É NOITE NA AMÉRICA

2021, three-channel video, 16mm transferred to HD, color, sound, 44’

Courtesy of the artist, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition “Penumbra,” 21/04/2022 – 27/11/2022, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice. Co-produced by Pivô Arte e Pesquisa, and Spectre Production

ANA VAZ

The film-poems by Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) travel through territories and events haunted by the consequences of colonialism and modernism in Brazil. Exploring the intersections between self and other, myth and history, the artist uses film to de-center the boundaries of human perception.

É Noite na América [It is Night in America] is centred on the consequences of modernism on Brazil’s environment, human society, and different-from-human forms. Set in Brasilia, whose building justified violent displacements of wild species and Indigenous people, the film opens with disorienting images and sounds. Such claustrophobic score is filtered through the stories of rescued species, from giant anteaters, otters, maned wolves, owls, and capybaras told via conversations with biologists, veterinarians, zookeepers, and the environmental police that question the ideology of conservation, in light of a fragility that dystopian ideals of progress contributed to creating. É Noite na América’s post-colonial eco-critique reverberates with its poethic meditation on lens-based vision, from the artificial creation of darkness via the day-for-night effect, to the series of experimental kinships between the body of the camera, the body holding it, and the bodies looked at. As a nocturnal feast filmed on 16mm —a material also in danger of extinction—, this immersive installation casts an animalistic spell with shades of eco-horror, wildlife fiction and documentary, subverting the limits of cinematic genres.

A first version of É Noite na América premiered at Jeu de Paume, Paris, on the occasion of the artist’s solo show in 2021.