Ways of Looking

Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker who pursues the possibilities of what a camera can do and what a film can be. Her virtuosic and mesmerizing “film-poems” examine different chapters in the history of Brazil, specifically the lasting effects of colonialism on the land, plants and animals, and people. Vaz’s films effortlessly oscillate between myths and official archives, personal stories, and abstract, undulating musings on our relationship to the land and one other. Vaz is also a founding member of the collective COYOTE, an interdisciplinary group working across ecology and political science through an array of conceptual and experiential forms.

For the High Line, Vaz shares three films that each takes a different posture. 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) is a series of attempts at looking at being looked at. Vaz realized the film collaboration with high school students Vera Almaral and Mário Neto in response to a commission from Lisbon’s Galerias Municipais and the educational outreach program Descola (Unschool). The film is a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions, and wonders of the students who, over a period of one year with Vaz, questioned what cinema can be. The work Apiyemikyeki? (2019) takes up the lenses of archives and anthropology, examining the records of Egydio and Doroti Schwade, educators and Indigenous rights militants working with the Waimiri-Atroari in the Amazon in the 1970s. At the request of the Waimiri-Atroari, the Schwades’ initiated literary processes, at first using drawing exchanges based on Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. The film animates and transposes dozens of the drawings from the Schwades’ archive, following the story of the genocide that made way for the BR-174 highway connecting the cities of Manaus and Boa Vista. An earlier film, Há Terrra! (There is Land) (2016) shows Vaz’s early interest in the camera as itself an active participant in making a film. She describes the work: “Há Terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey.”

Ana Vaz, Ways of Looking, is organized by Melanie Kress, Curator of High Line Art.