A record-cum-publication that unfolds through sound and text by transposing and transforming the soundtrack, dialogues, and images of Salomé Lamas' film Ouro e Cinza / Gold and Ashes (2025); featuring text by
Frédéric Neyrat, Isabel Pettermann, Isabel Ramos, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Salomé Lamas. The experience is intended to be intimate and meditative as it resonates between the spoken and unspoken, between sound and silence.
Our first object of inquiry and care should be life. We know the reason for that as we are living beings in a situation in which the conditions of life are endangered. What has no place in this ecological discourse is death. The fact that death is difficult to acknowledge is not new, but in our contemporary situation, death has a new face.
Gold and Ashes extends beyond representation to become an intimate act of excavation that proposes to mediate—materially, politically, and metaphysically—the reappropriation of death as power and our sovereignty as mortal beings in the private and social spheres.
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.
