New Moons: Alice dos Reis

The films of the visual artist and director Alice dos Reis stage playful, eerie confrontations between empirical knowledge and mystical thinking, blurring the boundaries between science and wonder. Rather than isolating these two poles, she scrambles them together, demonstrating—in playful, eerie ways—a kinship between their seemingly distinct modes of truth-seeking. Consider her 2020 short, Undercurrent, a kind of stripped-down epistolary drama about a marine biologist observing a species of deep-sea krill using nano-cameras planted in their bodies. For long stretches of the film, we’re looking at the scientist looking at the krill on her computer screen, basking in her state of careful examination. Written correspondences between the scientist and an unnamed colleague tell us that her study of the species has taken an unsettling turn: a pregnant female krill has managed to reproduce despite the machine lodged in her body, and the scientist suspects that the krill herd knows it’s being watched. If human technologies often invade and exploit natural spaces, what if nature could absorb the synthetic and evolve accordingly? Even the most diminutive species can elude us, mocking whatever Godlike claims humanity has over nature, which it endlessly, pointlessly strives to master and control.

This liminal space between the earthly and the otherworldly is mined again in dos Reis’s most recent film Our Lady Who Burns (2024), a meditation on Portugal’s Serra da Gardunha. Using desaturated 16mm footage of the craggy mountain range, a narrator draws connections between the site’s holy history, as a place where visitors often claimed to experience visions of saints, and modern claims of UFO sightings. We see close-ups of someone embroidering a design of the mountain with UFOs prominently scattered throughout, which allows the paranormal figures to evoke the kind of homespun, devotional art you might encounter in domestic spaces. Dos Reis habitually brings her theoretical subject-matter down to a personal, intentionally trivial scale: the narrator wonders if the mountain’s spectral powers might help rid her aging cat of its pregnancy (the female krill’s miraculous, mechanical birth contrasts, here, with a kind of immaculate abortion). Likewise, in For a Life Long Disease of Copper (2021), dos Reis imagines a world in which copper IUDs are manufactured from asteroid dust, underscoring her interest in the weird mutations of, and intrusions upon, the female reproductive system.

For a Life Long Disease of Copper is also a fictional remembrance of the artist’s grandmother, who worked at a pharmaceutical factory before companies became liable for their employees' exposure to toxic materials. In the second half of the film, we watch dos Reis’s grandmother testify about her experiences, though the elder woman is played by dos Reis herself, digitally aged to produce an uncanny and haunting effect. This phantasmal projection of the two women collapses age and distance even as it calls attention to the artifice of the illusion.

Dos Reis tends to represent relationships—usually relationships between women— as misty, enigmatic, yet inexplicably intimate, felt rather than physically evident. In See You Later Space Island, two friends reunite in a depopulated island (Santa Maria, in the Azores), where one of them is studying exoplanets. The island is the site of a missile-launch facility, and much of the film involves the two women silently passing through its various natural and man-made settings: a lush field punctuated by a massive satellite; a dune where teenagers are recording a TikTok video. “We came here 500 years ago and now we’re launching rockets to other places?” wonders one of the women in voiceover, subtly commenting on the colonial underpinnings of scientific exploration.

Axolotls—an odd, amphibious species native to Mexico (but, as Dos Reis observes, exported to places like Paris for zoological research in the late 19th century)—are at the centre of Dos Reis’s Mood Keep (2018). We see two women looking at their phones, presumably Googling information about axolotls, between close-up shots of the creature in a glass aquarium that seems to be catching the reflection of an external TV screen playing an anime. As the narrator observes, axolotls are cute—they always seem to be smiling—but cuteness is closely linked to duplicity and unnaturalness. Though there are real axolotls on-screen, their stillness and silly faces give us the impression that we’re looking at plastic figurines. The subjects of ongoing medicinal research, axolotls are seemingly aberrations of nature because they’re caught between two stages of evolution, thus their tender, juvenile features (like their underdeveloped limbs). As such, they’re the perfect mascot for dos Reis’s cinema of liminality, trapped between states of being, phoniness and fact; a mystery of God’s creation in the form of a cartoon.