Photo: Romy Pocztaruk, ela mesma

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How to imagine the future beyond technological advances? Interplanetary travel, brain chips, synthetic food, cellular robots, teleportation – we know that none of this is unattainable from a scientific point of view. But attainable for what? To whom? Who will survive the continuous destruction to which the Earth is subjected?

In an environment that transports us to a movie theater, Romy Pocztaruk presents us with his new film, Antes do Azul / "Before the Blue". For just over ten minutes, we are subjected to a sequence of subtly narrative and radically sensory scenes, a stream of thought-images about existence and violence, about the passage of time, about technologies of death, about the power of animal and mineral bodies, about art as a possible trace to be left by humanity when it ceases to resist its omnipotence itself.

At the very beginning, the strangeness that we will experience already announces itself in the presence of an unusual element, a glove with red nails. The hand that wears this glove searches for crystals gathered on a small table. These are mineral substances, and their mystery, that the similarly mysterious hand gropes. A black woman, portrayed by actress and singer Valéria (formerly Valéria Huston), occupies the energetic center of the film. Now, it is she herself who collects rock fragments and deposits them inside her clothes, as if seeking a fusion between the long-torn bodies. Already in this scene, our gaze sees not only union but conflict, rough impasse, desire, which are feelings that permeate all the images.

COLORIZED PICTURES USED IN THE MOVIE

By Matheus Heinz

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Spirit of the times

Opening text by “Antes do Azul” exhibition at Instituto Ling, in Porto Alegre, 2019/2020

How can we envision the future beyond the technological advances? Interplanetary spaceflights, brain chips, synthetic foods, cellular robots, teleportation – we know these things aren’t unachievable from a scientific point of view. But for what purpose are they achievable? For whom? Who will survive the continuous destruction that Earth is enduring?

In a place that evokes a movie theater, Romy Pocztaruk presents her new film, “Before the Blue”. For a little more than ten minutes, we’re subjected to a sequence of subtly narrative and radically sensorial scenes, a stream of images/thoughts about existence and violence, the passage of time, death technologies, the power of animal and mineral bodies, and art as a possible trace left by humanity when it ceases to exist after surrendering to its own omnipotence.

Right at the beginning, the strange experience we’re about to undergo announces itself with an unusual element: a glove with red nails. The hand that wears the glove searches for crystals on a small table. It’s the mineral substances and their mystery that the equally mysterious hand touches. A black woman, played by actress and singer Valéria (formerly Valéria Hudson), occupies the energetic center of the short film. Now, she is the one collecting the rocky fragments and putting them inside her clothes, as if she wanted to merge their long-divided bodies together. This scene shows not only unity, but conflict, desire, a bitter dead end – feelings that pervade all the images.

From the character’s gestures, expressions, movements and glances (given and received), the film develops, creating a place that merges past, present and future. A 21st century nightclub, the nuclear war and the Stone Age. Everything at once. Shattered chronologies among dance movements, static images of the power-thirsty science, and a reunion with nature, an escape from the idea of being human. The snake bites its own tail.

At a certain point, the sentence “the end of our times started with the end of time” echoes from those images through Valéria’s voice. However, contrary to what it may seem, it reverberates as a burst of possibilities – as if, beyond the time of History, which organizes everything in a linear sequence, we could finally experience another time, which doesn’t distinguish the essence of each body – mineral, animal, vegetal or spiritual. A time that simultaneously precedes and follows what we experience today. A time that is cherished by the symbolic realm, from indigenous mythology to art; a time that can effectively save us from the falling sky[i], the ultimate crushing of our existential and identity multiplicities. However, this sort of redemption through a pre- and post-historic time is ambiguous, permeated by melancholic images, from records of our destructive ingenuity to memories of our longing for shared experiences.

The nightclub scene is very representative of the film’s sensory ambivalence. Sitting at the bar counter (which showcases old and new tableware, creating what we could call a retro-futuristic environment), the character played by Valéria wears a reflective outfit with geometric jewelry – possibly representing the future as envisioned from the past. The circle, the line, the triangle of her look are symbolic ornaments that embrace all the others; she effectively serves as a convergence point for the surrounding bodies. While the women dance, the image follows their movements almost in slow motion, intensifying our assimilation of the cathartic atmosphere.

The dystopian quality of the film – composed of scenes where the actress is moving, experiencing collective situations, and where the actress is alone, facing obsolete places and objects, sometimes traces of a utopic future never achieved – seems informed by the urgency of our own time. The character played by Valéria seems to represent the only human being who has seen, lived and, above all, survived humanity itself and the anger of its extinction. The actress is an individual whose phenotype and gender identity are constant targets of prejudice, discrimination and violence in a society that wants to eliminate anything that isn’t a mirror.

It is through the combination of the film’s deeply fictional universe and the increasingly widening political, ethical and humanist gap going on in Brazil (and the whole world) that the film claims its poetic existence; the expansion of a mindset that is built on and for subjectivities, in favor of everyone who acknowledges and believes in the collective body that makes up our absolutely interdependent and interconnected singularities. The film itself is a collective body as it’s the result of a collaborative effort between many artists.

Science fiction, whether in cinema, literature or art in general, has always dared to speculate about the consequences of technology and the people who wield power over it, like a metaphor or allegory for different political contexts. On one hand, the absolute state control, depicted in many short stories by Philip Dick (and even in the classic 1982 movie “Blade Runner”, directed by Ridley Scott and inspired by Dick’s literature), involves a reality that is depleted of subjectivity and incapable of handling diversity. Ravaged places with barely any life, left at the mercy of fate in a nature-depleted environment, constitute the context of destruction from such a perspective. Indeed, the ethics of technology manipulation as an essential factor for the continuation or collapse of humankind is a subject matter that inspired movies like Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Chris Marker’s “La Jetée”, which is composed of a photographic sequence – both movies, like Romy’s “Before the Blue”, are affected by technologies created for communication, warfare, and territorial and space control[ii].

But there are also Bill Viola’s mysterious videographic installations, marked by a complex understanding of time, and David Lynch’s movies, where the narratives are often permeated by a combination (or confusion) between different times – like “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholand Drive” – and abstain from a sense of positivity or negativity. They evoke contradictory feelings in the viewer which are extremely disturbing in their similarity to the dreamlike experience of existence in the private realm.

In this sense, “Before the Blue” manages to merge perspectives based on different understandings of technology and its impact on human life and the political, social and aesthetical context of its (our) extradiegetic time. In contrast to the standardization of our lifestyles, we have not coerced submission, but invention and pleasure in exploring different possibilities: body, skin, rocks, territories, everything contains the possibility of being experienced in different ways. The dystopia initially suggested by the extremely oppressive, desperate and melancholic atmosphere of certain scenes is associated to a certain contempt for any form of technological, symbolic or social domination.

The images follow one another – moving bodies, sounds, traces from other times, magazines announcing the Space Age next to obsolete machines, hands pointing to an already-passed future. The image of an atomic bomb evokes both destructive scenarios and Land Art experiences. Our eyes dive deep in those unstable images and get lost as they struggle to organize an objective thought about the convulsive ruptures that approximate our time’s pulses of life and death.

In such a context, Valéria embodies existence by asserting her position as a roar, a pulsating life force. A cave is always an isolated shelter, and a whole universe of possibilities.

[i] The Falling Sky is a book written by the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa in partnership with anthropologist Bruce Albers. It approaches the indigenous notion that the sky is about to break apart, marking the end of a time and of all known forms of life due to the unbearable fatigue imposed on Earth’s ecosystem. In this text, “the falling sky” is also a reference to Ailton Krenak’s book Ideias Para Adiar o Fim do Mundo (literally, “ideas to postpone the end of the world”) where the author, besides commenting on the importance of Kopenawa’s work, presents a series of emphatic considerations on how the idea of humankind is the main cause for the environmental disaster of our time, the Anthropocene. At the end of one of the book’s sections, he asserts: “singing, dancing and living the magical experience of suspending the sky is common in many traditions. Suspending the sky is expanding our horizon: not the prospective horizon, but the existential one. It means enriching our subjectivities, which are the consumption material of our time. While there is a craving to consume nature, there is also a craving to consume subjectivities – our subjectivities. So let us experience them with the freedom we are capable of inventing instead of putting them on the market. Since nature is being assaulted in such an indefensible way, let us at least be capable of keeping our subjectivities, our visions, our poetics about existence. We are definitely not alike, and it is wonderful to know that each of us is different from the other, like constellations. The fact that we can share this space, that we are together traveling, does not mean we are alike; it actually means that we are able to attract each other through our differences, which should guide our life journey. Diversity instead of one humankind with the same protocol. Because this has only been a way to homogenize and take away our joy of being alive.” (P. 32, 33 of the original – freely translated for this catalogue.)

 [ii] The same could be said about other works by Romy Pocztaruk, like the photographic series “A última aventura” (2011) and “Bombrasil” (2017) – respectively, about the Trans-Amazonian Highway’s and the Angra 1 nuclear plant’s economic, humanitarian and ecological disasters, two major power-thirsty projects from Brazil’s military dictatorship period.

Gabriela Motta, visual arts curator, critic and researcher

Full catalogue exhibition

“Safira”, by Romy Pocztaruk and Livia Pasqual, 2018, 10min

Justification: First movie from the triology “O Fim do Fim” that includes “Antes do Azul”

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Caio Amon’s Soundtrack

instagram: @caioamon

Justification: Artists Romy Pocz & Caio Amon have been working together for more than 10 years on projects that cross the boundaries between music and visual arts.

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Artist Valéria Barcelos 

https://www.instagram.com/valeriabarcellosoficial/

Justification: An important voice of diversity in Rio Grande do Sul, the actresses’ voice inspired the creation of the film Antes do Azul