The graphic translation of the text at the heart of the Fatamorgana project (2016–2019), alongside a variety of related materials, including project notes and contributions. The books also provides online access to photographic, video, and sound materials, along with technical specifications for all of the project's component elements.
Fatamorgana is both a political parody and a speculative comedy, in which historical and contemporary personalities narrate post–World War II global history and geopolitics, through a web of references and direct citations. The undercurrent is one of sense, illusion, and truth. Hanan—a Muslim cousin of James Joyce's Molly Bloom—finds herself, not sure how, in Beirut's Hall of Fame waxwork museum after its closing hours. Like Homer's most virtuous Penelope, this woman waits for her husband; she appears to have set a date with him, but he has not arrived—where can he be? While waiting, she begins interacting with the wax figures in the museum's empty rooms, and the figures respond in turn. Blending and clashing sixteen differing languages, as well as a variety of fiction and nonfiction sources, Fatamorgana is a multidimensional space, a kind of experiment with truth, or a type of fiction that sets up a platform for the collision of multiple fragments, elements, stories, facts.
The publication is the final chapter in a longtime endeavor. Fatamorgana is a multiform project realized between 2016 and 2019, comprising a theatrical work, two films, two publications, and a sound installation. The current book is dedicated to the graphic translation of the text at the heart of the project, alongside a variety of related materials, including project notes and contributions from various authors, while providing online access to photographic, video, and sound materials, along with technical specifications for all of the project's component elements.
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.
