João Maria Gusmão
Animal Farm

While one might liken Animal Farm to Orwell’s fairy tale, Gusmão concurrently unfurls a structuralist conundrum: the spectral nature of the cinematographic medium, pointing us towards a “weirding” phenomenology; a hauntology of sorts – the study of the nature of what lies between being and non-being among domesticated and wild ranch critters – a vicarious ontology!

Within Animal Farm, Gusmão submerges us into his idiosyncratic world of para-historical, para-scientific and para-philosophical exploits and opinions, intricately interwoven within each celluloid strip.

In the rooms lit only by film projections, one might notice (or not) a mountain of Snow White’s favoured baking powder; the mute crowing of a Rooster at dawn signalling the beginning of yet another day; a Ghost tape that echoes the sounds of its own demise; a squadron of ducks waltzing through a still life titled Landscape with Boat and River; Half a horse; a humble estate devoted to the exploitation of the sun, that is, a Solar farm; Fermented Foam, an enigmatic goo reminiscent of a dairy product, flanked by Flat cows make nice Yogurt, a vivid account of genetically modified bovines with spongiform encephalopathy – feral!; a collection of purgatory Bedrooms; yours truly gazing with nostalgia at My Uncle’s Castle, once my grandfather’s and now my cousin’s cottage, immersed in a mise en abyme of resentful inheritance and birthright; Day for night, a motion picture salute to Magritte’s The Empire of Light; a tarragon Mustard piece imbued with scatological overtones; a Sunflower at dusk swept away by a nuclear storm; an eastern Disney like feature film folded 3 times for paradoxical reasons; The wondrous pumpkin farm; Mozart’s piss stone, the menhir once marked by Amadeus himself with the gasoline of a stone-age spacecraft.

Science is fiction!

And, so, the term coined by Derrida whilst delivering a lecture entitled “The Animal that Therefore I Am” reverberates once more: zoopoetics!