarchy of the explosion as a movement of protest and renewal of life in its many forms.

Atomic Garden was filmed in the garden of an elderly woman, Aoki Sadako, in Naraha, Japan. Several years earlier, the town had to be evacuated for a period of five years to be decontaminated after a tsunami turned into a toxic disaster. When she was able to return, Aoki went to her quarantined garden every week to tend the flowers. Despite the uncertainty of the threat of radiation levels, many elderly people returned to their land in order to, among other things, be close to their ancestors. Although life has returned to some form of normalcy, the radiation left a strange uncertainty in Naraha, a kind of distrust of what our senses cannot perceive.

Born in Brazil, Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores complex relationships between environment, territories and histories, pushing the boundaries of our perception. Vaz is a graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. Her films have been shown internationally in film festivals and institutions such as the Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, LUX Moving Images, New York Film Festival, TIFF － Wavelengths, British Film Institute, Cinéma du Réel, Tabakalera, and Courtisane, amongst others. In 2015, she was awarded the Grand Prize for the international competition at both Media City Film Festival and Fronteira International Experimental and Documentary Film Festival for her film Occidente. She is the 2015 recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work, and was a 2020 Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grantee.