Artists: Ana Vaz in conversation with Damian Lentini

This episode is a conversation between the artist Ana Vaz and the curator Damian Lentini. It was recorded on 7 March, 2025 in the context of the exhibition:

Ana Vaz
Meteoro 
8.4. – 18.5.2025

In her film-poems artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz collages images and sounds that revolve around violence and repression, the impact of ecological ruin and the continued colonization of the earth. The deconstruction of the grand narrative of Western modernity that imposes itself across vast territories on this planet lies at the heart of her filmography.

In her exhibition at the Secession, Vaz showcases her new film series Meteoro (2023–). Predominantly focusing on Paris and Porto, European cities are depicted as on the verge of collapse or on the path to extinction. More

Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian midwest inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Originally from the cerrado and wanderer by choice, Ana has lived in the arid lands of central Brazil and southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and in the northeastern shores of the Atlantic. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of transforming human perception, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Her film-poems are marked by a constant experimental defiance to the poetic forms of contemporary cinema, highlighting the profound contradictions of our time and questioning, above all, the destructive practices of colonial modernity. Consequences or expansion of her cinematography, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks.

Damian Lentini is a curator at the Vienna Secession. He obtained his doctoral degree in 2009 at the University of Melbourne and has realised major projects with artists such as El Anatsui, Phyllida Barlow, Kapwani Kiwanga, Sarah Sze, Sung Tieu, Raqs Media Collective, Harun Farocki, Dumb Type, Khvay Samnang, Lina Lapelytė and the Karrabing Film Collective amongst others.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Production: Damian Lentini, Jeanette Pacher