Conversation with Ana Vaz after a screening of 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) and Apiyemiyekî? (2019), in the context of CINÉ PLACE-MAKING (4-5 May 2022, Kaaitheater Brussels).
The beginning of the conversation is missing, but I believe I started with the idea that, although the two works that were shown seem very different on the surface, there are quite a few commonalitities, affinities and resonances at play between them. I wanted to unravel and explore these, and perhaps in that way study the sensibilities and challenges that are at play in Ana’s work. We started off with the notion that was the starting point of the project that resulted in 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. “the camera is the body”. The corporeal, the embodied, the haptic has always been at the heart of Ana’s cinema, practice and thinking, but I have the feeling that in the two recent films the reclamation of the body as the center of perception and experience, of poetics, is taking you into new directions, perhaps also to ever more profound places. I asked her about the importance of the bodily and embodied – as a a system of intensive affects, the origin of perspectives – in her work, how it has shifted, where it is now?
Ana Vaz, '13 Ways of Looking at a Black Bird / Apiyemiyekî?' (Ciné Place-Making study circle) from timely on Vimeo.