Date: Tuesday, 31 May, 18.00-20.00

Registration: To join the meetings you need to register at margot.edstrom@iac.lu.se and there will be room for max 15 attendees at each occasion. No entrance fee.

Location: Black Room, IAC, Bergsgatan 29, 214 22 Malmö, 4th floor

Last month we watched the visually compelling and eerily politically foreboding Extinction from 2018 by Portuguese director and artist Salomé Lamas. Now we present two short films by her:

Hotel Royal (2021, 29 min)

‘In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown’, says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupts this dynamic.

Hotel Royal is a fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

Extraction: The Raft Of The Medusa (2019–2020, 10 min)

The film is described as a meditation on humanity’s massive redesign of the planet and a dystopic pamphlet on the anthropocene. It portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the drifting occupants on the raft, hoping and praying to be rescued, appear to glimpse a possibility of salvation. We can almost hear the hoarse cries through which they attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering a final ounce of strength before the void. This is their last chance of survival. Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa refers to the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of high biodiversity in order to reduce life to its conversion into a resource through capitalism, with an enormous environmental and social impact. It is an allegory for states of emergency in environmental policy, climate and migration, with an ethical-political purpose.

Artist statement

In a fertile occupation of ‘no man’s land’, Lamas refers to her work as critical media practice parafictions. Rather than conventionally dwelling in the periphery between cinema and the visual arts, fiction and documentary, Lamas has been attempting to make these languages her own, treading new paths in form and content, challenging the conventional methods of film production, modes of exhibition and the lines between various filmic and artistic forms of aesthetic expression.These works of modified ethnography show an interest in the intrinsic relationship between storytelling, memory, and history, while using the moving image to explore the traumatically repressed, seemingly unrepresentable, or historically invisible, from the horrors of colonial violence to the landscapes of global capital.

Biography

Salomé Lamas (Lisbon) studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam and is a Ph.D candidate in contemporary art studies in Coimbra. Her work has been screened both in art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, BAFICI, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB – Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF, Museu Serralves, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Bozar , Tabakalera, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, Mostra de São Paulo, CAC Vilnius, MALBA, FAEMA, SESC São Paulo, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others. Lamas was granted several fellowships such as the Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship – Harvard University, The Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Brown Foundation – Dora Maar House, Fundación Botín, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Sundance, Bogliasco Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. She collaborates with Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola. She collaborates with the production company O Som e a Fúria and is represented by Galeria Miguel Nabinho and Kubikgallery.