Luiz Roque, Guest Artist of the 15th Cine Esquema Novo – Brazilian Audiovisual Art

To follow Luiz Roque’s career is to know that his path — which began in cinema and from where he would find the visual arts – has been filled with iconic and sometimes dreamlike images and sounds, illuminating a body of work in which film is a place to be and perceive biopolitics, one of his fictions’ starting points.

Different social interlocutions show that semantics, usually considered a mediator and ally, has its shadow: gaps unreachable by language. Therefore, we rely on gestures, signs, and images to preserve inexpressible nuances and dispel the fog of singular and demarcating image constructions. As Luiz Roque brilliantly shows us, there are things that only images can tell.

The camera floats, sometimes in Super8 or 16mm, through a sci-fi cosmos in which humanity appears with half-cyborg props, not yet cataloged but clearly perceivable by the audience. It breaks with the current state of digital mirages and reasserts the importance of film, grain, the film’s original soul, and social power.

The curatorship by Jaqueline Beltrame and Kamyla Belli with Roque presents works developed between 2013 and 2024 — when Clube Amarelo was made during an artistic residency at the Fundación Ama Amoedo, Uruguay. This film has its national premiere on the opening night of the 15th Cine Esquema Novo.

The challenges of queer-becoming, a recurring theme in Roque’s work, dissolve in the face of history. This glimpse of political issues, portrayed in stunning images and accompanied by robust sound designs, supports key debates sensitively exposed by the artists’ films. We do not need words to know we are looking at glimpses of a dissident future.

 Guest Artist Exhibition – Luiz Roque

Curated by Jaqueline Beltrame and Kamyla Belli