In her film-poems artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz collages photographs and sounds that revolve round violence and repression, the influence of ecological smash and the continued colonization of the earth. The deconstruction of the grand narrative of Western modernity that imposes itself throughout huge territories on this planet lies on the coronary heart of her filmography.
In her exhibition on the Secession, Vaz showcases her new movie collection Meteoro (2023–). Predominantly specializing in Paris and Porto, European cities are depicted as on the snapping point or on the trail to extinction.
Developed in collaboration with the Tuareg researcher Maïa Tellit Hawad, Franco-Guadeloupean writer Olivier Marboeuf, and Portuguese artist Isabel Carvalho, Meteoro sketches a important anthropology
of latest Europe, revealing the destructive imprint of an Empire based upon colonial violence, displacement and waste. Shot with high-contrast black-and-white inventory the work assumes the type of a fictive archaeology. Break up throughout three chapters, the movies posit what the artist calls a “counter- ethnography” of European cities whereby the landmarks and infrastructures of a Western world are mirrored and refracted as if seen in a mirror.
Within the first chapter, Paris, St Lazare, Maïa Tellit Hawad weaves collectively her apocalyptic textual content “Sahara Mining: The Wounded Breath of Tuareg Lands” along with her father’s poetry, the Tuareg poet Hawad, in a transgenerational dialogue. We additionally hear David Terriat, a Caribbean railway upkeep technician, in addition to Olivier Marboeuf, writer of the unique textual content “Déesse” [Goddess], whose voice and poetry guides us alongside a hallucinated drift by Paris descending into chaos.
The sequence of photographs commences at Gare Saint-Lazare, the station that linked the town to the port of
Le Havre, which, in flip, linked mainland France to the West Indies and the Americas. We then see animal skeletons and crystals preserved within the pure historical past museum, zoo animals, reproductions of cave work, in addition to rubbish collectors and railway staff. The town is surrounded by piles of garbage which might be the results of a common strike known as by janitors protesting the most recent pension reforms.
Within the following two chapters, Os Últimos Habitantes [The Last Inhabitants] and Déesse [Goddess], a radical transition unfolds that supplants trying with corporeal expertise. The digital camera turns into a topic in itself. We see photographs of a junkyard, of the ocean and the sky the wrong way up. Gustave Eiffel’s well-known Ponte Maria Pia transforms right into a swirling vortex.
Meteoro doesn’t present us with a singular narrator, however relatively a choir of voices, with the inverted and fused photographs revealing not a hegemonial gaze, nor a rational perspective with scientific objectivity, however relatively disorienting fragments and particulars, opening an area for a number of trajectories and the potential of motion elsewhere.
Vaz believes within the capability of cinema for the “decolonization of the thoughts”. Her movies provoke and query the medium as an artwork of bodyless “grasp observers” that take a look at and survey the world from above, revealing “fact” to the viewer. As a substitute, Vaz movies with an embodied digital camera that’s by no means nonetheless or steady. Somewhat than the rational topic of Western modernity, the sensuous physique with its instinct and impacts varieties the bottom of Vaz’ filmic counternarratives. Because the artist states: “What I’m making an attempt to insist upon is that this physique, this world is all now we have and that our negation of the physique is our negation of our belonging to this world. This negation is the idea for the destruction of our world that we witness vertiginously in the present day.”
Ana Vaz was born 1986 in Brasília. She lives and works in Paris.
Programmed by the board of the Secession Curated by Damian Lentini
at Secession, Vienna
till Might 18, 2025
