Moving Image Laboratory

The Moving Image Laboratory is a space/time dedicated to the creation of video works. The purpose of the residency program is to provide opportunities for people living in the Azores—whether they are artists or not —who have an interest in the cinematic arts, to realize their video projects by equipping them with content and references, and supporting them in the development and realization of their work. The reflection on the moving image is stimulated through theoretical and practical meetings, which establish the moving image as an artistic expression that bridges all practices, blending languages from experimental cinema, visual arts, performance, photography, literature, and digital media.

In this edition of the Moving Image Laboratory, director Cláudia Varejão was responsible for the theoretical component, while artist André Laranjinha provided technical support. During the Azorean summer, in weekly gatherings and through a collaborative process among the participants, Dryelle Andrade, Kateryna Kondratieva, Luisa Borges, Margarida Benevides, Maria Jorge Martins, Melrose, Rafaella Antunes and Rita Bolieiro proposed ideas, created scripts, captured images and sounds, and ventured into editing programs, each telling their own story.

The island, and the nature that inhabits it, permeate almost every work. They appear in Maria Jorge Martins’s film, a reflection that reaches beyond the matter born of an eruption; emerge as a place of worship in the vision of Rita Bolieiro; reveal themselves in the small gestures of everyday life in Raffaela Antunes’s video; or in the ‘invasive’ plants, a metaphor through which Kateryna Kondratieva gives voice to Ukrainian women refugees of war living in São Miguel. Dryelle Andrade weaves an ode to time, turning aging and ancestry into gestures of resistance, while Margarida Benevides seeks, through it, to create the image of the mother she never knew. Luísa Borges, in turn, exposes the emotional unrest imprisoned in the mind, which Melrose releases in a fictional work about the story of a coquettish vampire and a mysterious witch. Autobiographical or fictional, all these works find in the Azorean territory their common ground.

The videos are presented in the presence of their creators at the Black Box of Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, a space and a team that have been fundamental to the realization of the FUSO INSULAR residency program. The Public Library and Regional Archive of Ponta Delgada, through the dedication of its team, was also decisive in the implementation of the Moving Image Laboratory, hosting the participants’ weekly gatherings throughout the months of residency.

Over six editions of the Moving Image Laboratory, 45 films have been created, constituting an important representation of video art in the Autonomous Region of the Azores.