
Originally planned for 2021, the exhibition by artist Ana Vaz was one of the projects crossed by a significant time dilation in its production process. The exhibition, now on show at Pivô, entitled É NOITE NA AMÉRICA [IT’S NIGHT IN AMERICA], brings, besides other works, an instalative version of the homonymous film directed by the artist, exhibited at the Locarno Festival, in 2022, and that received a special mention in the Pardo Verde, an award dedicated to films with an environmental theme.
An eco-terror tale freely inspired by the reading of the book A cosmopolitics of animals, by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto, ‘É NOITE NA AMÉRICA’ follows the paths and detours of wild animals, fugitives from the destruction of the Brazilian cerrado in the middle of modern Brasília. In this book, adapted from her doctoral thesis, Juliana Fausto investigates, from a philosophical point of view, the political life of non-human beings and questions the idea of the exceptionality of the human species. After reading the book, Juliana Fausto and Ana Vaz began a dialogue and an exchange of correspondence – part of which was, in 2021, published in Pivô Magazine #2.
In the end, who are the real captives?
I take cinema to be a perspectivist medium, a medium able to produce infinite partial realities (Ana Vaz)
Consider the owls. An owl has such good hearing that it can find what to eat in total darkness. Bats, in turn, can see as well as humans, but have evolved a sophisticated sonic mechanism (described as echolocation) that enables them to navigate better and find food in the dark. Their distant maritime kins, scallops, have hundreds of eyes but no brain; their “vision” is therefore not premised on a sequel of “scenes”, but functions as a sort of motion-capture mechanism that tells them when to react. Humans, on the other hand, are highly dependent on their rather limited vision. Unlike scallops, our species’ brain combines information gathered by our two eyes into a single image. Within this restricted sight spectrum, we have created cinema, the quintessential domain of the visual, or at least what we humans perceive as frames in motion and narrative. Whether a cheesy romantic comedy or a hermetic structuralist feature, filmmakers mostly take for granted that their audience experiences their work with equal “perception devices”.
What would cinema in the dark look like? Could we learn to hear, smell and feel images like other species on their own terms? Maybe a scallop or a spider’s film would be far more intriguing than ours. Who knows how a picture would be framed to appeal to anteaters? For over a decade, artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz has been pursuing a type of cinema that happens around us, that slips out of the constraints and categories the genre is often subjected to, especially in the West. Vaz’s is a cinema of winds and waterfalls, that freely weaves together different times, contexts, and images from different provenances, be it human or non-human. Her films feel as if they are made in transit, reflecting a psycho-geographic life and a politically attentive gaze that stumbles between the flatlands of her native Brazil’s Mid-West, somehow a place she has never left, and a flickering territory she creates through juxtaposition.
In 2021, during her research phase, Vaz and the Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto started a conversation about the latter’s recently published book: A cosmopolítica dos animais [Animal Cosmopolitics]. The book is adapted from her Ph.D. thesis, in which she investigates, from a philosophical standpoint, the political life of other-than-humans beings in the context of the Anthropocene, or the Capitalocene, as Donna Haraway and Jason Moore, both key references for Fausto, put it. Her transdisciplinary philosophy problematizes the idea of the exceptionality of humankind and expands on the troubled and mostly violent coexistence between species in a world shaped by an anthropocentric mentality and a Western-Northern hegemony in the rest of the world.
Vaz’s first feature film, It is Night in America, presented at Pivô in a three-channel installation format, has a tangential approach to Fausto’s ideas and was shot entirely during the day with expired 16mm film stocks. Her thinking, and Guilherme Vaz’s music, intersect the imagery not as captions or explanations but as spectral presences and, in the music’s case, sometimes as a ballast. Even when the artist’s well-chiseled montage opts for a fading out or makes a sharp cut from her father’s strident metal chords to the giant otter’s shrills and squeals, the experimental symphony of his music somehow still echoes throughout the work. Paired with grainy images of cities and animals in twilight, dawn, and shadow, the music is essential to conveying the haunting “ecoterrorist” mood intended by Ana.
Ana’s father, Guilherme Vaz, is a groundbreaking multimedia artist and composer, who was a member of the 1970s’ avant-garde movements. She borrowed one of his unreleased songs as a guiding thread to weave together scenes of an emptied Brasilia in between lockdowns and a cohort of feathered and furry fellas captured or, perhaps more accurately, invited to collaborate with Vaz and her crew. Oddly enough, the city’s zoo was built before the town was erected, so construction workers could be entertained by the animals brought in while they displaced the local fauna with concrete mixers and backhoe loaders. The film’s soundscape is treated as a work on its own, almost like a character. It could be seen simultaneously as a homage, an evocation of different times and species, and an attempt to communicate with beings with different perceptions and sensory devices.
It wouldn’t be too much to say that the philosopher’s thematic and methodological approach has similarly underscored the artist’s entire filmography. In line with Fausto’s reflections, her goal was to make a film “with” rather than “about” wild animals forced to live in urban environments, whether in the streets and residential areas or the zoo due to the dire consequences of the aforementioned and still dominant mentality in Brazil. But this was a premeditated plot – not at all – but rather a sly transgression of the highly methodical and hierarchical environment of the film métier. For its part, It is Night in America is filled with serendipity and risk. It is a film that waits and awaits: from the unpredictability of shooting with expired 16mm film, which sets the tone for the film’s peculiar texture and colors, to the precise moment when wild monkeys cross a street to jump the zoo’s fence and sneak some food in for their fellow captive.
It is a film of contingencies and more or less random encounters. It started with Vaz’s desire to connect two highly planned and consequentially flawed projects by Oscar Niemeyer: the Copan building, where Pivô is housed; and Brasilia, the reason why he abandoned the former project – which he defined as “a city within a city”– in order to create a real city over a complex ecosystem then perceived to be an empty piece of ground. From the top of the modernist building, a persistent forest can be seen, pushed out to the megalopolis’ outskirts. With this image in mind, Vaz went to Brasilia, and, while out walking, literally stumbled into the film’s plot: the corpse of a baby ant-eater, most probably run over by a car, as many are, while they try to subsist in an urban center because of the progressive devastation of their own natural habitat. Without the need for further explanation, she borrowed a headline from a local newspaper for the film’s synopsis:
“A young anteater found dead by the side of a road, a boa constrictor wanders in the suburbs of Taguatinga, a maned wolf is found in a farm in Sobradinho II, a small owl is rescued in the Radio Center district, a capybara swims in the ponds of Itamaraty Palace. The question is: are animals invading our cities, or are we occupying their habitat?
Ana Vaz refers to the film as coming out of the dark, a work that thinks and trembles with gloom. She used a day-for-night shooting technique – well known in the early days of filmmaking, reaching its peak during the heyday of Westerns. Vaz’s take on the technical aspects of her films has the same conceptual rigor of her sounds and images. The choice of expired film stock and the nod to the infamous genre that profited a great deal from spectacularizing violent strugles is not random. She is, in fact, calling attention to the precarious state in which the portrayed animals live and how this is a direct consequence of the land being used as a staging ground for Brazil’s ongoing five-century-long colonialist drama, culminating in the current corporatized neo-colonialism. Even though she always tackles pressing issues, nothing in Ana Vaz’s work is dogmatic. Her work is the ultimate result of what comes out of a sharp perception of a “dancing-breathing-watching body that has as its accomplice a film-dancing-moving-machine,” as she once wrote about Maya Deren. Now I borrow these same words to welcome you to her show.
Ana Vaz (1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker. Her film-poems walk along territories and events haunted by the impacts of colonialism and their imprint on land, human and other-than-human forms of life. Expansions or consequences of her films, her practice may also be embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs or ephemeral events.
Her films were presented and discussed at film festivals, seminars and institutions such as the Berlinale Forum Expanded, New York Film Festival, TIFF Wavelengths, Cinéma du Réel, CPH: DOX, Flaherty Seminar, Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, LUX Moving Images, Courtisane, among others. Recent exhibitions of her work include: “Penumbra” at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto (Venice); “Il fait nuit en Amérique ” at Jeu de Paume (Paris, France); 36th Panorama of Brazilian Art “Sertão” at MAM (São Paulo), “Meta-Arquivo 1964-1985: Space for Listening and Reading Dictatorship Stories” at Sesc-Belenzinho (São Paulo), Profundidad de Campo no Matadero (Madrid, Spain) and “The Voyage Out” at LUX Moving Images (London). In 2015, she received the Kazuko Trust Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of the artistic excellence and innovation of her work in moving image. In 2019, she received support from the Sundance Documentary Film Fund to complete her first feature film. She is a member and founder of the collective COYOTE, along with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, an interdisciplinary group that works in the fields of ecology and political science through experimental forms (conversations, drifts, publications, events and performances).
https://vimeo.com/anavaz
Originally planned for 2021, the exhibition by artist Ana Vaz was one of the projects crossed by a significant time dilation in its production process. The exhibition, now on show at Pivô, entitled É NOITE NA AMÉRICA [IT’S NIGHT IN AMERICA], brings, besides other works, an instalative version of the homonymous film directed by the artist, exhibited at the Locarno Festival, in 2022, and that received a special mention in the Pardo Verde, an award dedicated to films with an environmental theme.
An eco-terror tale freely inspired by the reading of the book A cosmopolitics of animals, by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto, ‘É NOITE NA AMÉRICA’ follows the paths and detours of wild animals, fugitives from the destruction of the Brazilian cerrado in the middle of modern Brasília. In this book, adapted from her doctoral thesis, Juliana Fausto investigates, from a philosophical point of view, the political life of non-human beings and questions the idea of the exceptionality of the human species. After reading the book, Juliana Fausto and Ana Vaz began a dialogue and an exchange of correspondence – part of which was, in 2021, published in Pivô Magazine #2.
Shot entirely on expired 16mm film reels and with the cinematic technique of American night (day for night), the film narrates the grim plot of the arrival and survival of this fleeing fauna in search of refuge on a “planet with many refugees and few refuges”, in the words of Juliana Fausto quoting Anna Tsing.
For the soundtrack of this eco-terror, Vaz uses the composition Panthera Onca by Guilherme Vaz, her father, multimedia artist and composer. In the film, the spectator is provoked to reflect the visible and subjective effects of colonialism on different bodies, territories and species. In an experimental and non-linear approach, we witness stories and experiences such as that of Macau, a giant otter born in Dortmund in Germany and transferred to Brasilia zoo in order to “repopulate the land of its ancestors”, in the artist’s words.
The installation ‘IT’S NIGHT IN AMERICA’ is a commission and production by Fondazione In Between Art Film, with co-production by Ana Vaz, Spectre Productions and Pivô with additional support from Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Ana Vaz is one of the most relevant contemporary artists and filmmakers, having her films and exhibitions circulated through several museums, festivals and film libraries. Her work is noticiable by a constant experimental challenge on the poetic forms of contemporary cinema, highlighting the profound contradictions of our time, and questioning, above all, the destructive practices of the colonial modernity.
Service:
Ana Vaz: É NOITE NA AMÉRICA [IT’S NIGHT IN AMERICA]
Curator: Fernanda Brenner
Exhibition period: 03/09/2022 to 06/11/2022
Wednesday to Sunday, from 12 pm to 18 pm
Opening: 03/09/2022, at 1pm
Free entry