Ana Vaz

Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian Midwest, which is inhabited by the ghosts buried under its modernist capital: Brasília. Her provocative filmography questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and an instrument capable of dehumanizing the human, broadening connections with non-human or spectral forms of life. Her artistic activities, resulting from or expanding on her filmmaking, are also embodied in writing, critical teaching, installations, or collective marches.

Her residency project is devoted to writing ANHNANGUERA, a screenplay under development for a tran(s/ce)historical fiction arising from the history of the colonization of the Brazilian Far West, which is Ana Vaz’s birthplace and the central axis of her entire filmography. The film is based on a wild interpretation of the book História da Terra e do Homem no Planalto Central [History of the Earth and Man in the Central Plateau] by Paulo Bertran, a historical kaleidoscope that intermingles geological, pre-modern, and modern time. The archive of the Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, a Catholic congregation based in Rome that was responsible for the evangelization of the country, is one of the guides for the writing of this cosmopolitical Western.

Portrait © Michiel Devijver