Programme:

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa, dir. Salomé Lamas,
Portugal 2019, 10 min.

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a meditation on humanity’s massive redesign of the planet and a dystopic pamphlet on the Anthropocene. The film portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the drifting occupants on the raft, hoping and praying to be rescued, appear to glimpse a possibility of salvation. 

     The film is an allegory for states of emergency in environmental policy, climate and migration, with an ethical-political purpose. It refers to colonial paradigms, worldviews, and technologies that aim to reduce life and natural elements to their conversion into profitable resources.

     Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a multidisciplinary project in which sequential satellite products are layered around the exploration of a composed allegoric image.

No Man’s Land (Terra_de_Ninguém), dir. Salomé Lamas,
Portugal 2012, 72 min.

A mercenary sits in silence on a chair in an abandoned palace in Lisbon, as if posing for a portrait. Facing the camera, he begins narrating and performing his own history. His history reveals, in its turns of phrase and mismatched events, a series of doubts and contradictions. 

     Rather than affirming or discrediting the veracity of the historical record, or proving or disproving an official narrative, No Man’s Land dwells in witnessing the present – the space inhabited by the performance of memory. Salomé Lamas’ debut feature creates a stage where information and documentation are peripheral to the question of how one plays out and affirms one's personal truth as history.