VIENNA.- In her film-poems artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz collages images and sounds that revolve around violence and repression, the impact of ecological ruin and the continued colonization of the earth. The deconstruction of the grand narrative of Western modernity that imposes itself across vast territories on this planet lies at the heart of her filmography.

In her exhibition at the Secession, Vaz showcases her new film series Meteoro (2023–). Predominantly focusing on Paris and Porto, European cities are depicted as on the verge of collapse or on the path to extinction.

Developed in collaboration with the Tuareg researcher Maïa Tellit Hawad, Franco-Guadeloupean author Olivier Marboeuf, and Portuguese artist Isabel Carvalho, Meteoro sketches a critical anthropology of contemporary Europe, revealing the negative imprint of an Empire founded upon colonial violence, displacement and waste. Shot with high-contrast black-and-white stock the work assumes the form of a fictive archaeology. Split across three chapters, the films posit what the artist calls a “counter-ethnography” of European cities whereby the landmarks and infrastructures of a Western world are reflected and refracted as if seen in a mirror.

In the first chapter, Paris, St Lazare, Maïa Tellit Hawad weaves together her apocalyptic text “Sahara Mining: The Wounded Breath of Tuareg Lands” with her father’s poetry, the Tuareg poet Hawad, in a transgenerational dialogue. We also hear David Terriat, a Caribbean railway maintenance technician, as well as Olivier Marboeuf, author of the original text “Déesse” [Goddess], whose voice and poetry guides us along a hallucinated drift through Paris descending into chaos.

The sequence of images commences at Gare Saint-Lazare, the station that linked the city to the port of Le Havre, which, in turn, connected mainland France to the West Indies and the Americas. We then see animal skeletons and crystals preserved in the natural history museum, zoo animals, reproductions of cave paintings, as well as garbage collectors and railway workers. The city is surrounded by piles of rubbish that are the result of a general strike called by janitors protesting the latest pension reforms.

In the following two chapters, Os Últimos Habitantes [The Last Inhabitants] and Déesse [Goddess], a radical transition unfolds that supplants looking with corporeal experience. The camera becomes a subject in itself. We see images of a junkyard, of the sea and the sky upside down. Gustave Eiffel’s famous Ponte Maria Pia transforms into a swirling vortex.

Meteoro does not provide us with a singular narrator, but rather a choir of voices, with the inverted and fused images revealing not a hegemonial gaze, nor a rational perspective with scientific objectivity, but rather disorienting fragments and details, opening a space for multiple trajectories and the possibility of movement elsewhere.

Vaz believes in the capacity of cinema for the “decolonization of the mind”. Her films provoke and question the medium as an art of bodyless “master observers” that look at and survey the world from above, revealing “truth” to the viewer. Instead, Vaz films with an embodied camera that is never still or stable. Rather than the rational subject of Western modernity, the sensuous body with its intuition and affects forms the base of Vaz’ filmic counternarratives. As the artist states: “What I’m trying to insist upon is that this body, this world is all we have and that our negation of the body is our negation of our belonging to this world. This negation is the basis for the destruction of our world that we witness vertiginously today.”

Ana Vaz was born 1986 in Brasília. She lives and works in Paris.