Ana Vaz

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances explore complex relationships between environments, territories and hybrid histories pushing the boundaries of our perception. Some of the main themes in her films include colonialism, history, myth, Brazil and Portugal. These films carry a great deal of agitation and anxiety as they touch upon many issues that are considered taboo and sensitive—films that question relationships of “otherness”, western influences and the lasting impact of colonialism and how “modern” society is interacting with these forces. Recent screenings of her work include the Tate Modern, TABAKALERA, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel (Grand Prix) & specific focuses dedicated to her work at the Flaherty Seminar (USA) and Doc's Kingdom (Portugal). Her work has also featured in group shows such as the Moscow Biennial of Young Art, Videobrasil and the Dhaka Art Summit. She was also the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work.

Interview by Natalie Guzman

Filmography

• The Voyage Out (in process)

• Olhe bem as montanhas / Regardez bien les montagnes (in process)

• Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas (2016)

• Há Terra! (2016)

• A Film, Reclaimed, in collaboration with Tristan Bera, (2015)

• Occidente (2014)

• A Idade da Pedra (2013)

• Les Mains, Négatives, in collaboration with Julien Creuzet (2012)

• Entre Temps (2012)

• Sacris Pulso (2007)

Natalie Guzman: There is easily a very unique feeling that one notices when watching your films and so I wanted to talk a little about the different impacts that various film genres might have on people for example documentaries vs experimental or adventure films. I found your films very distinct in the way that they come off as sort of eerie, thriller and mysterious especially with Occidente and Ha Terra. I’m not sure if that was your intention, and if not I’d appreciate knowing what kind of genre you were going for and what is it about this genre that brings the issues that you wanted to communicate such as racism, colonialism and so forth come to life?

Ana Vaz: I would not say that neither Occidente nor Há Terra! fit = a specific genre. What I sense you allude to is the feeling of unease that these film entrance. As I mentioned to you earlier, I think these films carry a great deal of agitation, of anxiety as they touch on both totems and taboos that are embedded within the many histories that are entangled in what they figure. From the lunch scene to the staged hunt, from the zoo to the animal documentary footage, the traffic and staging of images that these films engage with reflect upon current and past conditions that are brought to life, that are literally animated in the films. I think they can be called ghostly, and this would be an interesting discussion about genre: what if what we call eerie and mysterious in ghost films is nothing but our confrontation with the traumatic characters and events of the past which return to haunt the present. In this sense, I think these films could finally be called ‘ghost films’.

OCCIDENTE

NG: The title Occidente, what does that term mean to you and what made you select it as a way to define this incredible film?

AV: Occidente is the title of a poem written by Fernando Pessoa in his final book, Message, which has an uncanny tone committed to colonial and fascist ideals. The film is a very loose and sauvage adaptation of this brief poem, which speaks of Portugal as godly hands shedding light, reason and will westwards. So in response, the film moves eastwards towards the coast of Europe looking to reverse its logic.

NG: I wanted to touch a little more upon Occidente. In Occidente, you showed statues frequently. I was interested to know what the statues symbolized or who they represented. Were they a conscious choice or did that happen organically? If it was a choice, why were they important for the film?

AV: In Occidente I film a number of different monuments that commemorate the odyssey of the ‘great navigations’, a period marked by the imprint of the faraway colonies kept by Portugal but officially absent from their imagery. The colonial enterprises and its subjects often only appear in the form of the goods and resources they could bring to the continent: sugar, wood, coffee, tropical fauna and flora, etc. In Occidente I look to stage a reverse ethnography, one in which I would study the landmarks of colonial culture not from the colonies but from the site that historically managed what entered and left to the colonies, in this case Lisbon.

Henceforth in a way, this is a film about traffic and the way this traffic transforms all things into goods to be consumed by the appetite of the never appeased modern subject. The monuments in the film appear in different ways, sometimes filmed from the perspective of a boat entering the coast of Lisbon (a clear reversal of the primal colonial image), sometimes in handheld movement at close distance and finally in a google maps digital render. Together these renditions look to trace the way in which even these monuments become consumable good for the eyes-lenses of contemporary tourism, which has become one of the major contemporary enterprises of extractivism, literally consuming what a ‘culture’, city, environment can offer through a few moments of pleasure and leaving rapidly stocked with images to show. Hence, in the film it is not just the monuments which grotesquely commemorate colonialism, but also the way in which they are de-historicized within the process of image-making, mass tourism and mapping.

NG: Do you consider yourself feminist filmmaker? If so, what sorts of responsibilities come with producing a film from a feminist perspective?

AV: I think feminism can really be a movement when it accounts for all minorities that it needs to empathize with. We raise our consciousness or sort of ethical institutions when we police our morality in cinema, art, politics and for me, this is really great to see as solidarity between women. There needs to be other perspectives included and sometimes we have to fight for that space. We need to address these issues (inclusiveness) and not just in a cinematic way but in a political way. There is no separation between the two. It’s more than being in the director’s chair pointing fingers but, the way in which the way I communicate with the people I work with, interact with them and the way I pay them.

NG: How would you say that people who are coming from certain privileges can approach issues they want to include in their film or other work areas, that they don't personally experience without being potentially problematic?

AV: I learned a lot from an American philosopher who addresses the question of ethics in a really wonderful way. She speaks about ethics as being a place for great anxiety. Not a place that you go to sleep or eat. It’s a place in which you’re always in trouble but you’re content about it. One day with your work, in regards to a person you’re working with, you might say “I have to be with her and there's just something that's going on there”. Or the next day you might say “I can't be there because my position there complicates her life”. But, the moment that you think you know this persons experiences as a person of privilege(s), you’re one step away from being very irresponsible. A majority of people who often do that, know nothing of the "other". But I think it's important to confront that fear. We are negotiating with the past, the present and probably the future and so how do I negotiate that in the world in which I live in? You have to be very attentive at all times, it's a continuous process.

NG: Aside from film, do you try to do any other work to continue to raise awareness around the types of issues that you touch upon in your films?

AV: My films have increasingly began to exist in multiple formats: installations, videos, texts, performances, readings, etc. exploding the films into other spaces, that are not the space of the cinema begins to gain some importance for me. These other spaces allow for a concomitance of temporal narratives (multiple screens, supports, surfaces) that the single screen of the cinema does not allow me to do. Otherwise, i am also very involved with Coyote, a collective i co-founded with Tristan Bera, Elida Hoeg, Nuno da Luz & Clémence Seurat who work at the intersection of formats, exploring territorial, ecological and social issues. We work at once as a conceptual collective as well as a communication agency trying to re-think the forms, language and images used to conceive of political discourse and mostly aim to re-think what is the political? how do we negotiate this space? with whom?

NG: For your work, what are your visions for its growth? What effect do you expect it to have on society?

AV: For me, making films is always already an extremely social endeavor as it often relies on constructing worlds alongside others, establishing alliances, learning new codes and languages, arriving at places of difficult access. Films are in and of themselves often social in its making and very social in its reception. Cinema has historically been a popular art, popular in the sense of being accessible to a diverse public. And hence cinema has something akin to the Greek agora as a gathering site for public discussion, as a common place for debate.

Hence, it is not only the space of cinema in what it proposes as a fiction/statement/idea but the debates that it may generate. It is an art form intimately bound to ritual and hence I think this ritualistic aspect of the cinema is and has been a transformative medium, for the best and for the worse, for the collective and for the individual, for the conscious and the unconscious.