26/02/2025

On Gold and Ashes: Representing Trauma and the Aesthetics of Disappearance, with Salomé Lamas

Our first object of inquiry and care should be life. We know the reason for that as we are living beings in a situation in which the conditions of life are endangered. What has no place in this insisting ecological discourse is death. The fact that death is difficult to acknowledge is not new, but in our contemporary situation, death has a new face.

The project “Gold and Ashes” extends beyond representation to become an intimate act of excavation that proposes to mediate — materially, politically, and metaphysically — the reappropriation of death as a power and our sovereignty as mortal beings in the private and social spheres.

Through selected excerpts and a discussion around the project’s production mediated by Susana Viegas and Lucas Ferraço Nassif, with the artist and filmmaker Salomé Lamas, we will speculate on the implications of representing trauma and the aesthetics of disappearance.

This event will take place exclusively in person at NOVA FCSH on March 6th at 6:00 PM.

Salomé Lamas is a Portuguese filmmaker, visual artist and educator. For the last fifteen years and with a steady production of more than thirty projects, Salomé Lamas’ work has been contextualized in visual culture, artistic studies, and film studies, exhibited and distributed internationally in the fields of cinema (movie theatres, festivals, VOD streaming) and contemporary art (galleries, museums, art fairs, biennials). She has been developing an artistic practice which explores the embedded relation between representation and the narrative power of social reality while proposing something different. Around, but not beyond, the real: beyond, but not besides, the fictional. To address the efforts to expand such interstice she refers to her work as critical media practice parafictions.

Lamand is a research artist studio that advocates for parafiction by rejecting the boundaries between reality and fiction to rethink a state of uncertainty inherent to our historical moment through cinema/contemporary art. Lamaland’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes and production strategies that range from film, to publications and installation. More info here.

📸 Gold and Ashes [2024], by Salomé Lamas

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07/08/2026

“Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films” is out now!

We are pleased to announce the completion of the Special Issue “Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films”, guest edited by Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas for Arts. The Special Issue brings together seven original articles examining testament films from a philosophical perspective. Rather than approaching filmmakers’ final works merely as […]
06/08/2026

New Open Access publication by Susana Viegas

We are pleased to share that the book chapter “Derrida on Cinema’s Spectral Images: Time, Repetition, and Belief” by PI Susana Viegas is now available in Open Access through the publisher Brill. Published in “Derrida and Film Studies”, edited by Kamil Lipiński and Andrzej Marzec (Brill, 2025), the chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s reflections on cinema […]
06/08/2026

Join us at the Goethe-Institut Portugal for the cycle “Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém)”!

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Portugal, with contributions from the FILM AND DEATH team, Death Café, the association Doulas do Fim da Vida, and many other partners, the festival Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém) [Speaking About Death (Never Killed Anyone)] will open on September 17 at 5:00 pm with the interactive sound installation Memorial […]
03/08/2026

Join Anderson Santos and Lucas Ferraço Nassif at the Centro Português de Psicanálise

On September 1, 7:00 PM, the Centro Português de Psicanálise (R. da Assunção 7, 2º) will host a talk by Anderson Santos, moderated by Lucas Ferraço Nassif, on “Félix Guattari: Psicanálise e o Paradigma Ético-Estético”. This presentation will be in Portuguese. This presentation addresses the shift initiated by Félix Guattari within psychoanalysis, as he proposes […]
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Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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