Salomé Lopes Coelho presenting at the II Coloquio Ecologías Críticas

On 3 december, Salomé Lopes Coelho is presenting her paper ‘Inhuman Intimacies: Air, Water, and Transorientation in Latin American Experimental Films’ at the II Coloquio Ecologías Críticas, hosted in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

During her presentation, Salomé will analyse experimental cinematic practices by Latin American women filmmakers who engage with air and water as entangled materialities. Focusing on a selection of recent short films—including works by Flavia de la Fuente, Everlane Moraes, and Lucrecia Martel—she will point out how formal cinematic strategies unsettle inherited perceptual coordinates. She will introduce the notion of transorientation to describe the perceptual reconfiguration that these films enact: a shift grounded in elemental relationality, where species, spaces, and materials emerge through enmeshments that blur directional cues and dissolve familiar perceptual hierarchies. This reconfiguration often unfolds through an amorous encounter, shaped by amateur gestures and attentive inhabitation—modes of engagement that cultivate an intimacy with air and water. Focusing on these cinematic processes, Salomé will put forward the hypothesis of cinema as a diffractor shield: a material-discursive configuration that shifts the focus from representation and reflection toward the production of difference, interference, and radical proximity. Rather than treating cinema as a mirror of pre-existing realities, these films approach it as a site for enacting relational fields through which difference emerges materially. Through operations of disorientation and transorientation, they unsettle the boundaries of the self and foster a posthumanist ethic of attention.