Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Janaina Wagner

Cães Marinheiros

Vidéo | mov | couleur | 7:0 | Brésil | 2020

Cães Marinheiros (Sailors Dogs) was filmed in the ruins of the small town of Velho Aira?o, in the Brazilian Amazon, at the confluence of Rio Negro and Rio Jaú. Founded by Portuguese missionaries in 1694, Airão concentrated the entire rubber production in the region. After a rapid and unsustainable economic growth, followed by the decline of the Rubber Cycle, the city went bankrupt. A politician at the time said that the population was being eaten by ants. Ruined, Airão was abandoned. Sailors Dogs juxtaposes the homonymous tale by Portuguese poet Herberto Helder with the dismantled landscapes of the village. In a perspectivist inversion, textual and visual images assemble and disassemble within a forest eaten away by men. By reflecting on the precarity and fragilities of human nature, and the limits of our relationship with the environment, the film questions our place of dominance in the universe that we inhabit.

Franco-Brazilian artist JANAINA WAGNER (1989) works with cinema, photography, scenography, drawing, video and installations, researching the relations of limit, control and contention that human-kind establishes with the world. Currently on a PhD at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR), Wagner participated in several artistic residencies, such as Gasworks, VISIO, FID Campus - Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, Bolsa Pampulha, Festival Mondes Possibles - Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Casa Tomada, Anarcademia W139 Amsterdam and NES Skagaströnd. Among the main exhibitions and film festivals, stands out Eco-spectrality: Residual Fabulations - Glasgow Film Festival, Thinking Beyond: Images for a post pandemic world (IT), Aliens are Temporary - Kunstraum Bethanien (DE), A natural history of Ruins – Pivô (BR), Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes (BR), Casa Carioca – MAR Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro (BR), Ensaio de Tração - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (BR), Simultan Festival XV – Unseen (RO), 10 ª Semana de Cinema do Rio de Janeiro (BR), Bestiário - Centro Cultural São Paulo - CCSP (BR). Graduated both in Fine Arts and in Journalism (BR), her references derives from the procedures through which human-kind registers and articulates its progress and legacy – a constellation of tales, facts and images. Janaina lives and works between Paris and São Paulo.