A Idade da Pedra (Ana Vaz, 2013) / La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1971)

This is the first instalment in a new series of quarterly events organised together by BIMI and LUX.

BIMI in collaboration with LUX Artists’ Moving Image present a double-bill screening of A Idade da Pedra (2013) by Ana Vaz and Michael Snow’s La Région centrale (1971). The screening, curated by Filipa Ramos, will be followed by a conversation with Vaz and Ramos.
Expanding the representation of space towards a system of vision that considers other forms of movement beyond the more conventional latitude-longitude axes, Michael Snow’s film La Région Centrale (1971) and Ana Vaz’s video A Idade da Pedra (2013) offer, at a distance of more than forty years apart, two truly outlandish perceptive experiences. La Région Centrale (1971), Michael Snow’s three-hour film was shot in the Eastern Canadian forest in Quebec and relied on the creation of a complex mechanical apparatus which allowed for a 360° movement of a 16mm film camera in all directions. No human or animal presences are seen on land, water or sky, only the vast, semi-flat natural area that surrounds the plateaux where the machine was positioned: stones, mosses, clouds and a distant lake becoming its most distinctive features.
A Idade da Pedra takes place in the central plateau of Brazil, the sertão, an arid, endless plain, whose naturecultural characteristics are scanned in a profusion of detailed and intense portraits that reveal Vaz’s unique exploratory gaze. This landscape is the set for the artist to rethink the birth of the city of Brasília and its geological foundations, opening itself to a journey that becomes an intense moment of discovery of a hypothetical future as well as an occasion to reflect about the ideals and beliefs of modernism.
Gradually both films break all sorts of conventional relations to space and time: latitude and longitude make no more sense as forms of measuring distance and location; the linear conception of history is scattered, and the disciplinary borders of geology, geometry, geography are shaken and twisted, fused onto a whirlpool in which images and sound stimulate a trance-like effect and offer an experience as pensive as it is immersive.
(Filipa Ramos, October 2015)