Introduction: Vanessa Joan Müller
Rio, 2012
Red Code/HD Digital, 88 min. 33 sec.
© Sara Morris, Courtesy White Cube
In Rio, Morris depicts the multifarious and complex layers of this most contradictory of cities, from its highly orchestrated and eroticised surface image, to the infinite realities of its vast urban sprawl, industrial production and the minutiae of its day-to-day living. Johanna Burton has described Morris’ films as being characterised by a ‘pulsing, nervous, chromatic attention’ and in this film, her camera wanders flaneur-like through Rio’s Ipanema beach, hospitals, iconic modernist architecture, football stadiums, factories and favelas. Filming in numerous locations including the office of architect Oscar Niemeyer just before his death, the headquarters of the Mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, the infamous Carnival and its ‘Winner’s Parade’, the legendary ‘City of God’ neighbourhood, as well as the inside of the Brahma beer factory, Rio focuses on the city’s architecture and, in particular, on the way that it engineers social interaction and plays a key role in Brazil’s outward-facing identity. With images that alternate between the micro and macro, day and night, Morris’ film creates a hallucinatory space that explores the psychology of this city at a particular moment in its history, and traces how this is embedded in behaviour, signs, surfaces and Rio’s complex political history.
Admission EUR 2
Free with entrance ticket or annual ticket