Ana Vaz

The vast open spaces between residential blocks and experimental concrete structures set the stage for a reflection on the city of Brasília in Ana Vaz’s video work Sacris Pulso. Accompanied by quotes from Clarice Lispector’s books, Brazil’s masterminded capital emerges as a ghost from the utopia of architectural modernism, and using the fragmented layerings of the collage, Vaz develops anachronism as a principle.

The film revolves around the paradoxes of temporality. It depicts a world where the narrative of progress has lost credibility and where a chord struck on a bass instrument can cause cars, trams and waterfalls to change directions, and instead be sucked into a backwards vortex. Vehicles and waterways of all kinds stand in for the machines and systems that once represented faith in the future, but which, in their accelerated contemporary state, only seem to transport us further away from the world.

Ana Vaz was born in Brasília, and in Sacris Pulso, she links her personal past to Brazil’s modern history in her use of footage from the film Brasiliàrios (1985), in which Cláudia Vaz – the artist’s mother – plays the role of Clarice Lispector. The city of Brasília is presented here not only as an enormous urban planning project, but also as an eerie memory of an erstwhile dream of the future that contains both desire and horror, and where a bloodline connects the science fiction of previous generations with the systems that underpin our reality today.

Thanks to Light Cone, Paris.

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris.

Work

Sacris Pulso, 2008
16mm & Super 8mm transferred to HD video

Location

Galleri Syster, Luleå
21.11–14.2