A woman struggles to find her place in the relationship to the infinite nature.

direction and editing_KIKA NICOLELA
performer_LUCIANA CANTON
director of photography_CHING C. WANG
music_THIERRY GAUTHIER & DELPHINE MEASROCH

selected screenings & exhibitions:
KIKA NICOLELA | Atrium Gallery, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, USA
BERLIN INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORS LOUNGE | Berlin, Germany
KIKA NICOLELA - SELECTED VIDEOS | Arnot Art Museum, Elmira - NY, USA
ALUCINE TORONTO MEDIA FESTIVAL | Toronto, Canada
AZA FILM FESTIVAL | Thessaloniki, Greece
VAD FESTIVAL | Girona, Spain
VIDEO SMACK | Washington, USA
RE:PLAY KIKA NICOLELA | São Paulo, Brazil
RETROSPECTIVA KIKA NICOLELA | São Paulo, Brazil


ESSAY:

The Ghosts of the Place, by Alessandra Ribeiro

The blue light, from the alien night, the light that turns everything into blue melancholy, melancholic alien blue light on a dark and sad night, during which the dancing woman wanders, the ghost of the place. Each place where there was life stores its ghosts, life traces of that place that is gone, traces of who passed by it, traces of past stories. The places die like people, loose their life when people’s lives are gone and start to disintegrate. The places die, decay, like the colonial houses of a certain Rio de Janeiro that Nature reclaims, the mosses spreading over the walls made weeds, the green that reabsorbs what man created, leaving only ruins behind, an empty pool home to a sculpture by Iole de Freitas that places a giant Dora Maar squeezed in a tight space, the nature swallowing the pool, Dora Maar, the sculptures of the Açude Museum. There, only the ghosts are left, the noisy silence of the place, the silence filled with glasses, forks and knifes, parties and steps of people who no longer exist, of a time that no longer is. Life died there. Nature lives and reclaims what had been stolen from it. Like in Kika Nicolela’s WINDMAKER, the wind maker that stirs the ghost of that gloomy, blue, timeless and surreal place. The fleeing woman, who takes shape and dissolves in movement and tissues. Dance that is almost despair. She struggles. The woman is a vision, she haunts the place that haunts her, fearless, no expression other than the despair of her dance movements. The woman is the ghost of the place.

The wind is made by the tissues of her long sleeved dress. The body that twists itself makes the wind blows. The wind brings the sound, the smells, the taste of that cold place, a humid taste, sad, heavy, but also light and subtle. The taste almost escapes when it touches the mouth along with the wind. It carries a sweet painful memory, of which the ghost escapes unable to forget.

It’s the agony of the ghost of the place, of what never dies and survives the life that once was there, of what lies there unable to die, desperate memory of the absence. When the sun rises in WINDMAKER, the woman, the ghost of the place, walks like a shadow in front of a lake and mountains, frozen lifeless scenery, petrified life on an infinite sunrise that she walks in front of. She walks and watches the sunrise, the mountains, the pink and yellow sky. Which sunrise doesn’t calm the nightmares, the moonlight, the alien blue? Which sunrise doesn’t save a person from the nightmares, awakening that doesn’t relieve the dream, a ghost that doesn’t disappear when the light is on?

The woman, the ghost of the place, is in the water, she dissolves herself in water, she moves in the water and the water is now her movement, her dance no longer in despair, now soft. Icy, the dance freezes the bones, makes the day as blue and melancholic as the night, of a soft sadness, fluid like water. Only the face is off the water, of an Ofelia that drowns as slowly as her agony lingers, an stretched thread in slow motion that waits for the breaking moment, the thread/string of the cello that stretches the pain to the limit, leaving a cry inside, that always returns with that music from WINDMAKER. I cry with the soundtrack, a pain that aches inside, breaking into pieces all that exists, letting only the ghosts wandering everywhere. The ghosts of the place.