Nuno da Luz is a Portuguese artist whose work circumscribes both aural and visual in the form of performances, installations and printed matter. His work undulates between sonic explorations of place — where resonance and reverberation are inextricably entwined as both echo- and eco-logical processes — and bookmaking through the publishing collective ATLAS Projectos. Alongside filmmaker Ana Vaz, he’s developing the soundtrack to her upcoming film The Voyage Out, a sonic exploration of her film to come, as a transmission.

Fields of newborn flowers, small gatherings of surviving bees, resistant plant species and new types of eggs lay upon our shore, engaging us to dig and search for the meaning of such unexpected life...

A filmic exploration of the working conditions of female workers at nuclear power stations. Voices of women describe their heightened exposure to the risks of lung cancer, miscarriage, Down’s syndrome or neurological damage. Echoing the way that the nuclear workers’ bodies are harmed by exposure to radiations, the filmstrip is constantly overexposed, burned to the point of the image’s near disappearance. Sandra Lahire (1950-2001) was a central figure in the experimental feminist filmmaking that emerged in the UK in the 1980s.

In Olhe Bem As Montanhas, Vaz draws parallels between the state of Minas Gerais in the south west of Brazil and Nord-Pas-de-Calais in northern France, two regions marked by centuries of mining activities. Borrowing its title from the phrase “Look closely at the mountains!” coined by Brazilian artist Manfredo de Souzanetto, whose geometric landscapes often evoked the surfaces of the region, the film adopts the perspective of hollow and gutted mountains to question their industrial memory and spectral futures. 

Sanctus is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisibile visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems. Sanctus portrays a body in need of protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate.