ARTISTS’ BIOS & SYNOPSIS OF THE FILMS

Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela began their sharing and collaboration in Porto and have been working as an artist duo since 2010. The artists’ practice is developed with a privileged use of moving images, intersecting installative and site-specific environments, and also drawing, painting, photography and sculpture.

Rise and Disappear / Subir e Sumir (2021) | 15:00h - 15:20h
Milk pouring into open eyes, details of stones and roof tiles, or even dogs being petted. Francisco Queimadela and Mariana Caló invent an idiosyncratic yet hypnotic world.

Ursula Biemann’s work has taken the artist to remote indigenous territories from the Amazon to the Arctic region where she has physically experienced environmental devastation and its deep impact on all forms of life. The main protagonist in her video narratives is the figure of the indigenous scientist emerging from a shared history of colonial conquest and modern natural science whose rationale has been a major driver in the current eco crisis. Based on field research in the Amazonian forests of Colombia, the artist recent art videos and collaborative action projects unite diverse strands of knowledge on the intelligence of nature and the relationship among all living beings who inhabit these spaces. Bridging scientific and indigenous perspectives, she has become involved in co-creating with the Inga people a Biocultural Indigenous University. This indigenousled long-term endeavour proposes an ecocentric worldview engendering further research on forest epistemologies. At a time of global biodiversity loss, it is more important than ever to rethink the epistemic roots of our relationship to Earth and take a propositional approach to art.

Forest Mind (2021) | 15:20h - 16:00
Located in the Amazonian forests of Colombia, Forest Mind unites diverse strands of knowledge on the metaphysics of plants, on plant-human relationships, and the coding of life with its form of storing information. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, the video takes an ecocentric worldview in search for the intelligence of nature. With modern science adopting a predominantly mechanistic take on the living world, and indigenous peoples experiencing an animate natural territory imbued with a spiritual dimension, these distinct cosmologies were considered vastly incompatible for the longest time. Forest Mind locates itself at the convergence of scientific and colonial histories in view of decolonizing indigenous knowledge and bringing it into a common reading with modern science, as for instance plant neurobiology quantum biology, the anthropology of science, ethnobotany, and philosophies engaging with the life of plants.

Elsa Brès was born in 1985 and lives in Bréau, in the Cévennes. She graduated from Le Fresnoy - studio national d’arts contemporains in 2017 and from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture in 2012 - where she taught architecture and landscape theory. Her films and installations focus on forces of resistance in contemporary landscapes, and blend researches, narratives and experimentations. She is currently developing a new film in the rural French region where she lives, which deals with wild boars as allies : Les Sanglières. Her recent exhibitions and screenings include: FID Marseille (2020, 2016), transmediale (2022, 2021), State of Concept Athens (2022), Cincinnati Contemporary art center (2022), MO.CO Panacée (2021), Manifesta 13 (2021), CRAC Occitanie (2020), LOOP Barcelona (2017), 25FPS (2016), Palais de Tokyo (2017), Tënk (2021). And her work has been shown and discussed at : Université de Montréal architecture school (2022), Hong-Kong University architecture (2021), Tainan University of the Arts (2017), Haus der Kulturen der Welt Anthropocene curriculum (2019), Beaux-Arts de Marseille (2020), Porto FAUP (2022), among others. Her films are produced within the production collectives Parkadia films and Elinka films.

Sweat (2020) | 16:30h - 17:00h
Sweat is a film shot in the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana over several months in 2018 and 2019. The film is constructed in an alternation between documentary and staged sequences. All the actors and actresses in the film are people I met in Louisiana, during my regular visits there over the last ten years. The film was thus shot in constant diplomacy with the places, the events, the circumstances, while remaining bound to the hypotheses of research and fiction, linked to the resistance to the cartographic will of this moving environment, whose exploitation of resources, notably oil, has led, since the European colonization, to an ever more important infrastructuralization. As the film progresses, the camera details the places and those who inhabit them in increasingly wide movements. The image is contaminated by grain, voices emerge, faces disappear: we gradually sink into the landscape through a movement of dissolution. This is notably the great Promethean narrative, embodied in part by the character of the first cartographer who is swallowed by the margins. The film chooses this direction when confronted with the catastrophic vision that often overlays the Mississippi Delta landscape. Tourists and the cartographer face the dam that spills the river’s waters into the lake during its historic flood of 2019. Lined up and with arms flailing: they are as if stunned by a world that is collapsing. The general movement of dissolution of the film allows another possible relationship to the landscape to emerge. From an “exposed”; landscape, we migrate towards a diffuse landscape, riveted to the living beings that inhabit it. Driven by water - the river, the rain, perspiration, a full barrel - this other landscape progressively becomes the main character of the film, it constitutes a world of signs and echoes where time becomes entangled. A lacunar and haunted geography where sometimes plants, animals and humans merge in a movement.  It is the reverse side of the stroke fixed between land and water, the lines on the screen wind and shake. Sweat wants to open a passage between the territory and its cartography and, through it, to make other living beings along with other narratives overflow to the surface. To live in the very thickness of the landscape (rather than facing it) and thus imagine, in the dark, other ways of living in our milieux that are both alive and devastated.

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker and writer, whose work is situated on the uncertain thresholds of the perceptible and the communicable, organism and environment, and knowledge regimes and power, at the intersection of media, ecology and the history of science. Since 2018, much of her work is produced in the context of the ongoing collaboration with Beny Wagner. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide including at the Berlinale, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Courtisane, Cinema Du Reel, Punto de Vista film festivals, the Baltic Triennial and Venice Architecture Biennale, Museum of the Moving Image New York, ICA London, LA Filmforum, Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Transmediale, Videobrasil, Berlin Atonal, and Criterion Channel, among many others. Her films have won numerous awards internatioanally, including the Sylvestre Award for Best Short Film at IndieLisboa and Best Short Documentary at Guanajuato Film Festival. Sasha is a lecturer in film at Queen Mary University of London and holds a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths. Her book monograph Geological Filmmaking is out this year with Open Humanities Press, and she is the co-author, with Beny Wagner, of the book All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press). Her writing has also appeared in books and journals including e-flux and Environmental Humanities journals.

Salarium (2017) | 17:00h - 17:45h
/ in collaboration with Daniel Mann

salarium [latin] - “salary, stipend, pension,” originally “salt-money, soldier’s allowance for the purchase of salt,” noun use of neuter of adjective salarius “pertaining to salt”.

Departing from the etymological derivation of both “salary” and “soldier” from “salt”, the film Salarium captures the entanglement of economic, military, and geological forces, which manifests in the figure of the sinkhole. Thousands of sinkholes are today perforating the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine, covering a wide strip of land that stretches between the water and the vast Judean desert around. Swallowing the remnants of what used to be a popular beach, a water park, or a settlement, the sinkholes make the land uninhabitable and hazardous. What Zionists once called a Natural Treasure to attract tourism and investment, is today a dilapidating site erected on unstable grounds. The sinkhole appears as both visible symptom and active cause of the failure of a colonial project to instrumentalise nature, collapsing together two temporal scales: the micro-histories of settler colonialism and the slow disaster produced by the exhaustion of natural resources. It appears as the collapsing of the surface into the sub-terrain, with that collapsing the possibility of thinking of territory as mere surface.

INVITED CRITICS

Pedro Bandeira (1970), architect (FAUP 1996), is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture of the University of Minho and researcher member of Lab2PT. Author of several publications in the field of architectural culture and is also co-editor of the Fascículos de Fotografia series of the Pierrot le Fou publishing house. As a curator he collaborated with institutions such as the Casa da Arquitetura, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the Porto City Council or the CIAJG. In 2015 he was awarded the Architecture Critics Prize of AICA / Fundação Carmona e Costa. Represented Portugal in the architectural biennials of Venice (2004) and São Paulo (2005). His latest project for a Rotating House in Coimbra was nominated for the 2019 EU Mies van der Rohe Prize.

Sara Castelo Branco (1989) holds a PhD in Arts et Sciences d’Art and Communication Sciences from Université Paris 1 — Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris) and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Lisbon), as an FCT fellow. She is a researcher at ICNOVA — Culture, Mediation and Arts (FCSH-UNL). In 2022, she created Solarity Prospects — a reflective and participatory project, comprised of a series of events that involve platforms for decentralised discussions on policies and dynamics linked to the sun. This project will have its first presentation at ACUD Macht Neu (Berlin) in 2023. She has been curating exhibitions and experimental cinema cycles such as Back of My Hand (Carpintarias São Lázaro, Lisbon, 2022), Blinding Light (CRIPTA 474 , Turin, 2021), To Film With One Hand My Other Hand (Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, 2021), Under the Ground (Municipal Gallery of Lisbon, Lisbon, 2020) or Out Off Nature (Arsenal — Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin, 2019). She has a master degree in Art Studies — Art Theory and Criticism from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, and a degree in Communication and Culture Sciences from the Lusófona University of Porto (ULP). In the field of research and criticism on Portuguese contemporary art, she regularly contributes articles and essays to magazines and catalogues.

Jorge Leandro Rosa is an essayist and translator. He writes on aesthetics, literature and the arts, the contemporary world, political ecology, climate change, and the philosophy of the Earth. He has translated and collaborated with authors such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Emanuele Coccia, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, etc. In 2019, he organised a Colloquium on Geopoetics at the Faculty of Arts of Lisbon, bringing to Portugal its founder, the Scottish poet and thinker Kenneth White.