Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose practice intersects cinema, installation and performative text. In the limbo of the contamination between historical-ethnographic elements and fictionalized speculations, her pieces dissect the destructive practices of our time and, perhaps, of those yet to come. Deeply engaged with colonial and environmental modernity, Vaz’s films imprint sensorially charged experiences that test human perception, expanding it beyond itself, and to other forms of life.

The artist's relationship with Curtas Metragens CRL began with the presence of two of her films in the Experimental Competition of Curtas Vila do Conde - International Film Festival: Entre Temps, in 2013, and Há Terra!, in 2016. These touchpoints paved the way for a new and wide-ranging project, the centerpiece of which being her original exhibition O que aconteceu ainda está porvir [What happened is yet to come].

Ana Vaz presents the second and new episode of her ongoing series of cinematographic poems, which weaves, in the artist's words, “a sci-fi ethnography of different European capitals as axes of colonial thought”. “The cities are seen as hallucinations, revealing what seems absent and contaminates what we see: their colonial past and future disasters. Past and future, stories and omens intertwine under the prismatic gaze of authors such as Isabel Carvalho, Maïa Tellit Hawad and Olivier Marboeuf.”

The first chapter was commissioned and exhibited at the Pernod Ricard Foundation's 24th contemporary art prize in Paris, 2023. Galeria Solar, in partnership with Batalha Centro de Cinema, presents this new chapter dedicated to the city of Porto, shown in an articulated way in both spaces, through moving image installations, expanded sound work and research documents, which fragment this new cinematographic piece into an exhibition logic.

In parallel, in partnership with Circular Performing Arts Festival, the project will expand to Vila do Conde’s Municipal Theatre, where there will not only be a performative reading led by the artist - or, more precisely, by her voice - but also a screening of four of her films: Occidente, Há Terra!, Apiyemiyeki? and A Idade da Pedra. At the Cinema Batalha, meanwhile, the short film Meteoro will be screened, followed by a conversation that promises to summon up some of the discourses on which this film series was built.