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Highlights from the São Paulo Art Biennial

This video draws us in like a moth to a lightbulb.

As the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial draws to a close, we’d like to share one of our favorite pieces, Phantoms of Nabua, a film installation created by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the film director and video artist who won the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes this year. The video opens up showing a leafy landscape illuminated by a fluorescent light tube and violent spurts of thunder and lightning. The setting is sinister enough by itself, but what eventually unfolds is the real wicked part: a soccer match played with a ball on fire, cutting the screen with hot light and the sounds of kicking.

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The film is part of Primitive, a project consisting of videos, music videos, installations and a book based on the myth of the Ghost Widow who abducts people from Nabua, a village in the Nakhon Panom province of Thailand. The legend may explain the absence of male adults in the region, but might also be based on the region’s dramatic historical past that went through a military occupation between the 60s and 80s, on charges against the local population for sympathy to communism. It’s likely that in this context, part of the male population will eventually disappear — be it to the heavens or into the forest that appears in Phantoms of Nabua.

Being familiar with Apichatpong’s background, helps us understand the symbology of the destruction of the projection screen, torched by the flaming ball, not only maintains the visual tension between the hot lights (the fire) and cold ones (the projector and the fluorescent lamp), but also illustrates the tension between “natural forces” (fire, thunder, and men) and “external forces” (white lights and the film projector). From a more political point of view, the football match is not the only dispute. The lights also seem to fight for their place in the film, similar to other relevant oppressing situations like struggling to stay alive, and attempting to tell a story.

Although the film was commissioned by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, Animate Projects of London, and the Haus der Kunst art museum in Munich, the only technology utilized is a fluorescent lamp and a projector. The result is simply brilliant. See for yourself here.