A cinema of friction

Marie-Alix Isdahl: You are currently preparing A câmera é o corpo (The Camera is the Body), an exhibition opening at Mudam in November, together with a publication of the same title. As you bring new and earlier works into relation, I would like to begin by asking how you think about the inheritances and transmissions that have shaped your practice. What does lineage mean to you?

Ana Vaz: When I think of lineage, I immediately think of trouble. As an artist coming from the Americas – a continent marked by the erasure of histories and the effacement of lineages – one often struggles to identify those who came before, to know one’s lineage, one’s ancestors, whether by blood or kin. For a long time, I struggled to map my artistic ancestry, as many of these artists – mostly women working on the South American continent – were rendered minor, silent or invisible in film and art histories. Only after latter-day efforts to restore archives, or through grassroots initiatives caring for the estates of artists long excluded from the Western canon, do I feel I am beginning to meet some of the ancestors who laid the groundwork for what I am doing today. It’s interesting to think that they were always there, despite the fact that I didn’t know their work when I started, or to find deep resonances with contemporaries whose practices I only got to know recently.

I like to think that there is a shared frequency, almost like a specific wavelength, that traverses certain imaginaries and asks to exist at particular moments in time, when it finally garners attention. This is why I prefer to speak about writing or filmmaking as acts of channelling: using film as a medium that channels what is asking to be expressed. And to think of such expression as a collective becoming, rather than something created by an individual self as a solitary entity. An idea so fiercely inscribed within Western modernity as the heroic producer of will and creation: the author, the artist, the writer. I have always struggled with this tradition. We never invent anything by ourselves.

I can also speak of lineage in terms of what I carry from my direct ancestry: my mother, Cláudia Pereira, a sociologist and cultural producer deeply involved with the counter-culture of Brasília in the 1980s; and my father, Guilherme Vaz, a composer, essayist and artist who broke away from the traditional centres of cultural production in Brazil and dedicated his life to the sound-worlds of the Brazilian Midwest and the Amazon. From them, I inherited two traditions rooted in breaking with convention. So, for me, the idea of lineage has always involved a kind of actualisation, with one part honouring and one part rupture.

MAI: I find that your films often produce images that seem to act directly on the body while exploring the afterlives and, as you put it, the troubled inheritances of the modern colonial project. How does the bodily, perhaps even the sensuous, and the critical relate to one another within your practice?

AV:  Since we are speaking of lineage, it seems relevant to me that the opposition you underline between the senses and the mind, the bodily and the critical, appears as a direct inheritance from the Cartesian, positivist lineage that grounds Western modernity, particularly in Europe. This is an opposition that I refute for its colonial authority over forms of knowledge that exceed the rational mind, forms of knowledge that we were violently severed from – another broken lineage. These other forms of knowledge are often somatic and were delegitimised in favour of theoretical and scientific knowledge. My entire practice is based precisely on trying to breach this opposition, which can also be translated into an opposition between macropolitical and micropolitical fields, as articulated in the political philosophy of thinkers like Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik.

In many leftist traditions, the micropolitical field is rejected in favour of macropolitical struggles. I believe this separation greatly harms our capacity to engage in struggles of various dimensions, notably because the body and the senses are left behind. Any Indigenous group knows that cultivating affect, dreaming, the body and the land is part of the struggle. Our capacity to know through the senses and to remain connected to our instinct, our intuition, is something that modernity has worked hard to take away from us. Affect is our capacity and necessity: to be traversed by historical imperatives and real forces that move through a body in a specific place and specific situation. And I believe we retain this profound connection to an affective, sensorial knowledge, despite having been estranged from it due to the feverish positivism of settler modernity.

So, it is not so much about the ‘sensuous’ alone, but about invoking the knowledge of the body, the senses as a technology, as a form of intelligence that can guide and nurture our experiences. In my films, I like to create the conditions for an experience of thought that is not predetermined.

MAI: This brings me back to something you once wrote about cinema: that it might become ‘a mere capture of energies’. I find that phrase resonant with your work and with what you have been saying here. What films, whether from the Brazilian avant-garde or elsewhere, made you understand that filmmaking could reach such a state?

AV: When I started making films, I began to realise that, in cinema, there was an embryo of something that needed to manifest itself, to bloom, to germinate. But that could not fully do so within the existing cinematic tradition. I often felt that I was trying to work towards something I did not yet know what it was, or something I did not yet see around me. Perhaps because there was a problem of access, or because what I was searching for in cinema is closer to poetry, dance or music – art forms that are constantly struggling to seek out a position where meaning escapes, where something resists being fixed or captured.

Here, I think of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, João Guimarães Rosa, Machado de Assis, Ana Cristina César, Maria Gabriela Llansol, Silvina Ocampo, Suzanne Césaire, Roberto Bolaño, Marguerite Duras… all modern thinkers who, through language, were trying to find that place where meaning becomes slippery. And this slippage is not merely a formal strategy, right? It is a direct contestation of a tradition that, through its desire and necessity to fix meaning, has transformed our relationship to the world into one of submission.

After literature, what comes to mind are figures from a certain counter-cinema such as Maya Deren, Jean Epstein, Bruce Baillie, Kevin Jerome Everson, Su Friedrich, Chick Strand, Helena Solberg (whose films I've only discovered recently), Abigail Child, Barbara Hammer, Ana Mendieta, Valie Export and Nancy Holt. All of whom were exploring the complex ways in which image-making might become something other than a machine for producing fixed ideas within a strict theatre of representation.

MAI: Within a Western tradition, image-making so often functions as a medium of distance. But your films seem to constantly push against distance in order to arrive at a cinema that does something else – we could perhaps say, to seek out these moments of slippage. How did you develop methods or strategies to overcome this distancing?

AV: There is no strategy, only lived experience. Situations that clearly render what is asking to exist, and that cannot be done from a position of detachment.

For example, we can speak of A Idade da Pedra (The Age of Stone) (2013). I spent two months filming with Ivonete dos Santos Moraes, who became an important person in my life and films. We met when she was 14. Ivonete was living in Alto Paraíso, a small town at the heart of a region that has been designated a natural park, somewhat as a counterweight to the environmental destruction caused by the construction of Brasília. Immediately, there was an affinity between us. You can’t explain this kind of thing.

Then, the crew arrived. Not only the people themselves, but the filming apparatus. I saw it happening in front of me: the distance. I need no theory book, no postcolonial theory to teach me this. The camera can do this. Suddenly, there is an enormous technical wall between us. It is real. A wall that has been rendered invisible by the history of modernity, which always allows someone to see without being seen, its infrastructure rendered invisible. This one-sided silent pact is full of meaning and, if you address it, it restores visibility to what was made invisible.

MAI: What did you do? 

AV: I said, ‘Okay, Ivonete, let’s change this scene.’ The director of photography handed me the camera – which never happens. The moment I took the camera, held it with my body and stood in front of Ivonete, the whole relationship changed again. I realised this could be the beginning of a different kind of conversation.

In another one of my films, Occidente (2014), there is the brilliance of Lis Andréa de Mello’s performance as the maid at a bourgeois lunch. She destroys the apparatus – she breaks the silent pact – by consistently looking at me, looking at the camera. And this is where a different relationship can begin. It is an improvised choreography of conflict and friction, not resolution. It is when the troubled lineage that I referred to earlier suddenly intrudes, without asking for permission.

So what does ‘distance’ mean in the context of filmmaking? It means arriving with pre-existing images of the world and projecting them onto it. It means not listening to what real situations demand from you. It makes for a very poor relationship to the world, with or without cinema. Instead, I try to create the conditions for what is necessary to manifest itself. For that, you need to let go of such pre-established images of the world and instead let yourself be fully confronted by it.

MAI: Does this manifestation also occur within the image itself? For instance, while you are working in the editing room?

AV:  An image is never innocent. But by that I don’t mean that it has inherent moral intentions and so forth. I mean it remains connected to other inheritances, to other images. If we consider the world as a chain of interactions, following Karen Barad – where things exist in constant friction and dependency – then, for me, the encounter between lighting conditions, a person and another person, a camera and the film stock means that what you see (and this happens a lot in the editing process) is connected to many different histories.

So when I look at the images of Há Terra! (There Is Land!) (2016), I cannot forget that my eye was, at some point, exposed to the paintings of Rugendas and Debret – the colonial painters sent by the Portuguese and French monarchies to produce the first images of so-called native life in Brazil. These images return differently, but they return. Like glimpses from a nightmare. It’s as if images are somehow haunting themselves. An image is always pregnant with other images.

MAI: Land, ground and soil recur throughout your films. In later works such as Terra Preta (2025) and Anhanga (2025), the soil itself is given the role of narrator, while in other films the image is turned upside down – the ground giving way beneath us and leaving us fragile and suspended. Were there filmmakers or movements that helped you think about cinema in this way? Where land is invited into, or intrudes upon the making of the films themselves?

AV: Within the history of filmmaking, there are certain filmmakers I deeply admire because they never cease to teach us to listen acutely to place. So, of course, James Benning, Masao Adachi, and also Arthur and Corinne Cantrill – particularly in relation to how the latter engage with the haunting of a colonised territory like Australia, so violently attached to its settler disorientation. They transformed landscape into place.

MAI: What is the difference between landscape and place?

AV: Well, according to the modern European tradition, landscape refers to a place rendered frameable. A landscape is rendered mute and is barely ever inhabited by others. This is a brutal tradition because it provides the necessary scene for the settler to arrive and claim it as theirs. But landscape is always already a place, always already a territory – a confluence of relationships between beings operating across different scales. So the tradition of landscape, which still persists in certain lineages of art and cinema today, and which attempts to render place as a silent background rather than an inhabited territory, poisons our capacity to think in terms of cohabitation. Instead, I believe in thinking more about how places produce us, rather than how we produce place.

A researcher I greatly respect, Raquel Schefer, speaks about the significance of the 360º panorama in anti-colonial cinema in Africa and South America. It’s very interesting because the 360º panorama goes directly against the 180º logic so present in European cinema. It exposes the conditions of production of images themselves. The act of framing, as both a political gesture and a writing device, is something I seek to destabilise over and over again in my films. Not as a formalist strategy but as a political one.

MAI: You have lived and worked both in central Brazil and southern Australia, two countries with distinct yet equally complex colonial histories. Did living in Australia influence your understanding of filmmaking? Do different territories produce different forms of cinema?

AV: Leaving Brazil for Australia was a first departure from a place so deeply shaped by displacement – Brasília – to another place identically shaped by it, only in a different form. It was a rupture. It is also a country with such a violent and recent settler history. I felt it immediately when I arrived: a country clinging to the edges of the land it occupies, fearful of the territory. Every time you drove inland, you sensed a population profoundly at odds with the place they inhabited, or rather, occupied. These were questions that, of course, resonated deeply with my experience of Brazil and its capital, where I was raised.

Interestingly, while living in Australia, most of the films I made were constructed from archival material. It was a moment in which the archive, the mnemonic, the forgotten imprints left behind, became a central preoccupation. I think I was drawn to the archive because of what it can produce: how can we recompose a history that is broken? Broken through my own relocation, but also already broken throughout history.

At that time, I was working mostly with Super 8 home movies and what the camera inside the domestic environment does to family members and subjects. Often, the camera was in the hands of the father – the one with access to framing. I became interested in what that revealed about the structure of the family, of the house, of a city, of a country. For a long time, I was less interested in making images and more interested in thinking through them.

MAI:  What eventually led you to begin filming?

AV: It was just before I left Australia. I made a work that was very important to me with a group of migrant and diasporic children, mostly from Eritrea and Ethiopia. At the time, I was doing social work with these children around language and language acquisition in contexts where most of them were the sons and daughters of exiled families. Suddenly, making images became something that interested me because there was something collective there. Not in the sense that everything was horizontal and everyone was doing whatever they wanted, but because the camera became an instrument for amplifying and intensifying perception in relation to the space we were inhabiting together.

MAI: The situation allowed for something to emerge.

AV: The situation asked for it. I felt we needed to address the present tense. 

MAI: In your films that conduct a form of counter-ethnography of European cities, were there particular works that informed your method?

AV: After relocating to France, I returned to films that relate to my period in Australia and the kinds of narratives and forms I encountered there. If you look at the work of Tracey Moffatt, for example, or many of the so-called counter-ethnographic documentaries made in Australia – often with an incredible sense of humour – they shift perception by inverting the usual axis of observation. Of course, the power imbalance is so outrageous that the inversion itself becomes almost absurd.

Then, I arrived in Europe, a place so brutally grounded in settler violence, one that fought violently to position itself at the centre of our regimes of perception, so that all forms of perception would emanate from it. You can read about this in postcolonial theory, but nothing really prepares you for arriving in this context. Europe is profoundly incapable of having the gaze reciprocated. And when it happens, it is usually refuted. I felt it was important to address this settler violence through a critical apparatus that addressed how it inhabits regimes of perception and visuality.

For me, there was no way I could arrive in Europe and make the kind of pretty ethnographic fictions from exotic, faraway places that serve the appetite of the ethnographic museum. Instead, I wanted to complicate, short-circuit and betray that tradition.

That’s why the Meteoro series became important to me. Not so much as a study of Europeans – we already have the entire history of cinema dedicated to that – but as a way of looking at the legacies of colonial histories through the voices of diasporic allies, friends, workers and people I met along the way. People who are, in a sense, inside empire while also looking back at it: the carriers of the visible and invisible labour necessary for these palimpsests of empire to persist, while pointing towards other directions.

So it’s not simply a reversal of the gaze. It’s more like a shift within a shift: looking at these cities through alternate perspectives and modes of perception that render their infrastructural violence visible.

MAI: Finally, can you name a work of art or film that was important to your understanding of your own practice, but that may seem unexpected given your work – perhaps precisely because it operates differently from your own?

AV: I think my encounter with Lygia Clark’s life-work was essential. At a certain point, she had to move away from painting and representation; it was no longer enough. And then there is the importance of her return to Brazil. Her acute understanding that she needed to connect with Yoruba and other traditions related to the knowing body, to the senses, to Dreaming.

That is where the shift occurs: from a relationship to the world as nature morte to nature vivante – an attempt to leave behind, at all costs, the reification connected to historiographical practices that so often transform the living into the dead; privileging the inert, the fixed, the encapsulated and the captured over the very foundation of our relationship to the world.

Lygia Clark was also very important to me as someone who consistently questioned her practice and situated her critical apparatus within the body, someone constantly attempting to move beyond the enclosure of her own practice. And I think she radically trusted this thing that I, too, have trusted since the beginning, without quite knowing how to name it. I still insist, perhaps, on not entirely naming it. But I think anyone who sees or listens to my films knows that it is there. And it is fragile, it can disappear in two seconds. But when it is there, it does something to us that shifts the space where we feel and where we understand.

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) lives and works between Brasília, Brazil, and Paris, France. This conversation with Marie-Alix Isdahl, editor at Mudam, took place in Paris on 25 May 2026, ahead of Vaz's exhibition A câmera é o corpo, opening at Mudam on 13 November 2026 and accompanied by a publication of the same title.

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