AntropoCena presents: Chimeras in Cinema, shared film screening

Authorship/Art/Dissemination: Carlos Eduardo Conceição • LISA Scientific Dissemination Scholarship
Published: 16/10/2025

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On October 21 at 2 p.m., LISA will host "Quimeras no Cinema," a shared film screening organized by the Art and Culture Festival and promoted by the Dean of Culture and University Extension in accordance with Resolution CoCEx 8451, dated July 30, 2023. The event will feature film screenings followed by a discussion with filmmakers.
Filmes em exibição:


Curatorial Text:

When cinema intersects with anthropology, a meeting place is created. Rather than merely representing, it shares perspectives, reframes experiences, and enables diverse voices to craft their own narratives. This exhibition brings together films in which the screen is a body, a ritual, and an archive. In these films, participant observation becomes a gesture of complicity. From drag queens preparing in their dressing rooms to wealthy Bahian women crossing the avenue in dialogue with their ancestors, and from a Congolese artist transforming his body into a performance of the diaspora to an American painter denouncing mass incarceration, a cinema of sharing emerges: fragments that, when assembled, form a chimera.


In Montando a Baiana and Carlos Caps Drag Race, the montage reveals itself as a transformative power in both cinema and bodies. In Montando a Baiana, the act of dressing up transcends mere chance and technique, approaching the realm of ritual. Since the mid-20th century, transvestites, queers, and other marginalized individuals have adopted the role of the Baiana Rica in maracatu processions, thereby asserting their presence within the context of ancestral and supernatural feminine figures, including Yabás, Mestras de Jurema, and Pombagiras. Aurélio, Mestre Maurício Soares, and Macaxeira recount this story in dialogue with the memory of Maria Aparecida, the archetypal Baiana Rica. In Carlos Caps, we see three Brazilian drag queens: Satine, Di Vina Kaskaria, and Gabeeh Brasil, preparing for a drag race in São Paulo. Through makeup, costumes, and confessions, the montage reveals the drag queen as a multidisciplinary artist whose body is constantly reinvented and exposed through performance. Whether on the maracatu avenue or the Caps Lock party stage, dressing up always creates possible worlds, mixing art and politics, tradition and re-signification, and performance.

In Tabuluja (Wake Up!) and Jail Birds, the screen and performance merge to create spaces for denunciation and reinvention. In Tabuluja (Wake Up!), Congolese artist Shambuyi Wetu, who lives in São Paulo as a refugee, transforms his body into a stage and living screen. Each of his gestures enacts the experience of the diaspora and rewrites the condition of the Black man in the world. Created in collaboration with anthropologists Rose Satiko Hikiji and Jasper Chalcraft, his performances are rituals of survival and affirmation where art and life merge. In Jail Birds, American artist and mass incarceration activist Henrietta H. H. Mantooth also transforms the canvas into a political performance. Her paintings of caged birds mirror the Black and Latino bodies imprisoned in U.S. prisons. Her presence in the studio and in the exhibition installation is part of the artwork itself. Together, these films reveal how bodies and canvases in different geographies can become symbolic weapons against structural violence—insurgent performances that expose wounds and create openings for the future.

These films not only document, but also assemble a chimera: Bahian, drag, bird, and body in transit. Through the combination of these experiences, not only in the diegesis, but also in the work behind the cameras and in the audience's perception, this exhibition set out to present productions born of shared perspectives since their conception. Films made in collaboration between a researcher (anthropologist), technical team, and characters unfold here in a universe expanded by the concept of chimera: the curatorship, the audience's perspectives and reactions, the exchanges in the film debate, and the debaters' views together compose an open montage. Each fragment—reactions, ideas, performances, and diverse bodies—becomes part of this living amalgam that continually reinterprets what we see and experience. All these perspectives together construct our chimera in cinema.

Curators: Marcelo Eme and Carlos Eduardo Conceição

Revision: Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji

Production: Vanessa Menezes Munhoz