Director: Vanessa Rosa

Bio:

Vanessa Rosa is a US based Brazilian visual artist and art historian. Her work merges physical and digital media into a storytelling continuum. Murals become portals to an imaginary world with projection mapping, ceramics metamorphose into living entities with the aid of AI models. She creates fictional tales about world history, past and possible futures intertwined.

Director Statement

My interest for worldwide cultures is directly connected to my experience as a Brazilian woman, raised in Rio de Janeiro, where each year we make offerings for the goddess of the ocean, Yemanjá, but our academic curriculum is mostly a failed (terribly underfunded) attempt to follow outdated versions of European and American standards. Also, as it’s common to Brazilians, my personal experience means a family background of continuous ethnical and cultural mix, often in pretty violent ways. Loving history and philosophy, analyzing how things came to be, is a deeply inspiring and liberating activity that became my path to understand my possible places and what is meaningful in the world.
Recently I started to put more of my mental space in imagining futures, speculating from the trends visible now. As Ursula Le Guin argues, playing with make-believe, such as fictional narrative, can allow us to reach deeper truths than when we’re constrained with clear words.

Film:

In a distant future, intelligence and life keeps evolving in the Solar System and eventually humans are not recognizable any longer. However, life as we know it continues to exist in a simulation, the ‘Human Memorial’.

This simulation is inhabited by uploaded human minds, but there are also reconstructed and completely fictional ones. There’s no essential difference between past and future in the memorial, one can travel through ancient China or through solar punk utopias.

This project is created with physical handmade ceramic pieces that are 3D-scanned, then transformed into AI-powered avatars in a sci-fi universe.