Parangolé, 2023

color, sound, 3:00

16mm film transfer to HD, single channel screening or multi-channel installation

A rainy morning in Rio de Janeiro: film as a membrane, a memory veil imprinted by the body and the environment. This handmade film, made with reclaimed pigments and physical processes including scratching, staining, and marking, is titled as a reference to the performative cloaks and capes of the late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica.

Selected Screenings/Awards:

• World premiere: 9th nodoCCS Festival, Galería elRAiSE, Caracas, Venezuela, 2023

• Brooklyn Film Festival

• Aurora Picture Show, Houston

• Cauldron International Film & Video Festival, Salt Lake City

• Berlin Kiez Film Festival, Germany *honorable mention

• Edmonton Underground Film Festival, Canada

• Revolutions per Minute Festival, Boston

• Rare Effect Festival, Lisbon, Portugal

• Light Matter, Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Spatiotemporal, Lambla Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina

• art + film + vienna

• Post-Cinema Film Festival, Siracusa, Italy *honorable mention

• Strangloscope, Mostra Internacional de Video/Filme & Performance Experimental, Brazil

• Stuff MX, Mexico City

• Mirror Mountain Film Festival, Ottawa, Canada

Press:

"What is valuable in films like Parangolé is a modernity that has been transfigured...it is rescuing the experiments of the past, not for reasons of nostalgia but for the aspiration to keep alive the new..."

-Pablo Gamba, Los Experimentos

"What makes Parangolé unique is Meza’s use of rhythm, with marks moving around inside the image...the larger composition pulls in and out of the celluloid space..."

-Michael Sicinski, In Review Online

"Meza’s series of films distill the disruptive and liberatory energy that animates the performativity that Oiticica’s Parangolés were meant to incite into a frenetic, cinematic dance — explosions, and agitations — of colors, scratches, and stains, which also creates, in Meza’s films, an unvarying field, a Dionysian hum that consumes singular articulations — including a participatory mobilization of the “longing for” the body..."

-Ronnie Yates, Glasstire