Planeta GZ

Eu máis is an emotional experience, a feeling, the reminiscence of a dream in which voices and bodies are lost and found in nature. Eu máis is a journey to the primitive, a question for the animals, an attempt to pierce the fear and to melt myself into everything to try to express all I cannot say.

In Galicia, Spain’s most north-western region, one of the oldest forms of Carnival takes place every year. Spread over several days are parades with felos and peliqueiros, characters who wear spectacular outfits, including a striking mask and a belt strung with large cowbells. Another tradition is the farrapada, in which participants pelt each other with rags covered in mud. There is also a fight in which flour and ants are thrown on the participants, and a huge model-ant towers above the crowd. These peculiar celebrations, lit by torches and accompanied by drums, are compellingly filmed in this short documentary—as if one were standing there in person, immersed in an age-old pagan ritual. The night-time scenes of the partying crowd, often packed tightly together, gain extra significance in hindsight, as this celebration took place in late February, just ten days before the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the region.

A light turns on. They are elusive and hard to see. They inhabit where there is nothing. There, in the deep.

Through my grandmother’s deteriorated memory, I walk through her old traumas while climbing a mountain at night, in the middle of a snow storm.
My 99-year-old grandmother talks to herself in the room, repeats childhood stories in a loop, but no longer remembers what happened 20 years ago. Memories of childhood fear overcome old age and a fading memory: her mother’s death at the age of 4 and the fact that she was abandoned still cement an emotional architecture that does not fade with dementia. In the middle of a snowstorm, I think about this, about being alone and afraid. Other women’s voices resound in the mountain.

When you pass out you fall into a hole from which you return after a short period of time, experiencing reality as if you were discovering it for the first time. When there is a hole, something is about to emerge. Wherever a hole moves, a surface is invented. Fainting is like falling in love. A love story like a Gruyère cheese.

A radio station (Radio Cu Cu) collects images from video surveillance cameras found on internet and superimposes its own audio track. The images come from all kinds of places: spa & bath houses, homes, streets, factories, radio stations, shops, buildings, and so on. The radio editor and hosts talk about their doubts regarding the use of this type of images, and the identities of the people captured on camera.