A TORRE / THE TOWER (2015)


HD video, 16:9, black and white, Dolby 5.1 sound, 8 min., Portugal/Germany/Moldova
In collaboration with Christoph Both-Asmus
Production: Mengamuk Films, O Som e a Fúria
Support: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Yaddo, Bogliasco
Foundation, Bikini, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Distribution: Agência da Curta Metragem, Kinoscope, RTP
Video Installation Edition: Fundação EDP/MAAT Museu de Arte Arquitectura e Tecnologia – collection, Portugal
Harvard Film Archive (HFA) / Harvard University – collection, Portugal
Video Installation Edition: CNAP – Centre National de Arts Plastiques – collection, Portugal

Produced with materials collected during the production of Extinção/ Extinction
Production: O Som e a Fúria, Lamaland, Mengamuk Films, Walla Collective, Screen Miguel Nabinho, Bikini
Development Support: Agora Works in Progress 2016 Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
Additional Support: Screen Miguel Nabinho, Walla Colective, Bikini, Yuki, Bogliasco Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Yadoo
Support: Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, ICA – Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual

Maybe Kolja’s experiment of merging his body (human) with the tree (nature) venturing into a border zone between the earth and the sky is due to his purity of spirit, to the grandeur of the idiots, or the foolishness of the mystics; or is it all this together? Maybe it is a symptom of the enlightened – or simply an elaborated suicide.


It was produced for the exhibition Salomé Lamas: Parafiction at Serralves Museum, Porto (20 February – 3 May 2015)

Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD
Lamaland
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian







The Tower is not a purely cinematic work, neither a purely art-installation—it wasn’t made for a cinema nor for a museum setting only, it was conceptualized for both. This is particularly clear, on the one hand, in the ways in which it ‘lures the ego through being an image of its mirror-self, the screen is ready for narcissistic looking, a mirror for mirroring, thus a double of its double’ (Metz 1982: 2-4). On the other hand, in its immersive character, it implies a bodily experience that allows for the dramatic understanding of our (tiny) existence in contrast with nature’s immensity. [...]

With this jouissance and under the current environmental crisis, we are also propelled to think about the effects of humans in nature. There are consequences to our actions. We watch / walk past the trees and the lonely man (is he a character of a not-so-distant future?) venturing into the woods uneasily and, hopefully, while we rejoice with our own individuality, we will speculate about possible futures which designs are of our own responsibility. [...]

Such an understanding is, in fact, comparable to the experience of the sublime—it is as striking in its potential for a beautiful world as much as it is petrifying in the ways in which it seems to go beyond us and defy our own existence.

Luisa Silva, Moving Image and the Museum: Speculative Spaces in 3 Acts