Frictions and Fictions: Ana Vaz

Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz (born 1986, Brasília) makes films and other works which speculate upon the relationships between self and other, myth and history through a cosmology of signs, references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the frictions and fictions imprinted upon both cultivated and savage environments and their multiple inhabitants.

Entre temps
2012
Video til DCP
11min

A meditation and a reverie upon a city at once real and imagined. The film has found form as poetic & expansive confrontation with the psychogeography of a contemporary Europe in crisis. A requiem for a city dreamt between its past and present.

A Idade de Pedra
2013
16mm til DCP
29min

A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure – petrified in the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. Through the geological traces that lead us to this monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth.

Occidente
2014
video & 16mm til DCP
15min

A film-poem of an ecology of signs that speaks of colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table.

Amérika: Bahia De Las Flechas
Amérika: Bay of Arrows
2016
DCP
9min

It is said that in the year of 1492, the first European ship led by Christopher Columbus, disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic, and was received by a rain of arrows carefully plotted by the Caribbean Taíno. Taking the camera itself as an arrow, a foreign body, this film looks for ways in which to animate, to awaken, to make vibrate again this gesture in the present – arrows against a perpetual «falling sky».