Salomé Lamas: Screening and Discussion

Join us on Saturday, December 6, 2025 from 2pm onwards for a three-part screening and conversation with Portuguese filmmaker and artist Salomé Lamas. The afternoon will begin with a screening of Eldorado XXI (2016), followed by a discussion with the artist and a presentation of the new publication Salomé Lamas: Gold and Ashes (Mousse Publishing, 2025), and will conclude with a screening of Gold and Ashes (2025).

Working between cinema, installation, and essayistic documentary, Lamas has developed a distinct approach to the environments and social situations she films. Drawing on parafictional strategies that combine sensory ethnography and critical media practice, Lamas focuses on geographies marked by extraction, instability, and forms of life shaped by structural violence. In Eldorado XXI Lamas approaches the twenty-first-century “El Dorado” without the use of voice-of-God narration or illustrative images, whereas in Gold and Ashes she creates a dual narrative space to consider how spiritual consciousness, power relations, and civilizational narratives intersect. Both films demonstrate how Lamas embraces uncertainty and subjectivity as integral to her way of storytelling. By staying with ambiguity Lamas refuses easy comforts of moral absolutism and instead invites the viewer to participate in the labor of meaning-making. Fiction in her work is not used to obscure the facts, but to expose how violently constructed—and violently maintained—versions of the truth can be.

Program

2pm
Salomé Lamas, Eldorado XXI (2016, 125 minutes)
Eldorado XXI tells of the living conditions of workers in a gold mine in the southeast of Peru. Under the ancient system of cachorreo, the miner works for thirty days without remuneration, and on the thirty-first day, he is allowed to explore the mine for his own profit. To endure this life, the workers chew coca leaves and drink heavily. Set in the highest settlement in the world, La Rinconada in the Peruvian Andes, the film depicts an illusion that leads men to self-destruction, moved by the same interests and dealt with using the same approaches in contemporaneity as in ancient times. The workers foster the hope that one day, without even the minimum for subsistence, they will find the means to resettle elsewhere.

4:30pm
Discussion and presentation
A discussion with Lamas, followed by a presentation of her new publication Salomé Lamas: Gold and Ashes (Mousse Publishing, 2025).

5:30pm
Salomé Lamas, Gold and Ashes (2025, 89 minutes)
Life should be our first object of inquiry and care. The reason for this is clear: we are living beings in a situation in which the conditions of life are under threat. Death has no place in this ecological discourse. While the difficulty of acknowledging death is nothing new, in our contemporary situation, death has a new face. Gold and Ashes goes beyond representation, becoming an intimate act of excavation that proposes to materially, politically and metaphysically mediate the re-appropriation of death as power and our sovereignty as mortal beings both in the private and social spheres.

This program is presented as a continuation of the October 2025 edition of e-flux Film’s series Staff Picks featuring Salomé Lamas. It is organized with the support of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portuguese Short Film Agency, and O Som e a Fúria.

Salomé Lamas is a Portuguese filmmaker, visual artist, and educator. For the last fifteen years, with a steady production of more than thirty projects, her work has been contextualized in visual culture, artistic studies, and film studies, exhibited, and distributed internationally in the fields of cinema (movie theatres, festivals, VOD streaming) and contemporary art (galleries, museums, art fairs, biennials).She has been developing an artistic practice that explores the embedded relation between representation and the narrative power of social reality while proposing something different. Around, but not beyond, the real: beyond, but not besides, the fictional. To address the efforts to expand such interstice, she refers to her work as critical media practice parafictions.With a mixed background in cinema and visual arts and research informed by critical epistemology, transnational and subjective, focused on the possibilities opened up by ecological thought, as well as the connection between artistic praxis, economic, aesthetic mutations, and contemporary philosophy, she’s been challenged to comply with a single orientation or to combine them in her actions as an artist/filmmaker, but also as an educator in various contexts, levels, and geographies.The multidisciplinary ethos underpinning her artistic endeavor continually challenges the boundaries of visual narrative to foster critical dialogues that prompt audiences to confront the intricacies of the human experience and broader societal dynamics, focused on migration, postcolonialism, and a critique of capitalism.This research-based practice perpetuates a legacy of intellectual inquiry and artistic innovation, critically examining the social and economic roles of media production across the stages of development, production, exhibition, distribution, and archive with outcomes that range from films to installations and publications.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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