On Gold and Ashes: Representing Trauma and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

Our first object of inquiry and care should be life. We know the reason for that as we are living beings in a situation in which the conditions of life are endangered. What has no place in this insisting ecological discourse is death. The fact that death is difficult to acknowledge is not new, but in our contemporary situation, death has a new face.

The project “Gold and Ashes” extends beyond representation to become an intimate act of excavation that proposes to mediate — materially, politically, and metaphysically — the reappropriation of death as a power and our sovereignty as mortal beings in the private and social spheres.

Through selected excerpts and a discussion around the project’s production mediated by Susana Viegas and Lucas Ferraço Nassif, with the artist and filmmaker Salomé Lamas, we will speculate on the implications of representing trauma and the aesthetics of disappearance.

This event will take place exclusively in person at NOVA FCSH on March 6th at 6:00 PM. The event will be recorded and made available on the IFILNOVA YouTube channel.

Bio

Salomé Lamas is a Portuguese filmmaker, visual artist and educator. For the last fifteen years and with a steady production of more than thirty projects, Salomé Lamas’ work has been contextualized in visual culture, artistic studies, and film studies, exhibited and distributed internationally in the fields of cinema (movie theatres, festivals, VOD streaming) and contemporary art (galleries, museums, art fairs, biennials). She has been developing an artistic practice which explores the embedded relation between representation and the narrative power of social reality while proposing something different. Around, but not beyond, the real: beyond, but not besides, the fictional. To address the efforts to expand such interstice she refers to her work as critical media practice parafictions.

Lamand is a research artist studio that advocates for parafiction by rejecting the boundaries between reality and fiction to rethink a state of uncertainty inherent to our historical moment through cinema/contemporary art. Lamaland’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes and production strategies that range from film, to publications and installation. More info here.