Parangolé, 2023

color, sound, 3:00

16mm film transfer, 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. The title is a reference to the performative cloaks/capes of the late Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, made of various materials including fabric, paper, and plastic. This handmade film is made with reclaimed pigments and physical processes including spraying, scratching, staining, and marking.

Selected Screenings/Awards:

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

• Brooklyn Film Festival

• 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

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