2014 / 15' 15

Filmed in Lisbon in search for the originals of our colonial history I found copies. Brazilians, the new worlders fluent in glitz, entertain the Portuguese in awe and discomfort, colonial norms applied and reapplied. Chinese porcelain seem to signal the hybrids to come: the Chinese dressed as Europeans, the Brazilian maid dressed as an European 19th century servant. 15th century porcelain becomes reproducible readymades that set the tables for the new colonies - a trans-Atlantic calling. Ouro novo reads new money. As a poem without full stops, as a breathe without breathing, the voyage travels eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table.

Ana Vaz, artist and filmmaker, was born on the Brazilian Midwest inhabited by the ghosts buried by the modernist federal capital Brasília. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and as an instrument capable of transforming the human perception, expanding its connections and becoming with other forms of life - both other-than-human and spectral. Consequences or expansions of her cinematography, her activities are also incorporated into writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks.