Luiz Roque
Heaven Unfolded

Heaven Unfolded brings together a selection of experimental video works concerned with both historical and ongoing discrimination against queer people and potential liberatory futures. The event begins with and departs from Luiz Roque’s dystopian sci-fi video HEAVEN (2016). In the year 2080 in Brazil, a virus spread through saliva has been mutating into a much more aggressive form that seems to target transgender people who take hormones approved by the Secretary of Health. The work is a speculative analogy that alludes to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and healthcare inequities along class and gender lines.

Eat Me (1975) by Lygia Pape presents closeup shots of two mouths chewing on and spitting out unidentifiable objects. The work makes use of the Brazilian cultural metaphor of anthropophagy—the idea of devouring the Other to absorb its energy—and serves as an allegory of the violence gripping Brazil at the time of its creation. In the context of this screening, Eat Me raises questions about intimacy, attraction, abjection, repulsion and objectification.

Combining street interviews, newspaper clippings, found movie fragments, and homages to historical queer figures, Temporada de caça (Hunting Season, 1988) by Rita Moreira explores multiple perspectives around the waves of homophobic hate crimes that occurred in São Paulo in the late 1980s. Although the footage reveals a widespread intolerance of sexual minorities, through her montage Moreira denounces such perspectives and their endorsement by the media and cultural industry. Temporada de caça insists that homosexuality is intrinsic to both mankind and nature, and that being different is no aberration or perversion.

Violence and discrimination instigates the two protagonists in Somos Libres!? (Are We Free?, 1981) by Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas to move away from their current undisclosed religious whereabouts and find a place where they can feel more free. They eventually land in Amsterdam via Barcelona but find themselves disillusioned with both of these so-called progressive cities.

Running order:

Luiz Roque, HEAVEN, 2016, 9 minutes
Lygia Pape, Eat Me, 1975, 9 minutes
Rita Moreira, Temporada de caça, 1988, 24 minutes
Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, Somos Libres!?, 1981, 21 minutes