The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, presents a selection of short films by Salomé Lamas (b. 1987, Libon) : artist, film director and researcher whose work explores the boundaries and circumstances of documentary filmmaking in manifold ways.

Constantly considering the relationship between narration, history and memory, she enquires into that which cannot be represented, is historically invisible, or is repressed through trauma. Her films have been shown at numerous festivals and art centers, receiving several awards.

Le Boudin, 2014, 17min
In a cinematographic process similar to that used in her first feature film Terra de ninguém (2012), Salome Lamas explores the issues and questions related to the Foreign Legion and the mercenary. The result of an interview between the director in 2011 and the former legionnaire, Nuno Fialho, the narrative deployed in the soundtrack reflects an inevitable difficulty: “It might have been the toughest interview I have directed, due to the fact that remembering was a delicate experience for Nuno. Because asking someone to remember is cruel.” (SL)
In the film, a young German actor the same age as the legionnaire at the time of his enrolment, tries, via a fertile dissonance, to play and embody a text that seems to escape perpetually. This text is rendered abstract by means which stay in the comfortable register of the “unsayable”. Behind a subtle and fertile device, the dull horror of politics and a forever invisible international affairs is drawn.

Encounters with Landscape 3X, 2012, 26min
“In late 2011 I arrived in Sete Cidades, Azores. I recalled Kant’s ideas on the sublime. We experience the sublime when our imagination fails to comprehend the greatness of natural events, in the process of determining concepts of understanding, but supplants this failure with a delight stemming from its ability to grasp these aspects of nature by virtue of an idea of reason.” (SL)
There is something absurd, abstract and inevitably entertaining in the quest implemented in Encounters with Landscape 3X – an attempt of self-exploration, of one’s own sensitivity, one’s own body. Inevitably citing “Fall” by Bas Jan Ader, Salomé Lamas’ encounters with the landscape chart imposed limitations, sometimes with violence, and are here exacerbated by placing a device which renders sound and image at two distinct experiential levels.

A Comunidade (The Community), 2012, 23min
Shot in Portugal’s oldest camping site, A Comunidade portraits a temporary but recurring community, made up of habits and repetitions, traditions and sometimes emancipation. Broad and tight shots of the tent village interact with humorous and moving interviews.

These three films will be screened in loop between 10.07 and 02.09.2015, accompanied by a fourth short film:

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 2013, 26min
The “Theatre of the World” is considered to be the first true modern atlas. Teatrum Orbis Terrarum can be seen as a cinematic exploration, a sensory journey, a dizzying history; it is above all an adventure. “When I look at the sea for long, I lose interest on what happens on land.” (SL)

Curated by Emilie Bujès