by Francisco Llinas
In the cinema of Venezuelan artist filmmaker Adriana Vila Guevara, notions of identity, knowledge and loss are abundant with poetry and light.
In Intertropical Vision (2018), the artist situates us at the geographical centre of the world – the tropics – where the very notion of hegemonic centrality is challenged. Using Viewing Machine, Olafur Eliasson’s 2001 kaleidoscopic sculpture in Brumadinho, Brazil, the artist brings to the screen a visual splitting and convergence of tropical images. This visual fragmentation asks us to discard ideas of a fixed centre and, instead, embrace the fluid, multifaceted nature of the periphery as a point of departure.
Building on ‘Childless Woman’, Sylvia Plath’s poetic meditation on infertility and femininity, Womb (2021) evokes the painful yet liberating moment when identity fractures from imposition and obligation. Plath’s line, ‘discharges itself from the tree’ – a poetic encapsulation of such rupture – is sung in hypnotic repetition over a cosmos of moon-like images that Vila Guevara has painstakingly crafted, frame by frame, on 16mm film.
In collaboration with Barbara Sánchez Barroso, The Knots We Knot(2022) entwines images of nature with the artists’ intimate space of research and dialogue. The result is a visual meditation on coexistence, closeness and symbiosis – one that challenges the rigid separation between knowledge and materiality, the self and the other. This interrogation continues in Dilution (2022), where landscapes dissolve into water reflections. Through this formal oscillation, the filmmaker evokes the conceptual ‘dilution’ that occurs when we recognise the other within ourselves.
Like Womb, Inhabiting the Silences (2021) turns to literature to find meaning in pain and mourning. Through the words of Audre Lorde, Vila Guevara reflects on self-determination and its capacity to transform loss – of land, identity or even creativity – into a force of empowerment.
Vila Guevara’s recurrent themes of loss and identity, knowledge and materiality, permanence and impermanence are translated into pure formal exploration in her 2024 work In Flama. Returning to visual motifs of water and reflection, the artist employs solarisation to again upend notions of fixity, switching repeatedly between images evocative of an absence, and images that are not.
This programme is an outcome of a research residency supported by Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities in partnership with University of Edinburgh. Be sure to also catch Excerpts On Extraction and Araya on Sunday 4 May.
