The film’s mise-en-scène, the wax museum, is an odd collection of history: in a time-palimpsest and through the actor’s mimetic voice, a gallery of talking heads delivers a blend of historical speeches and purely fictional statements at times sourced from a tape-record. The speeches are punctuated by the female character that, just like Penelope, knits a thread into an ordinary jumper. As in a choir, the film is underpinned by the structure of the tragedy – the search of a child as well as the absent husband – albeit with the chronology of the narrative running in one day only just as in Joyce’s Ulisses. The structure of Hanan’s speech unfolds - a Diotima constantly interchanging her personal memories with the track of recent history – hovering along the factual, the prosaic, between existential enquiry and historical account, and between tragedy and irony in a babelian overlay of languages and texts. Hence, just as important as the dialogue weaved into a thread of samples (almost the product of a literary DJ), the afterword sums up all contributions resulting as it where in an historical “leporello”. Affektenlehre is a sound installation where bellicose sounds are repeated in a rhythmic mantra while the sound of our steps is hushed in a layer of black rubber. The physical nature of the experience, the film’s long haul, the complexity of the text and intensity of the sound experience conjoin to turn this installation into a bodily-felt essay about contemporaneity but also about the experience of the most unsettling strangeness that comes through in the closely familiar.

FataMorgana is always a ripple of fantasy, an act of witchcraft that transmutes forms by warping them, the cause of aquatic mirages, inversions, elevations, collapses and collages of images. These fantastic visions continue to exist, even though they are now called optical illusions, and they are always generated by atmospheric conditions. In Salomé Lamas’ film (and in all other elements in the project, such as the one which we are explained what is Fata Morgana or FataMorgana) we can observe, sometimes just through guesswork, these variations in the use of the term, stressing that what is happening is a meteorological event, the present weather, with the previously observed reach, here exuded by the war in Lebanon, the invasion of Iraq, the Syrian war and their ruins.

Light Reading was Lis Rhodes’s first voice-over film and her first explicitly feminist work, finished just a year before the publication of her important essay “Whose History?” Like Rhodes, Salomé Lamas appears to believe in repetition and in the inevitable circularity of language and history. Fatamorgana is more and less than a film… It is also more and less than a book. A wordy two hour moving image work with 106 footnotes (yes, actual footnotes) and 111 characters, all rigorously enumerated and referenced in the film’s “index,” Fatamorgana is in fact a film that requires to be “read” like a book. A one-off viewing may be disorientating, for how could a spectator, however focused and willing, comprehend, process and integrate such an exhaustive amount of information and instruction?

Over the course of many years Salomé Lamas has been establishing her film-making within the realm of essay-research thus putting forward the critical tools that capture both documentary and fiction. Her aim is to give voice to invisible or silent lives. As an approach, the essay works to multiply fragmented and open hypotheses upon a provisional corpus coupled with a research approach which builds an articulated narrative. […] The singularity of Salomé Lamas' work lies in the dialogue of different modes of signification (writing, film, theatre, performance). The originality of this work draws from its polygraph-like nature which ends up delivering a large-scale mapping of contemporary artistic creation which is understood in its transdisciplinary dimensions – this gives evidence of a research which is embedded with present time but which also frames a process in the making.