The films of Ana Vaz activate and question cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with other-than-human or spectral forms of life. 

In her exhibition at the Secession, Vaz will showcase her new film series Meteoro dedicated to drawing a critical anthropology of contemporary Europe through its landmarks and infrastructures in capitals of empire such as Paris and Porto. Through historical excavations, spectral hallucinations and anticipatory narratives, Vaz’s work reveals the negative imprint of an empire founded upon colonial violence, displacement, erasures, extraction and waste. Shot with high contrast black and white film, emphasising the fictive archaeology implicit in the images, Meteoro forges an archive of the present, guided by the hands and vision of a future traveler whose gaze is the very embodiment of the film and whose sightings are based upon performed contributions by Caribbean writer and performer Olivier Marboeuf, Tuareg researcher Maïa Tellit Hawad and Portuguese artist Isabel Carvalho. 

Recalling Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives—also a “portrait of colonial Paris”—and Chris Marker’s La Jetée—with its incursions into the Jardin des plantes, a most perfect synthesis of modern science with its colonial foundations—Meteoro also enacts a reverse genealogy of cinema, one that is not born out of the Lumière Brothers’ fixed camera awaiting a train, but rather out of an embodied camera that perforates the guts of empire. Modern cities appear on the verge of collapse as new forms of temporalities, perspectives and lives emerge from within the abyss.