FILMMAKING & ARTISTIC COLLABORATIONS
LABIA
2025
LABIA is an autobiographical artistic project of a permanent processual nature, never fixed but transforming with each moment and space it occupies. Rooted in queer identity as an act of destabilizing one’s own identity, LABIA fosters a meeting between multidisciplinary artists who navigate between worlds without being confined to entrenched ways of operating, in a coexistence and re-signification of their (re)(ex)istences. In alliance with an intersectional transfeminist thought, we propose the urgency of becoming- collectivities while preserving our subjectivities and nurturing a non-hierarchical relationship between them. We construct a universe that allows for the extrapolation and transcendence of individual and bodily materiality, dismantling the colonizing and binary language, and proposing discourses of language through gesture, expanding its multiple possibilities in a lifelong artistic process.
Artistic concept and direction
Jo Castro
In collaboration with Francisca Manuel, Lui L’Abbate, Rezmorah, ROD
OUR SKIN
2021
The film observes and questions how we influence each other: Body-Earth, Earth-Body as it explores the transformation of the female body merging with the natural landscape. The boundaries between the performers bodies and the landscape disappear, highlighting the continuity of our skin into the skin of the earth. Dedicated in memory of the artist Dani Karavan who passed away during the making of this film. Our Skin aims to bring back the wild nature into the urban spaces where it once belonged.
In collaboration with the artists Yael Karavan and Rita Vilhena
Teaser: https://youtu.be/TshsYUuGa2w
Mina_film (video performance)
202100:50:26
Video, 4K, stereo
Co-directed with Carlota Lagido
Carlota Lagido is interested in working with women, artists and non-artists, and using the creative process as a possible platform for feminist, transfeminist and intersectional activism. “I am interested in making a performance-manifesto that aims to contribute to the abolition of patriarchy,” she argues. Mina is a project that is openly involved in feminist issues, a project with and about women. “Some of these women lived in different times. Some have dealt with epoch-specific gender inequality conflicts, many still present today. Some revolutionized the world and many of them were suppressed from history. They will not be present now, but their ghostly presences will, through their tought, their professional, artistic and life paths that will be absorbed in the study of this process. ”
https://www.teatrosaoluiz.pt/en/performance/mina/
Teaser: https://youtu.be/BGidQJDqqwE
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film stills
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Zenith
202000:30:40
Video, 4K, stereo
Acoustics is a branch of physics that studies sound, a phenomenon in waves caused by the most diverse objects, whose propagation occurs through the different physical states of matter. Being emitted from any sound source, the sound then finds in its emission a series of shields that cause diffraction, reflection or absorption. It is this meeting of the materiality of the sound with the other physical materialities that the acoustics addresses. Each architectural environment has a diverse set of possibilities for the interaction of sound and matter. Just as a bat uses its sonar to guess the nature of the environment in which it circulates, acoustics reveals an environment, its nature, its spaces.
ZENITH is a concert performance haunted by the affection of those who have departed in a tragic way for their skin color, their gender, their sexual identity, their social status, their political position, leaving us orphans of their biographies and their speeches on the world. From original and adapted compositions, the concert invests in the encounter of Isabél Zuaa’s voice with architecture to take the audience on a tour of the full and empty spaces of a ship.
http://gustavociria.co/works/zenith/
The concert premiered in October 2020 as part of the program “Things grounded in silence”, curated by Marta Rema, at Centro Cultural Brotéria, in Lisbon
Creation - Gustavo Ciríaco
Voice and interpretation - Isabél Zuaa
Musical direction and interpretation Domenico Lancellotti
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film stills
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Mina_table - (video installation)
202001:30:00
Video installation, HD, stereo
“Mina table” was a performance and part of the rehearsal for "Mina" play.
"Mina" will premiere in 2021 - S. Luiz Theater, Lisbon.
"Mina is a project that positions itself as feminist, transfeminist and intersectional. It is a manifesto about women who lived in different eras and that lived conflicts of inequality and gender-specific violence, many of whom still present today. Some women revolutionized the world but many were extinguished through patriarchal power. These women may not be here now but their ghostly auras will keep existing through their thinking, their professional and artistic life paths."
"Mina table" was performed by Carlota Lagido, Joana Castro, Joana Levi, Aurora Pinho, Francisca Manuel, Shahd Wadi, Elizabete Francisca, Thamiris Carvalho, Tita Maravilha, Lula Pena, Mafalda Oliveira and Marta Moreira in "Dancing is my revolution - II part" event (Fev. 2020), Lisbon.
Concept and Artistic Direction - Carlota Lagido
Production and Management - ORG.I.A
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Jungle Red (teaser)
2019
00:24:00
Doc., HD, stereo
“It is truly about Paradise nostalgia.
It is a fiction, a flock of birds looking for Simurgh, the king of birds — a hybrid creature, a phoenix, male, female and something else. In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “a being made up of other beings, a bird made up of birds”. It is about wishing the world to be whole. It is an idyllic jungle, an ultimate garden where everything coexists in harmony. In Sanskrit, the word paradesha/paradise means ultimate country. This project explores different aspects of utopia, paradigms of heavenly places or states, and sees Paradise as a metaphor for the desire for common welfare among and between humans, animals and nature. It insists on the idea that while searching for that heavenly state there is the chance of understanding all the malfunctioning in the world. The dramaturgy of the piece is based on a virtual journey to the begining of everything, the first garden of eden in a
jewish, islamic and christian perspective. In this journey to the beginning of everything, one assembles ethnographies of imagery from the past — personal, historic and fictiona —, and tears down and builds visions for our future paradises.”
Carlota Lagido
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The Gesture
201900:30:00
Doc., HD, stereo
A film which portrays, in a freeform and subjective manner, the professional activities of different people. These portraits are based mostly on the gesture which emerges, and the bodies that are created, through different activities, combined with their life stories.
An archaeology of gestures and an archaeology of memories to create a common territory: where does the emancipatory power of a gesture reside when it can be understood in its entirety and in its richness? How do we speak of what we do, and how does what we do inform us? How can we understand what surrounds us from that unique perspective, which is that of each one of us in vibrant relationship to things and to others?
In the different universes, the idea of a hierarchy of knowledge is replaced by an analysis of the power of how one does as opposed to what one does, insisting on the search for what might be the knowledge of the body which exists beyond the choreographic field, and how it may be understood and transmitted.
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co creation with Elizabete Francisca and Jen Bonn
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film stills
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JUNGLE RED_Performance at Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra (video)
2018
music https://pedromeloalves.com
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ACTING
Those who move
2025Over the course of one night, René, a Brazilian immigrant in Lisbon, grapples with the choice between staying illegally in an increasingly alien city or returning to the home she once fled. Her external struggles and internal conflicts intertwine, exposing the complexities of life between two worlds.
Stephanie Ricci
Co-production: Ladaia, Terratreme
BI
2019“The film installation 'Bi' is a 2 screen projection commissioned by Kohta that happens on both side of one screen positioned diagonally in the space. You always see half of the work – either the location or the inhabitants – imagining and hearing the other half as though you are in a room hearing sounds coming through the walls or a virtual space with actors where the background has not yet been filled in.
The work is also half of a partnership of 2 works inspired by a reverse of Eugene O'Neil's famous play 'a Long days journey into night'. Only in these works – 'Bi' and 'Night for Day' (which will be shown in the Secession June 2020) , the idea of a play getting darker and darker is reversed and we instead start at night and end with the sun coming up. And the mother, who in O'Neil's masterpiece is addicted to opium is instead using LSD on the advice of her son, educated on the west coast of the US and connected to that particularly special relationship between technology and hallucinogens.
The piece tries to retain the energy of a sketch. Filmed on a gopro- swapped between characters. This family is not descending into darkness, but filmed as the sun comes up as a nod to pre-industrial time, when the rising and the setting of the sun had more of part in the beginning and end of our days. (...)”
Emily Wardill
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Catherine or 1786
201700:22:00
Catherine or 1786” is a video installation that focuses specifically on the passage of Catherine Hickling in Furnas, where she remained between 19 May and 29 September 1786. It’s a free interpretation of a daily record, a state and a cloudy, melancholic place, in which nature, boredom, but also mystery and torpor are crossed as lines of an uncertain and inconclusive narrative.
The construction of the text that serves as the basis for the film's premise: Catherine's phrases become motivations for wandering in the representation, photography, action and sound design. But they also become disturbing elements of the filmed temporality itself: what are the times of this narrative and what dialogues do they keep with each other? Which Catherine is?
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Where i grow old2016
00:98:00
“Using nonprofessional actors, this fiction film from established documentarian Marilia Rocha explores notions of nationhood and belonging. At the request of her mother, Portuguese expat Francisca welcomes old friend Teresa into her Belo Horizonte apartment. Both are nearly thirty, and find themselves at a crossroads, one created as much by the Portuguese financial crisis as their individual personalities. While Teresa eagerly embraces the rhythms and openness of Brazilian life, Francisca still desires to return to Portugal. Through largely improvised dialogue, Rocha’s beautifully shot film deftly explores their relationships to themselves and their surroundings.”
filmlinc.org
Co-production: Anavilhana, TEIA, terratreme
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Best Film - Festival de Biarritz Amérique Latine '16
Best Film - Festival de Cinema Luso Brasileiro '16
Critics Prize - Festival de Cinema Luso Brasileiro (Portugal, 2016)
Best Iberian-American Film - Festival Cinematográfico Internacional do Uruguay '17
Prize Kino Sound Studio - Jury Special Prize - Portuguese Competition - DocLisboa '16
Prize Cineclubes - Festival de Cinema Luso Brasileiro '16
Best Feature Film - Festival de Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro '16
Best Directing - Festival de Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro '16
Best Actress - Festival de Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro '16
Best Supporting Actor - Festival de Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro '16
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For An Oil Free Future: 4th episode
201600:04:22
“In a dystopian future in which oil extraction has become a catastrophic reality in Portugal, a citizen-journalist looks back and questions how it was possible to go ahead with such plans.
Over the last few years, and particularly in 2015 under the former PSD/CDS-PP right-wing government, several contracts were signed between the Portuguese State and major oil companies (Galp, Partex, Repsol, Eni, Australis, Cosmos and the controversial Portfuel). The matter is of major national interest, given its environmental impact, rupture with Portugal's international climate agreements, and the redefinition of the country's energy plan. Furthermore, these contracts were signed without any public consultation. In the meantime, the Socialist Party came to power in late 2015, but has avoided making a clear declaration about the situation, and, from the little we know, appears to agree with the plans.
Many activist movements are organizing protests, first in the southern regions of Algarve and Alentejo and then all over the country (with particular expression in Peniche, an area which will also be affected): PALP, MALP, ASMAA, Movimento Futuro Limpo, Climáximo, S.O.S. Salvem o Surf, Não ao Fracking Aljezur, Tavira em Transição, Porto pelo Ambiente and Peniche Livre de Petróleo, among others.
Inhabitants joins this protest by publishing a set of informative videos, playful yet activist, that will hopefully contribute to the canceling of such contracts and, moreover, the complete Portuguese disinvestment in fossil fuels.”
site_Inhabitants
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Portrait cover by Aline Belfort