Pivô Boulevard, in partnership with MUDAM (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg), welcomes artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz, psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik, architect Dilton de Almeida, and curator Fernanda Brenner for an encounter shaped by projections, errant walks, listening sessions, sensorial experiences, and open conversations. Over the course of ten days and nights, the three participants will exchange experiences, inhabit the city, and trace marginalia in order to compose a poetic cartography that transcends any map or direction. Free improvisation is the only possible score.

Ana Vaz situates cinema as a perspectivist medium, capable of producing “world-forms that favor the partial over the whole, tribes over the people, the ground over figures, the land over its heroes.” From É Noite na América, an eco-terror film shot on expired 16mm among the fleeing animals of the Brasília savanna, to Apiyemiyekî?, which animates thousands of Waimiri-Atroari drawings as a living memory of colonial genocide, her filmography embodies critical manifestos of the history of modernity, focusing on the contradictions of her hometown, Brasília. As the artist traces a sensitive cartography through her films, the encounters with Suely, Dilton, and the city of Salvador become the air, fire, earth, and water of this borderless map.

Suely Rolnik is a fundamental reference in Vaz’s trajectory. Her thinking proposes the de-anesthetization of the body, activating a form of knowledge that precedes consciousness and operates as a path toward decolonizing the colonial–racial–hetero-cis-patriarchal–capitalist unconscious. Her lived-writing invites us to embrace the fragility of the unstable state into which experience throws us, to avoid rushing the time of creative imagination, and to practice an insurrection that takes place in affect before it reaches discourse. This is the very twisting of the gaze that Vaz performs with the camera and that Rolnik claims as an ethical gesture: seeking, within the magma of violence, the germs of life that surround us.

Dilton de Almeida, author of Brasília Fantasma, maps the ghostly images of the capital through a diasporic movement between Brazil and Nigeria, reclaiming insurgent and counter-colonial experiences that survive despite the violence imposed upon them. At the crossroads between progress and catastrophe, his spectral prose shares with Vaz both a territory of origin and a commitment to decentered, polyphonic narratives that render visible futures interrupted by the colonial project.

Between golems and ghosts, utopias and zombies, the encounter seeks to probe the modern unconscious, opening fissures between body and image, trace and apparition, cinema and ruin.

This conversational experience will serve as the basis for an experimental essay to be published in the catalogue dedicated to Ana Vaz’s work, on the occasion of her first monographic publication, released in the context of a solo exhibition at MUDAM in Luxembourg. Titled The Camera Is the Body (November 2026 to April 2027), the exhibition was conceived in collaboration with architect Anna Ferrari and curator Fernanda Brenner, with music by composer Guilherme Vaz. The exhibition brings together films, installations, and derivations from the past fifteen years of the artist’s work and her alliances with thinkers, poets, musicians, animals, and specters—an ecosystem of collaborations in dialogue with telluric, territorial, and spectral forces.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Twisting the Gaze: Cinema and Insurrection
Conversation with Ana Vaz, Dilton de Almeida, and Suely Rolnik
Moderated by Fernanda Brenner
February 26 (Thursday), 6 pm
Pivô Boulevard – Rua Boulevard Suíço, 11A, Nazaré, Salvador
Free admission