Among
Portugal's most interesting young filmmakers, Salomé Lamas explores the boundaries and circumstances of
documentary filmmaking, working at the intersection of ethnography, history,
storytelling, memory, and fiction. This publication documents her work since 2010, through contributions, video stills, and interviews.
Salomé Lamas' short films and video installations—powerful portraits, in a sense—investigate the traumatically repressed, the seemingly un-representable, and the historically invisible, from the horrors of colonial violence to the landscapes of global capital. This book covers Lamas's selected works from 2010 to 2016, and includes contributions by Michael Bobick, Deirdre Boyle, Filipe Felizardo, Irene Flunser Pimentel,
Peter Galison, Javier H. Estrada, James Lattimer, Joana Pimenta, João Ribas, Lawrence Weschler, and
Ana Jotta, as well as interviews conducted by Nuno Lisboa, Jorge Mourinha, and Mónica Savirón.
Salomé Lamas (born 1987 in Lisbon) is a Portuguese filmmaker, visual artist and educator. Her work has been contextualized in visual culture, artistic studies, and film studies, exhibited, and distributed internationally in the fields of cinema (movie theatres, festivals, VOD streaming) and contemporary art (galleries, museums, art fairs, biennials).
Salomé Lamas has been developing an artistic practice that explores the embedded relation between representation and the narrative power of social reality while proposing something different. Around, but not beyond, the real: beyond, but not besides, the fictional. To address the efforts to expand such interstice she refers to her work as critical media practice parafictions.
With a mixed background in cinema and visual arts, and a research informed by critical epistemology, transnational and subjective, focused on the possibilities opened up by the ecological thought, as well as the connection between artistic praxis, economic, aesthetic mutations, and contemporary philosophy, she's been challenged to comply to a single orientation or to combine them in her action as an artist/filmmaker, but also as an educator, in various contexts, levels and geographies.
The multidisciplinary ethos underpinning her artistic endeavor, continually challenges the boundaries of visual narrative, to foster critical dialogues that prompt audiences to confront the intricacies of the human experience and broader societal dynamics, focused on Migration, Post–colonialism, and a critique of capitalism.
This research–based practice perpetuates a legacy of intellectual inquiry and artistic innovation and approaches critically the social and economic roles of media production, in the stages of development, production, exhibition, distribution and archive with outcomes ranging from films, audiovisual installations and publications.
