Anticline

In the anticline of Estremoz-Borba-Vila Viçosa in Alentejo, is located one of the oldest and most productive marble extraction industries in Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula that has deeply marked this region. The movie approaches the problematic of the transformation of the environment into commodities, from a point of view that intends to be that of the stone itself, in which we can find the huge quarries, some more than a hundred meters deep, thus exposing these monumental scars. The testimony falters between the stone, the machines and the landscape, where humanity seemingly ceased to exist. The narrative documents fragments of this exploration, where we find habitats dominated by cranes and disfigured by heavy machinery, functioning almost as an industrial archeology, in which we are placed as witnesses at the center of a scar that extends for over 40 kilometres and whose epicentre is a tragic landslide of a 100-meter stretch of road, in November 2018, which claimed a number of fatal victims. Observing the ecology of the different players, Anticline brings to the surface traces and artefacts composed of micro-narratives that document and witness the profound and continuous subjugation of the landscape.

“I try to let the film think. “— Harun Farocki ‍The Azores are an archipelago in the ‘middle’ of the Atlantic. Due to their privileged geographical position, these islands have been a place of enormous importance throughout history. This video essay aims to explore the visibilities and invisibilities inherent to the political agendas behind this geographical position through a two-channel video work that juxtaposes images of the magnificent landscapes often portrayed in Tourism advertisements, with media images of Lajes Airport, an important transnational military complex from the First World War to the present day.The contrast of these two visual sequences composed of ‘found-image’ seeks to reflect on the politics of landscape and its representation, through the simultaneous, although paradoxical, discourses in these locations.The film is accompanied by the soundtrack “Conquest of Paradise” (1992), by Vangelis, transformed and edited by me, slowing it down more than ten times, transforming it into an almost unrecognizable environment, with about forty-five minutes of duration. Each of these three elements — two videos and a soundtrack — has a different duration, creating asynchronous ‘loops’ and generating endless interactions, combinations and readings, in time.

A kind of origin that comes closer and closer and finds and diverges, as João Bragança Gil makes a point of expressing. ⌢’s state had completely changed since the arrival of ↩. I was on a completely different journey. They were travelling at this time to other times. Moments beyond the shadows, or the first representations of them. The ammonites made the representation something else, a chance like the previous blurs, but still, an unplanned representation, an image-journey to a past so distant that we cannot imagine. This process of millions and millions of years ended up being brutally cut in half, or even more than half, after being extracted from the ground. The origin (on and on) brought with it another notion of time in these images. The process identify > shoot > reveal > project > observe brought to their memories the apparatus of the first images they saw projected, but reminded them of how in this circle they always reappeared, reinvented themselves. Time after meeting, so long that the Sun had appeared, ⌢ and ↩︎, embracing the paths they had travelled until then, stopped.‍ Pedro Huet, 2021 (Excerpt)