Ana Vaz
Working across film, installation, and expanded cinema, Ana Vaz approaches the moving image as a medium where the visible and the invisible intersect. Her practice interrogates cinema’s capacity not only to represent reality but also to attune perception to forms of life and temporalities that exceed the human.
A Árvore [The Tree] is a ritual-film and an elegy, conceived as a tribute to the filmmaker’s father, Guilherme Vaz (1948–2018). A Brazilian composer, experimental musician, and one of the pioneers of conceptual and sound art in Brazil, Guilherme Vaz appears throughout Ana Vaz’s filmography in a continuous dialogue between music, sound, and place. The film unfolds through fragments of recorded conversations between father and daughter, carried across landscapes that mark both their lives. As a spectral cartography, it gathers historical, emotional, and more-than-human energies, transforming cinema into a space of continuity between generations, species, and worlds.
In patient attention to what ordinarily remains at the edges of cinema—silence, inherited knowledge, forests, peoples, and places—A Árvore enacts a form of radical kinship with the living world. It asks what it means to carry another’s voice through landscapes they loved, extending mourning into a meditation on the entanglement of human and more-than-human life, and on the forms of knowing that modernity has tried, but failed, to silence.
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian midwest inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of transforming human perception, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Her film-poems are marked by a constant experimental defiance to the poetic forms of contemporary cinema, highlighting the profound contradictions of our time and questioning, above all, the destructive practices of colonial modernity.
Recent showings of her work include 18th Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, Turkey); “Once within a time”, 12th SITE SANTA FE (New Mexico, USA); “O que aconteceu ainda está porvir”, solo exhibition at Cinema Batalha (Porto, Portugal) and at Solar (Vila do Conde, Portugal); “It is Night in America” solo exhibition at Jeu de Paume (Paris, France) and Pivô (São Paulo, Brazil); High Line Channels (NYC, USA); “Do you believe in ghosts?” at 24th Prix de la Fondation Ricard (Paris, France); “Shéhérazade, at night” at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France); Locarno Film Festival, Cineasti del Presente (Switzerland, 2022); Berlinale, Forum Expanded (Germany, 2023, 2021, 2020); MoMA Doc Fortnight (New York, USA, 2023); and artist in focus at EXIS – Experimental Film & Video Festival (Seoul, South Korea), Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo, Brazil) and Courtisane (Ghent, Belgium).
With the support of the French Embassy in Belgium and the Institut français — as part of EXTRA, a program that supports French contemporary creation in Belgium.
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b. 1986, Brasilia, Brazil.
Lives and works in Paris, France.
A Árvore [The Tree] 2022
16mm transferred to HD and 2K, single-channel, colour, sound
20' 32"
Commissioned by Azkuna Zentroa