Archaeologies in Trance

Best of Fest

MUTA Festival Internacional de Apropiación Audiovisual de Lima

INTRASTEVERE CINEMA – Room 2, May 29, 6 p.m.

Introduced by the curator

This program brings together seven short films that explore the materiality of cinema and the poetic potential of collage, where film and archival images become archaeological gestures shaped by chance, intervention, repetition, and reappropriation.
Orphan images are intervened until their own dimensions are altered, opening perceptual states in which the visual becomes matter in transit. From the meticulous observation of a hummingbird’s flight to the reading of two historical moments as archaeological gestures, the works activate ways of engaging with time that oscillate between the microscopic and the ancestral.
In this trajectory, a search runs through the archive as a trace of a history in which the face of a lesbian woman had to remain hidden, while other works address how exile and migration are inscribed in the body, shaping displacement through collage as an embodied experience.
The program also invokes an ancestral trance in dialogue with the quinine plant, questioning the narratives of colonial extractivism through Bora and Uitoto chants that reactivate other forms of knowledge. A new north is imagined “down and to the left” of hegemonic world maps, where the history of rebellious radios and leftist political struggles across the continent opened imaginaries of resistance.

Milagros Tavara
MUTA Programmer