Artist in Focus: Ana Vaz

Our 2019 artist-in-focus is Ana Vaz, an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances speculate upon the relationships between myth & history, self and other through a cosmology of references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation – exploring the f(r)ictions imprinted upon ‘cultivated’ & ‘savage’ environments.

Ana joins us at the festival to present a special reading/screening around her upcoming debut feature film, The Voyage Out.

The Voyage Out takes the toxic disaster in Fukushima as a synecdoche of the impending ecological disaster and the possibility of renewal. It presents an ethnography of the future, an ethnography otherwise. Two years after the toxic disaster in Fukushima, a new island has emerged in the Ogasawara archipelago, in the far south of Japan. The Voyage Out stages, in a dreamlike and experimental form, the sensitive imaginary of these two places, and the way in which they compose a world crossed by the spectre of destruction and renewal.

Followed by a conversation between Ana and Charlotte Ashcroft (Film Hub Scotland) 

—

Arrows, Gazes, Points of Intensity: The Films Of Ana Vaz screens Saturday, 5:45pm

Our 2019 artist-in-focus is Ana Vaz, an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances speculate upon the relationships between myth & history, self and other through a cosmology of references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation – exploring the f(r)ictions imprinted upon ‘cultivated’ & ‘savage’ environments.

This collection of films proposes a critical reflection on the relationship between colonialism, modernity and the impending ecological disaster – exploring the colonial and post-colonial exchange between Europe and the Americas.

Interrogating the filmmaker’s gaze and relationship to the ‘other’, and through the development of a distinctively “embodied” cinema, Ana’s films explore complex relationships between environments, territories and hybrid histories, pushing the boundaries of our perception. Associations of images, sounds and texts, her works propose a corporeal and subjective experience of being in the world.

Followed by a conversation between Ana and artist Alexander Storey Gordon.

Curated by LUX Scotland

Part of our Artist in Focus: Ana Vaz series, which also includes a presentation by Ana around her upcoming feature film The Voyage Out, Sun 3:30pm