Ana Vaz - The Camera is the Body

Since the end of the 2000s, Ana Vaz (*1986, Brasília, Brazil) has set out to unlearn the camera’s oldest habit: the vertical gaze that parses and captures. Her films start at the ground, alongside the submerged perspectives that extraction was built to ignore. Rooted in the unruly tradition of Brazilian cinema and nourished by critical theory, radical pedagogy and knowledge systems that sidestep the Western canon, her work invites us to see otherwise, to notice that every act of looking is also an act of exposure.

Published to coincide with her first solo exhibition A câmera é o corpo (The Camera is the Body) at Mudam Luxembourg, this monograph brings together commissioned essays by Erika Balsom, Fernanda Brenner, Juliana Fausto and Tristan Bera; conversations with Olivier Marboeuf, Suely Rolnik and Dilton de Almeida as well as Vaz’s own writing. This collection examines a body of work that extends beyond the screen, engaging with questions of decolonial criticism, political ecology and micropolitical resistance.