Often taking the form of cinematic vignettes accompanied by original dreamlike scores, Brazilian artist Luiz Roque’s short films address vital social, geopolitical, and environmental aspects of contemporary culture – including identity, queer bioethics, automation, and artificial intelligence –, positioning his subjects in surreal settings at once languorously utopian and eerily postapocalyptic. The silent Super8 film presented here, Urubu (2020), was made in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced Roque to spend many months inside his São Paulo apartment during a government-enforced lockdown in Brazil. Urubu was inspired by the artist’s interest in the observational distance of nature documentaries. Backgrounded by the historically layered architecture of São Paulo, to which Roque turned his camera from his apartment window during his many months in isolation, the image of an urubu – a common urban bird in São Paulo – captured in mid-flight poetically condenses the feeling of suspension wrought by the unprecedented conditions of the pandemic. The video combines visual techniques drawn from cinema – in this case, a continuous loop – with the contemplative, detached disposition of documentary. Likewise, the short night film XXI (2022) meditates upon body disputes, automated desires, and dialogues between human and non-human figures in a hot summer in a Latin American city.
Madeline Weisburg
