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Paper Short Abstract:

Imagine you are in a ritual, and someone says: “Images of gods can move and look at us. This is evidence”. How would you film it? This presentation shows different strategies (cinema, AI, acting) to make it visible the moments where images transcend themselves, thus becoming what they “represent”.

Paper Abstract:

Within Afro-American religions, images play a crucial role. And I do not only mean material images placed in the altars (basically statues of gods) but also corporeal images (bodies possessed by spirits) and mental images (dreams, visions, apparitions, acts of imagination). All these images are interconnected establishing a dynamic network of images. Yet there are moments where images become more than mere representations: they merge with what they represent, thus becoming a dispositive of presence.

For instance: imagine you are in a ritual, and, talking about statues, someone says: “Images of gods can move, talk, and look at us. This is evidence”. How would you film it? Or, more broadly, how would you visualize it?

This presentation shows different strategies (cinema, AI, acting) with which I have been experimenting during my research in order to make it visible, and therefore thinkable and sharable, these sort of “miraculous moments” where images transcend themselves and become living beings, with affects and effects.

Cinema has been described as an art of presence. Camera, it has been said, can only record what it is in front of it. This presentation goes straight against this thesis, my aim being to convey the idea that through cinema, and other visual research techniques (AI, drawing, acting), it is possible to grasp, and make it visible, what is not directly observable. I will focus on an on-going research in Puerto Rico. This research forms part of the ERC-Consolidator Gran Visual Trust (2021-2026, www.visualtrust.ub.edu).