Gold and Ashes is erected upon internal and external — ontological-epistemological — scaling dualities reflected in the characters but also in the time and space where the action is set or in the world they inhabit. It is structured around a concrete plane and an abstract plane as a reference to, human subjectivity.
    The project features two female actresses. The concrete plane plot is set in filming locations that provide a backdrop for the narrative with direct dialogues and action — mother-and-daughter, placed in the present time. It conveys a social sphere outlined by complex communication models and conventions — such as kinship and existential quests while underlining the artificiality of a constructed reality — an inhabited drawing.
    The abstract plane plot is set in a film studio that provides a backdrop for the para-philosophical narrative with monologues and no action — two disconnected entities (not sure if aware, of each other), placed in an unknown time. It conveys a mental labyrinth outlined by relational power dynamics and conflicting human emotions — such as humanity’s history and its relation to planet Earth while underlining the speculation of symbolic and imaginary articulations damaged by the loss of the social, political, and spiritual.
    Overall, the project unfolds around cognitive systems, societal models, and civilizational paradigms, and uses an approach that acknowledges human evolution, simultaneously outlining human limitations to follow the poetics and relational politics of two grand narratives —  [a]naturalism, [anti]eco/[geo] constructivism — which usher the mythology of the human impact on Earth (Anthropocene); compelled by two timeless perspectives: progress and apocalypse — questioning our ability to rebuild and pilot the Earth away from the 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 is a powerful exploration of the human condition in the face of devastation, reflecting Lamas’s ongoing commitment to addressing difficult and urgent themes through innovative techniques that often disrupt traditional narrative structures, creating films that are non-linear, fragmented, or that deliberately withhold key information. This technique enhances the parafictional quality of her work, as it mirrors the complexity and uncertainty of real-life events, where truth is often elusive.
    In the project she explores the idea of subjective memory and how personal and collective histories are constructed. By using parafiction, she highlights the fluidity of memory and the ways in which stories are shaped by the storyteller’s perspective, as well as by political and social contexts.
    Gold and Ashes symbolizes the duality of destruction and resilience—the “ashes” represent the remnants of war and loss, while the “gold” signifies the hope and strength that survivors cling to in their efforts to rebuild their lives. Lamas uses her distinctive style to blur the lines between reality and fiction, creating a layered and immersive experience that challenges viewers to question their understanding of truth and memory and its impact in both the private and public spheres.

GOLD AND ASHES / REDUX (2025)

[…] The artist’s interest in impenetrable, politically ambiguous contexts is guided by concerns and the need to problematize reality that otherwise would not be possible. The web of relations making up the socio-political fabric of her projects is made visible through representational strategies, for which she adopted the term parafiction. […]

A parafiction would be something in which fiction has been perverted, altered, modified or pushed beyond its point of reference, as opposed to remaining within the boundaries of the category of fiction. It can also be understood as a “simulation” of fiction, pointing to a distortion of the border around what is considered fiction, thus reaching what is on the other side of that border: that is, the world of non-fiction, or seeking the “real” world. Thus, instead of fiction being used to blur the border with non-fiction, it is used as a way of expanding and transcending those boundaries.

Salomé Lamas departs from the principle that we do not have access to a stable reality. Instead we have an excess of meanings, interpretations, explanations, manipulations, (de)constructions and evaluations that go into narratives and systems that sustain and occupy us. Consequently, the need for appropriating the idea of parafiction stems from the questioning of how human subjectivity is formed, drawing on psychoanalysis, with the aim of clarifying and expanding concepts such as real (something that is out of reach), reality, symbolic and imaginary. […] 

I wondered if there really is a separation, in what Jacques Lacan would propose of an alienation (in language) and a separation (of the daughter from her mother - castration - which we find in the concept of lamella, of the libido that separates the breast from the mouth and allows breastfeeding, which supplies the drives by occupying the erogenous zones). But isn't the concept of the unconscious already saying that separation is impossible, that something revolts in the face of separation? Chantal Akerman only lives as long as her mother lives. The death of the mother is the death of Chantal Akerman. The impossible, the real, is separation. What happens if we think that the separation - or rather: the separations - are in the real, not in the symbolic? They, the separations, are atomic, molecular. Separations are the power of anti-gravitational delirium and dreams that take place in the real; they are anti-molar because they escape the fall of bodies by producing other bodies. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose an orphaned unconscious in order to disorganize a familist, familiar unconscious. Their film places the name Irma on a daughter, in a strange familiarity that produces a question: is every daughter a sister? Who would be the mother of these sisters? Orphaned sisters? The process of analyzing two orphaned sisters. The death of parents is to make them our siblings; is that what we can learn from psychoanalysis? Is the process of analysis always like this: becoming siblings with parents and others? In the unconscious, we are nomadic siblings, problem children living in temporary orphanages.

[…] Communication as experience is co-respondence, a connection that requires separation to happens. It is not preceded by anything, even if, when it takes place, everything that precedes it is rightly called upon - history, customs, meanings and dictionaries, codes and techniques, conventions. Correspondence, I would say under the influence of Walter Benjamin, creates a monad. It is a space where two different times communicate. You and I are not from the same time. You are like a distant star that may already be dead when I speak to you, or even when you “speak” to me. It’s the same on my side, and heterogeneous times are never unified, they correspond in a flash, and sometimes the half-charred traces of their meeting remain on the ground, those sleepy archives I mentioned earlier. Now, you know that by communicating we mean exactly the opposite of that; we assume two disjointed spaces, and a simultaneity that links them to each other, through contact, contagion, transmission of signals, etc. At this point, it seems to me that contagion, viral transmission, whether we think of it literally or metaphorically, whether we’re talking about a virus or information, is a failure of communication, not its success. I mean: its concealment. […]

We’ve known that “Eros is sick” ever since the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and the writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Not only has Eros not recovered since the 1960s,  but worse still, Eros now shares his misfortune with Hermes, the god of exchange and communication. A sick Hermes: it seems to me that this is what Salomé Lamas' fascinating film Gold and Ashes is all about .

[...]

So, let’s imagine, what if the meta-physical dimension of philosophical-poetic formulas came to meet (again) the physical one, where Carmo and Irma suffer from not getting along? Would they be able to find each other again? After all, the film begins with a question against a white background, the whiteness of the original trauma that keeps dissolving the mother-daughter relationship from within: “Where am I?”, followed by a question addressed to another: “Where were you?” I can imagine this: if the metaphysical dimension were to meet (again, again for the first time) the physical dimension, even for a moment, in a flash, the mother would lose her coldness and the daughter her illusion about her mother. A kind of dazzling psychoanalysis would deliver Hermes, bringing him out of his apathy, giving him back a taste for laughter, for words that leave room for the other, underpinning the community of beings who lose themselves together. Gold would glisten in the ashes.

The real (…) is the impasse of every representation, its impossibility, the infinity of what remains surrounding, what cannot be captured in it. The archives that define the boundaries of our history collect only what is important to the archive itself, that is, what somehow anchors the fluctuating possibilities in the present and organizes the experience of time. The real has an alienating effect because it is paradoxically perceived as all that is not collected in the archive, as its unarchivable outside.

[…]

In recent years, there has been a growing sense that the ground on which Western reason had established its dominion is crumbling beneath our feet, and that every system of orientation that has hitherto governed our actions is breaking down. In fact, it is precisely what “we” are that seems to be collapsing. Precisely this panic, which according to Latour gnaws at everyone equally, «at the former colonizers as well as at the formerly colonized» , would then be the new condition of our time: the new universality would consist in the common feeling that our ground «is in the process of giving way».  The collapse of this unique ground should therefore reveal that far from being unitary and global, today’s world is instead a plurihistorical and multidifferentiated series of processes cascading across multidirectional waves of colonial, genocidal, and extractive modernities.

[…]

A necessary form of realism today requires a new sense of presence that precedes any representation, and at the same time the ability to perceive a world «peopled not with things but with forces, not with subjects but with powers, not with bodies but with bonds» . A context surrounds and embraces, yet remains imperceptible. The environment is thus an uninterrupted presence, it’s never in front of us but it is always all around. It coexists with the actual present, is here now, but in the mode of inactuality. Therefore, a georealistic materialism cannot be a realized, complete thought.