Contemporânea

In an unfinished song by Chico Science, probably halted by the artist’s untimely death, a sequence of verses conceives of time as a non-linear phenomenon. In them, the Brazilian singer and composer fixes his gaze on the horizon: “o futuro avança / em direção ao passado” [the future advances / towards the past], foreseeing that, “quando chegar a hora / [o encontro] / com o tempo real… [when the time comes / (the encounter) / with real time…], the world “será outro” [will be another]. There is something fascinating about trying to decipher the meanings of a non-existent artwork, like a song that never reached its listeners—and so a brief exercise in critical speculation begins to take shape. What kind of future is this that moves forward only to reach the past? What is the real time the lyrical voice speaks of? When will this encounter take place, and what “other” world will emerge from it?

Some of these questions resonate in biarritzzz’s KaOuS (2025), an expanded film in which the artist reinterprets the track “kAPTURA oU sURTAH,” from the album Eu Não Sou Afrofuturista (2020) [I’m not Afrofuturist]. In it, biarritzzz seeks to unsettle the Western concept of progress, whose linear chrononormativity rests on a belief in infinite economic and material growth. Phrases such as “não vou deixar que eles dominem o mundo” [I won’t let them dominate the world], “não serei mais um objeto de estudo” [I won’t be another object of study], and, in a rising sonic trance, “o real não é real” [the real is not real], are repeated with insistence. This punk cry from the original lyrics is reignited in the film through counter-narratives in which ethics, aesthetics, and politics intertwine as equivalent forces in a cosmological struggle over realities. The notion of time as absolute linearity and the foundational division between culture and nature (two myths established by Western literary and philosophical traditions and perpetuated through their institutions) are both put to the test.

To do so, biarritzzz draws on meme pedagogies—a term she coined in reference to the potential of viral images circulating through cyberspace as tools of communication, learning, and information synthesis—and on the operational modes of web art, which employs logics of appropriation and remix. Through these, she develops a satirical, humorous visual language that helps to unpack themes central to contemporary thought. In this artistic practice, pedagogical yet never didactic, the languages born of the popularisation of the World Wide Web align with DIY aesthetics and low-budget production methods, creating a space of proximity and inclusion for diverse audiences.

In many ways, biarritzzz works through approaches inherited from counter-cultural movements such as the manguebeat of Chico Science & Nação Zumbi—from which she also reclaims a spirit of defiant sonic experimentation—bringing together seemingly disparate elements through a shared language. Mixing, recombining, fusing, and reactivating are key gestures in her work, interwoven with the operational logics and visual languages of internet culture to further expand and complicate the debates her practice evokes. Within the spiralling temporality she envisions, ruins coexist with projections, ancestries with virtualities, and realities with fictions. And perhaps “[the encounter] / with real time,” as the composer’s verses suggest, could be nothing other than the present itself—an ever-expanding time that corrodes the very idea of unidirectional progress.

KaOuS (2025) was commissioned as part of the ATLANTIC project, an initiative by Contemporânea.

—Paula Ferreira

In a world dominated by surveillance systems, we see a character who wakes up not knowing where they are. A mysterious room is filled with seemingly harmless objects that, in fact, conceal surveillance cameras. Through their lenses, we follow the character's every move as they attempt to escape. Clues are scattered throughout the room, and the character has exactly 9 minutes and 59 seconds to piece them together and find a way out.

This work explores themes of domination, capture, breakdown, and illusion. Deploying satire and humour, the film embraces the aesthetic of surveillance footage and the pedagogies of memes in both its essence and realisation.

biarritzzz is the winner of the ATLANTIC CONTEMPORARY Film Commission 2025

The selection committee, composed of Inês Grosso, João Laia, Raphael Fonseca, and Vitória Cribb, chose the artist from Fortaleza, who lives and works in Salvador, Brazil.

KaOuS is the work that biarritzzz will present in gallery 2 of CULTURGEST Lisbon between October 24th and November 9th.

Opening
24 OCT
FRI 10:00pm

Opening hours Culturgest
TUE-SUN
11:00am-6:00pm

The ATLANTIC commission is an initiative of the CONTEMPORÂNEA platform that supports artistic creation, focusing on the moving image. This international commission aims to select visual artists who explore film, video, and experimental cinema in their practices.