Exploring how the reverberative power of communal voicing can evoke modes of resilience against zoning practices created by extraction,The Refracted Body navigates a multiplicity of parallel presents, expanding the textures of poetry and politics throughout synaesthetic sonic and visual portals. Through a borderless form of elemental navigation, it senses nature and bodies as infrastructures, from the molecular to the cosmic, puncturing the spacetime continuum with folk tales that challenge hegemonic narratives of structural violence.

Reflecting about the cycles of the Earth’s material transformation, while facing forms of indigenous dispossession and the imminence of multiple extinctions, this program explores the existentialism of interspecies echoing in a moment of disappearance of traditions and rituals, attempting to dislodge traumatic memory through chants and dispersed forms of introspection, utilizing fables, animation, collage, and the power of allegory. The works summoned explore forms of auto-ethnography and docufiction that invoke powerful connections with the vibrational architectures of sacred songs and the voices of our ancestors, conjuring the scalar space of life as a dimension of kin by resonance. In doing so, they expand on how different cosmologies can narrate distinct accesses to the natural world, drawing the resilient possibility of a political multiverse inhabited by a spectrum of presences.

Curated by Margarida Mendes, the programme included films by Allora & Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang), Heba Y. Amin, Monica Baptista, Fausto Carlos with Takumã Kuikuro & Leonardo Sette, Diogo Evangelista, Laura Huertas Millán, Laleh Kohrramian, Lukas Marxt, Vincent Monnikendam, Hira Nabi, Alexandra Navratil, Thao Nguyen Phan, Agnieszka Polska, Deborah Stratman, and Ana Vaz.