5:30 minutes
In Luiz Roque’s short film Zero we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert. The dog seems tranquil as if keeping up with its daily routine in an environment in which the human presence is completely absent. The disturbing image of the animal left adrift — perhaps the only remaining living being in existence — is interspersed with the shiny mirrored surface of high-tech skyscrapers emerging out of the sand, in what might have once been an oasis. The continuum is only interrupted by the word ZERO. In times in which emerging technology points to the overcoming of the very concept of the human, the contrast between the desert’s dust, the futuristic skyline, and the lone creature seems like a timely alert to the environmental and social consequences of much of the political and economic choices of the 20th century. The film suggests an inevitable return to a sort of ground zero of the species, whatever this might be. The inconclusiveness of its plot makes us wonder about extinction, whether it concerns either the disappearance of the human race itself or perhaps of the cultural construct that we call “human civilization”.
Brazilian artist Luiz Roque’s production consists largely of short duration open-ended cinematic narratives, in which he places mysterious characters (either gender-fluid dancers, famous drag queens, animals, landmark modernist buildings or historical artworks) creating dreamlike and sci-fi atmospheres. Roque’s sets unfold through suspended time and are at once prehistoric and dystopic, familiar and odd. To compose his visually engaging and well-chiseled allegories, he relies on different film formats and cinematography techniques (HD, super-8,16mm, etc), as well as original soundtracks to address pressing issues such as queer-bioethics, the legacy and the failure of modernism, the cultural overstimulation of the 21st century, and the problematics of automation and artificial intelligence. His films may be fantastical, but they fall far from an escapist fantasy.
Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524...
The video Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means by Sin Wai Kin is from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere...
Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78 - The New York Times Movies | Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/movies/nancy-buirski-dead.html Share full article Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan...
Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...
Singapore Street Art: The Legal Rebels (Part 2) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints Courtesy of Not Safe For TV July 23, 2020 Artist Sam Lo gained notoriety in 2012 after getting arrested for stencilling the phrase ‘My Grandfather Road’ on a public road...