FILMOGRAPHY, PROJECTS

PARAFICTION II (SELECTED WORKS 2017 – 2023)
(in development)

In 2023, Salomé Lamas: Parafiction II (selected works 2017-2023) explores the singularity of Lamas' work that lies in the dialogue of different modes of signification (writing, cinema, video, installation, theatre, performance). The originality of this work, which she has dubbed parafiction, presents a polygraphed nature that ends up providing a large-scale mapping of contemporary artistic creation understood in its transdisciplinary dimensions, evidence of a research embedded in the present time, but which frames production processes.

The book covers Lamas’ selected works from 2017 to 2023 and includes project notes and production memoirs, contributions by contributions by Yaron Dahan, David Perrin, Eric Hynes, Nico Marzano, Sara Magno, Maria Filomena Molder, Pascal Cassagnou, Delfim Sardo, Penelope Curtis, Lars Henrik Grass, Adelina von Furstenberg, Andreea Patru, Michael Sicinski, Matthew Chan, João Laia, Miguel Amado, Emmet Kelley, Frederic Neyrat, Giovanbattista Tusa, Boaventura de Sousa Santos as well as interviews.

PANTHERAS, PROJECT
(in development)

Pantheras is a project with an interest for human rights in the Niger Delta that replies to the urgency to address climate change and global geopolitical reorganization.

Despite the valuable crude oil that flows from the ground beneath their feet, the neglected country dwellers in the Niger Delta wage a conflicted daily struggle to survive.

With the end of the fossil fuel age in the horizon we delve into the complexity of Nigeria's smuggling ideologies and clandestine economies exploring the neoliberal risks of neo-colonialism.

PANTHERAS COSMOLOGY
An open-source platform for mapping the Niger Delta and monitoring the resource control conflict.

VERTIGO, PROJECT
(in development)

A multidisciplinary project that attempts to comment on the paradigm-shifting moment that humanity faces today.

The planetary condition refers to the shift of the horizon from earth to air conveying a progressive dissolution of the entire system of individualisation, measurement, and localisation that makes the earth an inhabitable, political space. We are, deprived of any support, we can finally overcome the orbital movement of a thought that for centuries has gravitated around the same founding nucleus.

The hypothesis of the end of the man as its own horizon impels the proliferation of histories without horizon and without ends.

Our present implies recognizing that our disorientation makes the uninhabitable our common place.

Vertigo intends to use train routes (allegory) around the world to open new ways of considering human, technological and animal subjectivity, language, politics, and metaphysics.

The project uses the structure of a journey, extended from the purchase of the ticket, moments before boarding (the beginning), to the disembarkation (the end). It intends to engage with contemporary thinkers/passengers as well as with a range of people/passengers with different backgrounds. Along the way we will make several stops, coinciding with crucial questions such as the meaning of space and time, or the nature of society and existence. We will also take some detours that consist of meditations on cultural artefacts associated with the passenger's universe.

AL· LE· GO· RY
(in development)

A family, where some people confuse reality with what are mere shadows projected on the walls, determines the uselessness of all authoritarianism.

If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.

OURO E CINZA / GOLD AND ASHES, PROJECT
(in production)

In a redemption exercise two women [mother and daughter] go beyond their limits to free themselves of their comfortable and suffocating lives.

Erected upon internal and external [ontological-epistemological] dualities  reflected in the characters but also in the time and space where the action is set, followed by a structure with two separate planes [abstract-concrete] it attempts to expose how our spiritual [conscious] existence shapes [is shaped by] the power and symbolic relations that we construct with the surrounding [environment] others [no matter their kinship] and how do these associations come together to produce [be product of] societies that [are] convey[ed by] civilisations.

Gold an Ashes’ matters of concern unfold around cognitive systems [thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem solving by means of language, imagination, perception, and planning], modes of knowledge conversion [socialisation, externalisation, combination, internalisation], models of communication applied to societal models [politics, culture, history, religion] and civilisational paradigms [capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy].

The fragmented narrative is perforated by unexpected moments of clarity and acumen.

GOLD AND ASHES / REDUX
(in production)

Gold and Ashes / REDUX is a multidisciplinary installation with the participation of authors from various fields. It inquires how 'scale', one of the tools with which we know the world, can be reimagined. Scale establishes technological conditions and expectations that cement the positions from which we perceive the world. In what ways can scale become a lens to observe, measure, question and reconstruct our perceptions, feelings, democratic processes, and technological infrastructures?

Gold and Ashes / REDUX uses an approach that acknowledges human evolution while simultaneously outlining human limitations.

Using two female performers and an enlarged sculpture it unfolds around cognitive systems, modes of knowledge conversion, communication models applied to social models and civilisational paradigms.

The text component allows us to follow the poetics and relational politics of humanity’s world visions. On the one hand: the existential awakening of the two women, on the other the discourses and imaginaries of two grand narratives – [a]naturalism, [anti](eco-geo) constructivism – the myth of our current era [Anthropocene], compelled by two timeless perspectives – progress and apocalypse –, questioning our ability to rebuild and pilot the Earth away from socio-ecological disasters and showing what it means to appreciate the Earth [but also humanity] as an irreplaceable becoming – a trajectory that cannot be replicated, remade or mastered.

Gold and Ashes / REDUX absorbs materials developed for the feature film Ouro e Cinza (Gold and Ashes), but essentially it emerges from the need and desire to develop, produce, and present unframed materials in the field of cinema.

2022 – LA VAGUE / THE WAVE

The projection of a giant wave on the façade of a municipal building in Paris – Hôtel de Ville. Its magnitude in dimension and movement. The beauty of the light and the detail of the wave of the sea in Nazaré meets the earth.

For the occasion of the France-Portugal Season held simultaneously in the two countries between mid-February 2022 and October 2022 which symbolically makes the link between the rotating Presidency of the European Union exercised by Portugal and France.

2021 – GAIA, PROJECT

We would all like to end up reconciled with the world, to know what world we live in and consequently what life is. Meteors have fascinated the human race since they were first spotted in the night sky. But without science and space exploration to aid understanding of what these amounts of rock and ice are, ancient cultures often turned to myth and legend to explain them. Would a new paradigm enable us to become more resistant to the test that the recent Coronavirus ordeal presents to the global economy and societies? Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon that we are most urgently rethinking and carefully redescribing; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge.

Gaia is a multidisciplinary project with an approach between science, technology, and the arts, in dialogue with contemporary thinkers and that promotes an ecological production. It comprises three works, a record-cum-publication, a film and an installation. It was developed with the artistic direction of Salomé Lamas under the frame of Scale Travels, a collaborative program between Gnration and INL – International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory.

2021 – WHAT IF THE METEORITES WOULD TALK

eBay provides an accessible platform for meteorite retailers and numerous auctions. A certificate of authenticity is often provided by the dealer. Illegitimatize dealers are numerous. The purchased specimen claimed to be from Campo del Cielo that refers to a group of iron meteorites and to the area in Argentina where they were found dating from 4200 to 4700 years ago, Holocene. The specimen was submitted to the MNHN – Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in France for identification. The specimen was submitted to the INL – International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratoryand the etching of a QR-code was asked to the Department of Advanced Electron Microscopy, Imaging and Spectroscopy. The Department of Quantum and Energy Materials characterized the meteorite and multiple scanning electron microscope (SEM) images were captured.

The meteorite voyage was recorded with the collaboration of a sound designer and several musicians. Excerpts of philosophical insight combining political and cultural history with the mechanisms of poetic paranoia from contemporary thinkers were selected from the three concurrent contemporary directions in an attempt to map the cacophonic cosmology of visions and pressures that coexist at the moment. What if the Meteorites would Talk: Installed in the space when scanned the SEM nano QR-code provides access to online sound.

2021 – GAIA: WHAT IF THE METEORITES WOULD TALK

Only an atopian philosophy-a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy-can rechannel our fear of the outside. A radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. We must occupy the voids with affection.

2021 – GAIA

A record-cum-publication features correspondence with scientists Jérôme Borme, Alex Bondarchuk; images captured with a scanning electron microscope (SEM); sounds by André Gonçalves, Emmett Kelly, Luís Fernandes, Rodolfo Carvalho, Filipe Felizardo, Joana Sá, Gonçalo Almeida, João Lobo, Nuno da Luz, Pedro Sousa, Yu Lin Hum, Tanja Simic designed by Miguel Martins, text by Salomé Lamas, João Laia and a web curated out of multiple authors.

2021 – HOTEL ROYAL

'In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown', says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupts this dynamic.

Hotel Royal is fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

'There’s no need to reinvent the world, paying close attention is enough.'

Hotel Royal exposes itself as a set of simple rules of formal and structural restrictions.

The rooms are all the same… people are all the same.'

We all have identical biological bodies, but we pair people, groups, cultures, policies and identities that are nevertheless different.

Where is the resemblance and where is the dissemblance? Where is fiction and where is reality. And what to do with the problems shared by both in representation?

Hotel works on notions of intimacy, vulnerability and intrusion when establishing and crossing the limits of the public and private sphere. Whether or not intentionally, the filmic device generates feelings of seclusion/participation in a viewer who feels a desired guest but also an intruder.

Sentimental, intense and occasionally traumatic spaces are created. All banal or extraordinary objects will thus be imbued with allegorical qualities.

Hotel Royal produces a sort of fiction of the intimacy. The viewer becomes accomplice of the voyeurism – compelled, too, from the need to move without being observed, through the private sphere of the other, compelled to cultivate his/her own interior narratives. – A social experience of subjective production. 'Nothing is poorer than the truth expressed as a thought.'

2020 – HR

2022 – HOTEL ROYAL

2020 – O TEATRO E A PESTE / THE THEATRE AND THE PLAGUE, PROJECT

On April 6, 1933, at the invitation of René Allendy, Antonin Artaud proposed to the Sorbonne audience a conference with the strange title “The Theater and the Plague”. Nobody foreshadowed the show that was going to take place there. The only existing documentation is presented in Anaïs Nin's Diary: “Allendy and Artaud sitting behind a large secretary. Allendy introduced Artaud. The room was packed. (...) there are no words to describe what Artaud interpreted on the Sorbonne stage. He forgot the conference, the theater, his ideas, Dr. Allendy at his side, the audience, the young students, his wife, the teachers and the stage directors. His face was in convulsions of anguish and his hair was soaked in sweat. The eyes dilated, the muscles tightened, the fingers struggled to maintain flexibility. Howled. Delirious. He represented his own death, his own crucifixion. People started to get chocked. Then they burst out laughing. Everyone laughed! He whistled. Finally, people went out one by one, with a loud noise, talking, protesting. When they left, they knocked on the door. (...) But Artaud continued, until the last breath.”

In April 2020, in the middle of mandatory confinement, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the theaters are empty. The conference “The Theater and the Plague” by Antonin Artaud is reenacted.

2020 – TEATRO ROMANO  (LISBON) | WITH ALBANO JERÓNIMO AND LÍDIA FERNANDES4KHD vídeo, 2:39, color, stereo sound, 40 min, Portugal

2020 – TEATRO SÃO LUIZ TEATRO MUNICIPAL (LISBON) | WITH CUCHA CARVALHEIRO AND AIDA TAVARES 4KHD vídeo, 2:39, color, stereo sound, 40 min, Portugal

2020 – TEATRO DO BAIRRO ALTO (LISBON) | WITH MÓNICA CALLE AND FRANCISCO FRAZÃO4KHD vídeo, 2:39, color, stereo sound, 40 min, Portugal

2020 – LU.CA – TEATRO LUIS DE CAMÕES (LISBON) | WITH IGOR REGALLA AND SUSANA MENEZES4KHD vídeo, 2:39, color, stereo sound, 40 min, Portugal

2020 – TEATRO VIRIATO (VISEU) | WITH JOHN ROMÃO AND PATRÍCIA PORTELA
4KHD vídeo, 2:39, color, stereo sound, 40 min, Portugal

2019/20 – EXTRACTION: THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA, PROJECT

Produced with materials collected during the production of Interdependence (2019) an omnibus composed by eleven short films to raise awareness on Environment and Climate Change, conceived, developed, and produced by Adelina von Fürstenberg with ART for The World.

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a meditation on humanity’s massive redesign of the planet and a dystopian pamphlet on the Anthropocene.

It portrays a moment of euphoria as the drifting occupants on the raft, hoping and praying to be rescued, appear to glimpse a possibility of salvation. We can almost hear the hoarse cries through which they attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering a final ounce of strength before the void. This is their last chance of survival.

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa refers to the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of high biodiversity to reduce life to its conversion into a resource through capitalism, with an enormous environmental and social impact.

It is an allegory for states of emergency in environmental policy, climate, and migration, with an ethical-political purpose.

2019 – EXTRACTION: THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a publication dedicated to the scope of the project featuring, inedited photographs, 10 texts to the same allegoric image written in dialogue with other authors, project notes and a preface by Lars Henrik Grass.

2020 – EXTRACTION: THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA

2020 – EXTRACTION: THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA

2019 –  O CORPO, A SEXUALIDADE E O ERÓTICO NA OBRA DE JÚLIO POMAR / THE BODY, SEXUALITY AND THE EROTIC IN THE WORK OF JÚLIO POMAR

Julio Pomar (1926-2018) was often considered the greatest Portuguese painter of his generation.

O corpo, a sexualidade e o erótico na obra de Júlio Pomar / The body, sexuality and the erotic in the work of Júlio Pomar. (2019), establishes free correspondences between the painter’s writings and his pictorial work focusing primarily on his explorations and concerns around the body, sexuality and the erotic.

In his moments of despair, he declares that drawing does not exist and that only geometrical figures can be made with lines; (…) drawing furnishes a skeleton, color gives life; but life without the skeleton is much less complete than the skeleton without life. Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu.

2020 – O CORPO, A SEXUALIDADE E O ERÓTICO NA OBRA DE JÚLIO POMAR

The body, sexuality and the erotic in the work of Júlio Pomar (2019) is an installation designed by Salomé Lamas, which the artist and filmmaker made at the invitation of the Atelier-Museum, to show in the sequence of the exhibition "Júlio Pomar: Formas que se tornam outras", about the erotic dimension in this artist's path. The piece establishes free correspondences between the painter's writings and his pictorial work, focusing mainly on Júlio Pomar's explorations and concerns around the body, sexuality, and the erotic. [

In an installation made with slide projectors and sound, the filmmaker uses archival images, sometimes showing fragments of works, sometimes their entirety. These images are reworked, slightly altered, emphasizing some element (a trace, a stain) or reinforcing what is intended to be communicated (processes, materials, methodologies, references), questioning what is traditionally considered the content of a work. What is the content of a painting? Of a drawing? Of an image? What is figuratively represented, or also its material and formal dimension? In the realization of the work, Salomé Lamas, based on the consultation of published books about the artist, of various digital files and other information, in the impossibility but ambition of seeing everything, also problematizes the idea of "archive". In doing so, he questions the way Art History, with its scientific criteria, and sometimes some morality, arranges, categorizes, and fixes ways of seeing. In this work, putting into play an authorial dimension, her own, the filmmaker reorganizes and edits fragments of a common cultural heritage, reminiscent of Godard in The Book of the Image: "Do you still remember how we used to exercise thought? We used to start from a dream. We asked ourselves how it was possible that, in total obscurity, colors of such intensity could appear in us. Great things were said, important things, amazing, deep, and just, in a sweet, low tone of voice. Image and word."

2016/19 – FATAMORGANA, PROJECT

Fatamorgana is both a political parody and a speculative comedy, in which historical and contemporary personalities narrate post – World War II global history and geopolitics, through a web of references and direct citations. The undercurrent is one of sense, illusion, and truth.

Hanan—a Muslim cousin of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom—finds herself, not sure how, in Beirut’s Hall of Fame waxwork museum after its closing hours. Like Homer’s most virtuous Penelope, this woman waits for her husband; she appears to have set a date with him, but he has not arrived—where can he be? While waiting, she begins interacting with the wax figures in the museum’s empty rooms, and the figures respond in turn.

Blending and clashing sixteen differing languages, as well as a variety of fiction and nonfiction sources, Fatamorgana is a multidimensional space, a kind of experiment with truth, or a type of fiction that sets up a platform for the collision of multiple fragments, elements, stories, facts.

2017 – FATAMORGANA

Fatamorgana (2017) is a theatrical play commissioned by BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts for performance at CCB – Centro Cultural de Belém. It transposes the research and text (first edition) of the project into a theatrical play for stage. Within the play, Hanan (Antónia Terrinha) performs an extended monologue, in dialogue with an ensemble cast of pre-recorded voices and a soundscape. Following a brief Pre Prologue, the play begins with the projection of a filmed Prologue. The sections Development and Postface follow. Throughout the performance, subtitles, texts, and citations appear on screen to accompany the piece.

2018 – WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FATAMORGANA

What do we talk about when we talk about Fatamorgana is a film that extends the prologues of Fatamorgana (2017) and ©Fatamorgana (2018–2019).  

What do we talk about when we talk about Fatamorgana reflects the casting sessions conducted in Beirut in 2016 during the research and development of Fatamorgana (2016–2019). Before being attributed excerpts of Fatamorgana’s text in Arabic, interviews were conducted with each one of the actresses. Questions inherent to the text and to the psychology of Hanan, the leading character of Fatamorgana, were discussed. Christine Choueiry, Roula Hamadeh, Caroline Hatem, Nada Abou Farhat and Claude Baz talk openly about their background and upbringing in Lebanon as well as their careers. They share their memories and their viewpoints on politics, religion, society and culture.

2018 – FATAMORGANA

Fatamorgana (2018) is a publication dedicated to the graphic translation of the project’s text (second edition), alongside a variety of related material. It was produced to accompany ©Fatamorgana (2018–2019) for theexhibition Fatamorgana at Culturgest, Porto (October 27, 2018–January 13, 2019).

2018 – AFFEKTENLEHRE

The doctrine of the affections was an elaborate theory based on the idea that the passions could be represented by their outward visible or audible signs. This sound installation was first developed for the exhibition Fatamorgana at Culturgest, Porto (27 October 2018 – 13 January 2019) where it was installed inside a former subterranean bank vault in surround sound.

©Fatamorgana (2018–2019) is a film commissioned by Culturgest – Caixa Geral de Depósitos. It transposes and transforms the research, text experience and production of the theatrical play Fatamorgana (2017) into a single-screen film, for projected installation. The film takes core elements from the original theatrical production of Fatamorgana  (2017) and moves them, and Hanan (Caroline Hatem), into the space of cinema, through a dense interweaving of still and moving images, text (second generation) and sound produced in Lebanon and Portugal. The film is structured into five sections: Preface, Prologue, Text, Epilogue and Postface.

Fatamorgana (2019) is the last production of Fatamorgana (2016–2019): a publication dedicated to the graphic translation of the text at the heart of the longtime endeavor (third edition), alongside a variety of related materials, including project notes and contributions from Pascale Cassagnou, María Palacios Cruz, Sara Magno, Maria Filomena Molder, Delfim Sardo, and Joost Smiers.

The publication also provides online access to photographic, video, and sound materials, along with technical specifications for all of the project’s component elements.

2018 – TERMINAL, METRO, HANGAR, PROJECT

2018 – TERMINAL

2018 – METRO

2018 – HANGAR

2018 – EXTINÇÃO / EXTINCTION, PROJECT

I don’t have an easy relationship with borders. They frighten and unnerve me. I have been searched, prodded, delayed, again and again, for having the temerity to cross a few meters of land. Borders are bureaucratic fault lines, imperious and unfriendly. Their existence is routinely critiqued by academic geographers, who cast them as hostile acts of exclusion. And yet where, in a borderless world, could we escape to? Where would be worth going?

The end of the cold war did not produce a thaw throughout the continent. A peculiarity of today's Europe is the variety of “frozen conflicts” it contains.  Transnistria is an unrecognized state that broke away from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in 1990.

2018 – EXTINCTION /ÇÃO

Extinction is a film which takes a stand, and in this sense allows us to overcome many of the preconceived ideas about Eastern Europe and its recent history, which we see as entrenched in a polarity of communism and post-communism, but which is much more complex than that, and which finds its loudest expression in the divorce of politics from life. Publication edited on the occasion of the screening of Salomé Lamas' homonymous film at MNAC-Museu do Chiado from March 29 to June 6, 2018.

2015  –  A TORRE / THE TOWER

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.

2017  –  HORIZON NORIZOH

São Paulo - history timelines are overlapped into one single block of cement with its windowless facades, brutal containers to personal narratives. Architecture curators wonder whether the new temporary, analogous to the development of modernism, it might become the new modus operandi soon.

Forest - the nature is sublime, empty and stormy. It is the natural land of the imagination where we assemble ourselves to resist to the silence of the universe, in order not to succumb to the pure panic and the threat of dissolution. At first glance the spectator might not acknowledge the frame’s mutation. As time lapses, one will realize that we are moving towards a figure at the center of the image.

2016/18 – AUTORRETRATO / SELF-PORTRAIT

2016 – Self Portrait Web project, photography and text, Germany-Portugal

2017 – Autorretrato / Self-Portrait

2018 – Self-Portrait

The war in Ukraine is burning. In early 2015 a Portuguese producer allocates a symbolic fund for the production of Extinction (2018) that allows for a return to Transnistria, a pro-Russian frozen-conflict in Moldova. We apply for journalist visas with a false script. The visas take too long. Nevertheless, we book the crew their plane tickets; I fit part of the available budget in my pockets; S.D carries the rest from Berlin. Two days before departing all the crewmembers are granted journalist accreditations – including the Moldovan nationals. The shooting runs as expected for 20 days, the only border incident to allude, between Moldova and Ukraine, with KGB agents is reported in Self-Portrait (2016/2018). There is no consular protection in the territory. I’m unsure if I’ll ever get to meet our friends again

2018 – DREAM WORLD

Dream World (2018) is a sequence of 148 firework shots in the colossal Memorial House of the Bulgarian Communist Party, built on Mount Buzludzha between 1974 and 1981.

2017 – COUP DE GRÂCE

Leonor returns from a trip on a day where her dad wasn’t expecting her. In twenty-four hours, they will live a crescendoing hallucinated reality, led by Francisco’s unsettling state of apparent normality.

2017 – UBI SUNT I-III, PROJECT

2017 – UBI SUNT I

Ubi Sunt. Porto. Cartography of an imaginary place attracted by the margins (social and geographical). Hybrid and eclectic project, it is the outcome of a audiovisual research residency of humam and urban exploration of an expanding city.

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? meaning "Where are those who were before us?". Reflective essay on mortality and life's transience, it emerges from that dialectic, of a and episodic and fragmented structure with a choreographed cinematography; where the memory intersects the contemporary. The project hosts two performances - 'One Life to Live' and 'Requiem' by Christoph Both-Asmus and counts with the participation of CESA.

2017 – UBI SUNT II

15.10.2016 Lisbon, Portugal – A few days after the performance Christoph Both-Asmus text message read: “With the approaching tidal flow it became simultaneously cold and wet from below and warm from above. I felt lingering between water and fire. (…)” I was intrigued when he mentioned that the touch of the flowers was perhaps gentler than the human touch. I let the performance run until his wish.

2017 – UBI SUNT III

03.07.2017 Costa Navarino, Greece – Email from Christoph Both-Asmus: “05.08.2015 Acropolis of Corinth, Greece. Excerpt from sketchbook – Since I remember that I wish to be here, with the nature, an almost painful desire.” So he attempts to encapsulate this nature but I know that he won’t find peace in his restless search.

2016 – PARAFICTION (SELECTED WORKS 2010 – 2016)

In 2016, Salomé Lamas: Parafiction (selected works 2010-2016) explores the boundaries and circumstances of documentary filmmaking, working at the intersection of ethnography, history, storytelling, memory, and fiction. The short films and video installations—powerful portraits, in a sense—investigate the traumatically repressed, the seemingly un-representable, and the historically invisible, from the horrors of colonial violence to the landscapes of global capital. The book covers Lamas’ selected works from 2010 to 2016, and includes contributions by Michael Bobick, Deirdre Boyle, Filipe Felizardo, Irene Flunser Pimentel, Peter Galison, Javier H. Estrada, James Lattimer, Joana Pimenta, João Ribas, Lawrence Weschler, and Ana Jotta, as well as interviews conducted by Nuno Lisboa, Jorge Mourinha, and Mónica Savirón.

2016 — ELDORADO XXI, PROJECT

Eldorado XXI is a haunting and mysterious ethnographic reality cut-up. Set in the highest settlement in the world, La Rinconada y Cerro Lunar (5500m), in the Peruvian Andes; an illusion leads men to self destruction, moved by the same interests, dealt with the same tools and means in contemporaneity as it has been dealt in the ancient times.

Eldorado XXI is a parafictional attempt to combine a sensory ethnographic approach with critical media practices. Some eighty thousand people live in crowded dwellings in La Rinconada y Cerro Lunar, without even the minimum for subsistence farming; they foster the hope that one day they will find the means to resettle elsewhere. There are enough stories of fortunes made randomly to keep hope and the fever alive. As a measure of safety, the miners chew large quantities of coca leaves. They carry the leaves in their pockets daily to deceive hunger and prevent exhaustion. If they live to work again the next day, it is common to celebrate with alcohol and to frequent the local brothels. This becomes a quick road to self-destruction, the only motivation behind it being to soften the harshness of everyday life. Under the system of cachorreo, the miner works for 30 days without remuneration and on the thirty-first day (if lucky) he is allowed to explore the mine for four hours for his own profit.

The little precious metal he might carry down the mountain has now to be separated from the rock through antiquated methods using highly toxic levels of mercury. Then the value of the gold powder has to be negotiated in a non-regulated establishment within the community, and the miner will be offered the minimum amount possible. The system is an unpredictable lottery; nevertheless cachorreo means that miners and employers avoid 'certain taxes.' It is a mental game, in which the possibility of generating a small fortune motivates the miners. To believe in and aspire to 'some- thing bigger' can be a greater motivation than a miserable pay-check at the end of the month; a constant low wage would simply not be worth a life of danger. La Rinconada and Cerro Lunar are doomed towns, which will very shortly become ghost towns since the mines are running low on precious metal.

You are alone. You hear nothing, you know nothing, and you expect nothing. This is a mysterious film dwelling on the complexity of the human being. It stimulates the viewer to reflect and contemplate, constantly seeking an active audience. It will carry you on a hallucinatory journey. You will not be indifferent to it.

2016 – THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

There is no need to design or stage an apocalyptic landscape, for the earth we inhabit is already in crisis and the apocalypse is now. Attempting to redefine ethnographic film tradition, The Burial of the Dead is a video installation set in the Peruvian town of La Rinconada at an altitude of 5,200 meters on the edge of a gold mine; it captures a dystopian world that scarcely seems possible in the 21st century. Lamas has constructed a cinematic triptych to convey the extremity of this situation and the dimensions of its misery without having to resort to graphic images – indeed a dantesque escherscape of haunting beauty.

2015  –  MOUNT ANANEA (5853)

A haunting and mysterious ethnographic reality cut-up, where a continuous flux of miners and peasants’ conflict in the darkness, vanishing in the out-of-frame.

2017 – Mount Ananea

Mount Ananea (5853) is a project by filmmaker and artist Salomé Lamas produced by O Som e a Furia in collaboration with the Serralves Museum of Comtemporary Art, Portugal. The film premiered at the Serralves Museum, Porto, as part of the exhibition ‘Salomé Lamas: Parafiction’ from 20 Februrary to 3 of May 2015 curated by João Ribas, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, Serralves Museum of Comtemporary Art.

2016 – …RIOTS AND RITUALS

An eclectic mosaic of news, uncensored clips, home videos, images of movements film collective imagery of the Internet and social networks, surveillance cameras and institutional sources, a set that reflects the chaos of documents, files and the collective memory.

Images of resistance. Images that are resistant to remain fixed in the past. Images in the future past. Images from the past that play a part in shaping the present.

At a time when a neoliberal Europe is experiencing an unprecedented social and political crisis, various contemporary visual and artistic practices are looking back to the militant cinema archive from the 'Long Sixties', the turbulent historical period started by the international cycle of struggles in 1968 and their subsequent lives throughout the 1970s.

The foundations of the current Europe—financial, democratic Europe, the Europe of inequality, fortress Europe—were built on the defeat of the social movements in the long 60s. From the violent outbursts in 68 to the Athens Polytechnic uprising, from the Portuguese Carnation revolution to the struggles of the factories and workers’ districts in late-Francois Spain and the transition, from the mass strikes in the United Kingdom in the 70s to the 'Hot Autumn' turmoil and the autonomous movements in Italy. The political future of Europe was at stake in these struggles. A confrontation that would be resolved under the dictum of 'there is no alternative', demobilising the grass root democratic initiatives and imposing neo-liberal economic orthodoxy.

The militant cinema archive of the Long Sixties is a visual map of a Europe that could be: a map of resistance and radical political imagination, a map that looks towards the Global South, a map of discussions and inclusive democracy, a map of new political subjectivities—of gender, class, post-colonialism and environmentalism. Militant cinema was cinema that was out of place. Light equipment made it possible to move filming and projecting towards the spaces of social revolt. The demand for radical democracy resulted in new forms of collective, participatory authorship. Cinema became a space for experimentation around the politicisation of images and their modes of production.

2015  –  NORTE/NORTH: FIRE

A daring group of boys feel the nightly hoods with their Mirandês cries. Mysterious, hypnotic, and trance-like old rites are set around a bonfire by the Caretos. Wild musical loops, improvisation, and endurance set the mood.

2013  –  THEATRUM ORBIS TERRARUM

The Theatre of the World (1570) is thought to be the world’s first modern atlas. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum may be con- sidered a film exploration, a sensorial journey, a vertiginous history, but definitely an adventure story. 'When I look at the sea for long, I lose interest on what happens on land' says our shaman leading character.

In the sixteenth century the Padrão Real hung from the ceiling of the Map Room in the Casa da Índia. It was a secret map, guarded from the eyes of foreign spies, which was changed and reworked with the comings and goings of each expedition.

Aided by scientific equipment to measure distance, the navigators dreamed up the representation of the expanses that they had covered. When at sea, they looked up to the heavens and gauged their path by the stars, hands drawing in space fictional lines that carved territories. Upon returning to shore, they took the map that had previously belonged to others as their own, erasing divisive lines and constructing new borders.

The map that they followed has been lost over time, and what remains of it is a stolen copy, made from memory by one of the cartographers in order to outwit enemies.

Maps are imaginary lines projected in space, visual representations of territories that have been traversed. They create spaces for navigating, utopias and dystopias, fictions created and broken by memory. Like the colourful banners that bear the title of the exhibition, drawing homographs in the air, maps devise coded messages that are then exposed to the entropy of the elements. The spaces dreamed up in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum act as a map made of memories that sketch out their own territory, constructing and reconstructing the minute borders existing between the three screens.

2012  –  TERRA DE NINGUÉM / NO MAN'S LAND, PROJECT

A mercenary sits in silence on a chair placed in an abandoned palace in Lisbon, as if posing for a portrait. Facing the camera, he begins narrating and performing his own history, constructing a record which slowly reveals in its turns of phrase and mismatched events a series of doubts and contradictions. The camera watches, relentlessly. Paulo narrates his involvement as a hired killer for special military forces during the Portuguese colonial war, the part he played in the GAL – Antiterrorist Liberation Group, a death squad illegally established by the Spanish government to annihilate high officials of ETA, and his work as a mercenary for the CIA in El Salvador.

Rathe than being interested in affirming the veracity of the historical record or in proving an official narrative, No Man’s Land dwells in the present moment of witnessing, the space inhabited by the performance of a memory. Refusing to linger on a static moral duality, throughout the film accuser and accused are frequently asked to change positions – at a certain point, after describing a series of crimes he committed, responding to a question by the director Paulo replies with one of his own 'How much is worth the life of a man? A man like me or men like them?' As the film’s own processes of making are slowly revealed, No Man’s Land creates a set or a stage where information or document are peripheral to the question of how one plays out and affirms as history his own personal truth.

Paulo offers sublime portrayals of the cruelties and paradoxes of power and of the revolutions that brought it down, only to erect new bureaucracies, new cruelties, and paradoxes. His work as a mercenary is in the fringe of these two worlds.

2014  –  LE BOUDIN

"None of the people who were asked about me had seen me." Le Boudin documents the encounter of the young Elias Geißler with the testimony of Nuno Fialho who at the age of 16 was forced to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. "I didn’t enlist. They enlisted me."

2012  –  A COMUNIDADE / THE COMMUNITY

A Comunidade (The Community) is a short documentary focused on CCL the oldest camping park in Portugal.

2012  –  ENCOUNTERS WITH LANDSCAPE (3X)

Shot on São Miguel, the largest Island of the Azores, Encounters with Landscape (3X) is divided into a prologue and three acts. Salomé Lamas embraces a three-act structure to wage a war of mythical proportions, culminating in a reaffirmation of the inferiority of humans with respect to nature.

2011 – GOLDEN DAWN

Set in the North sea the film portraits dutch fisherman’s life. Going to the sea it’s a fandango play that mankind has been playing since early ages in remote places.  The aim of this film is to portrait the routine of one of the hardest jobs while turning it into a poetic visual trip.

2010/12  –  VHS: VIDEO HOME SYSTEM

How can I lie that I’m asleep and be faster than my body? - “But it wasn’t so violent, was it?” She stayed in bed repeating that she was sleepy for 40 minutes. “I’ve wanted it to be almost like a mantra and to generate tension.” The embroidery draw maps the relation between a mother and a daughter. Time past and time present if all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. “It was a school exercise, I would use what was close to me, what was domestic, and you were part of it” Fourteen years have past. I take her images; I compel her to answer me. She is the mother. She is the daughter. She is my mother.

2010  –  IMPERIAL GIRL
D video, 16:9, color, mono sound, 11 min., Portugal
Production: Lamaland

It is Sunday. It is raining. The outsiders of Lisbon stay indoors talking randomly. These are the permanent guests of the Imperial hostel.

2008/2009  –  JOTTA: A MINHA MALADRESSE É UMA FORMA DE DELICATESSE

Artist Ana Jotta’s plastic universe and her world of relationships is portrayed in na unconventional way.

2008/2009  –  O PALIMPSESTO DA RAPARIGA CISNE OU CHOVEU DURANTE DOIS DIAS E A PAISAGEM ALTEROU-SE

Memories are lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
Entropy. They fall into my lap, the memories.
It rained during two days and the landscape has changed.
Does life matter without memory. True memories. False memories.
Hyaline is what is bright and evident.
A latent image pulses hidden.

OTHER PROJECTS (SELECTION)

Ernesto De Sousa Centenary, Action for Isabel After Ernesto(2021)

Filmmakers’ Archive Eqze [Salome Lamas] (2021)

Filmmakers’ Archive Eqze [Ernesto de Sousa] (2021)

Doctors of the World (2020)

Ao Domicilio (2020)

Where Will We Land? (2020)

Our Soul isn't a Border (2018)

Them or Us (2018)

Dreaming The Dark: Hands That See, Eyes That Touch (2018)

People’s Cinema (2016)

Re-Action (2016)

Europa, Futuro Anterior (2016)

Garcia Da Selva (2015)

The Darkness Collection (2014-2015)

Rascunho-Oldschool (2013)

How To Piggyback Your Lifetime Production (2011)

Lacoste, Com B II, Umbrella (2011)

Fall II (2011)

Jornal Mural (2011)

XV Unidentified Species (2011)

Melancholy Girls (2010)

Black Tulip (2010)

Robert Notrot (2010)

Split Screen (2010)

DANCE AND THEATER