Gold and Ashes, Project 2022-2024[Ouro e Cinza/Gold and Ashes 2024 - Core of the Project, Gold and Ashes/Redux 2024]
Gold and Ashes (2022-2024) is a multiform project that comprises the film Ouro e Cinza / Gold and Ashes (2024) — core of the project, and the installation Gold and Ashes / Redux (2024).
Gold and Ashes, Project (2022 – 2024) comprises the film Ouro e Cinza / Gold and Ashes (2024) — core of the project and the installation Gold and Ashes / Redux (2024)
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. It is structured around a concrete plane and an abstract plane, as a reference to human subjectivity.
It is played by two female actresses. a) A mother and a daughter in the concrete plane, b) two disconnected entities (not sure if aware of each other) in the abstract plane.
While the concrete plane plot conveys a social sphere outlined by complex communication models and conventions (such as kinship), but also underlining a constructed reality (an inhabited drawing) that holds existential quests; the abstract plane displays a sort of mental ‘labyrinth’ with a para-philosophical text that addresses the relationship of the characters, unveiling power dynamics, conflicting human emotions and draws a parallel on humanity's relation to planet earth, a reality product of symbolic and imaginary articulations, damaged by loss of the social, political and spiritual.
Overall, it 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 the earth system [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.
O Som e a FuriaFoi bonita a Festa
OURO E CINZA / GOLD AND ASHES
(2024)
4K HD vídeo, 2:39, color, dolby 5.1 sound, 89 min, Portugal
Production: O Som e a Fúria, Foi Bonita a Festa
Development support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual, MEDIA – Europa Criativa, Camargo Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, FLAD – Fundação Luso Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo
Support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual, RTP – Radio Televisão Portuguesa, FILMA PORTO – Film Commission.
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] civilizations.
The fragmented narrative is perforated by unexpected moments of clarity and acumen.
O Som e a Furia
Foi bonita a Festa
(2024)
4K HD vídeo, 2:39, color, dolby 5.1 sound, 89 min, Portugal
Production: O Som e a Fúria, Foi Bonita a Festa
Development support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual, MEDIA – Europa Criativa, Camargo Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, FLAD – Fundação Luso Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo
Support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual, RTP – Radio Televisão Portuguesa, FILMA PORTO – Film Commission.
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] civilizations.
The fragmented narrative is perforated by unexpected moments of clarity and acumen.
O Som e a Furia
Foi bonita a Festa
GOLD AND ASHES / REDUX
(2024)
Production: Lamaland, Primeira Idade(2024)
Additional support: Dgartes – Direção Geral das Artes, Yaddo
Support: Fundación la CaixaProduced with materials collected during the production of Gold and Ashes
Coproduction: O Som e a Fúria, Foi Bonita a Festa
Development support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual, MEDIA – Europa Criativa, Camargo Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, FLAD – Fundação Luso Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo
Support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual, RTP – Radio Televisão Portuguesa, FILMA PORTO – Film Commission.
A multidisciplinary installation that inquires how scale, which establishes technological conditions and expectations that cement the positions from which we perceive the world, can be reimagined.
La Caixa
Lamaland
[…] 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. […]
On Parafiction (excerpt), Sara Magno[…] 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. […]
Letter on communication (excerpt) Fréderic Neyrat
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.
Terrafictions: Notes on georealism (excerpt), Giovanbattista Tusa
