A Certain Kind of Cinema:
Some notes on Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela’s State of Spirit
“Cinema exists to emancipate the night,”1 I wrote in a poem many years ago. Forgive the self-quotation, but this line came back to me, from that shared reservoir of scintillations carried by every reader of poetry, the moment I immersed myself in State of Spirit, the extensive presentation of fifteen years of work by the duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela at the Galeria Municipal do Porto, curated by João Laia.
Bringing together previously shown works and new pieces, and combining film, photography, drawing, and sculpture, what State of Spirit establishes across the thousand square metres of the Galeria Municipal’s ground floor is cinema—or at least a certain kind of cinema: one whose interpenetration with a certain kind of poetry goes far beyond invocation or ekphrasis, operating instead at the level of image-making and memory itself.2
In the darkness of the gallery, lit almost exclusively by the film screens and the light boxes of certain works, with red filters on the windows tinting the afternoon outside, I recognised an emotion which I so often seek in cinemas, and which I would only call "escapism" out of carelessness or modesty. Rather, it is the certainty of gaining access to another time: an emancipated one, resistant to the constraints of the clock or the chores of daily life, free from the weary yoke of morality and urban biorhythms.
Indeed, in State of Spirit we are encouraged to inhabit a time that has been edited and re-ritualised so as to mirror the cosmic dance of sun and moon, the immemorial cycle of the seasons, of agricultural labour, of communal feasts and rites, of the daily work of sustenance within the family and the home.
While this reintroduction of a natural temporality within the gallery space might seem like an admission of defeat, or a kind of reversal—no longer an attunement to the arc of the sun or the rhythm of the seasons, but rather the 24/7 capitalist insomnia now seemingly immanent to us—Caló and Queimadela stage it with an enchanting effect. They invite us to recall the wonder of a first gaze, to access the somatic memory of ancestral rites and flows, the primordial night from which the totalising use of technology has estranged us. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the child, with their grimaces, games, and questions, continually urges us to follow them through a series of events that, for them, constitute initiatory experiences and, for us, if we are lucky, occasions for reconnection.
In recalling the warmth and mystery of small daily gestures, in suggesting contiguities between the human and the animal, between domestic routine and the vertigo of historical time, and in overlaying the elementary language of water, stone, fire, and vegetation onto the human language of mirrors, bells, and utensils, Caló and Queimadela reanimate an ancestral vitality that our bodies still remember: their belonging to the rhythms of the earth. Yet this harmonious reintegration does not fail to unsettle us.
Indeed, at a certain point, it is as though the earth, the water, and the minute forms of life they harbour return our gaze. Stones, tiny patches of mould, flowers, and insects are transfigured; vocalisations of uncertain origin swell; strangeness becomes intolerable at times. Through sustained contemplation, if we allow ourselves to embrace this unsettling form of animism, we begin to realise that the strangeness is mutual, and that what nature reflects back to us is, in fact, our own face.
These phantasmagorias of the human, of which all nature seems to bear a trace, are reinforced by moving beams of light that traverse the space, cutting shadows and veils across the works—video and photography, drawings and sculptures that are more or less organic, more or less anatomical—and across the other figures we encounter in the gallery’s nocturnal atmosphere. Shadow, silk, and veils strike me, moreover, as key interpretative tools for reading Caló and Queimadela’s work, appearing from the outset in Sala de memória para corpo radial, a wooden and silk structure which, at the beginning of the exhibition, imposes a sensitive, ruby-red, carnal filter upon our gaze.
At a time when we film and photograph everything, yet often stripped of cinema—that is, forgetful as we are of our inner night—the duo seems to resist seamless beauty, an image without secrecy. Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on nudity are not entirely extemporaneous here, insofar as they allow us to read Caló and Queimadela’s work in light of the reintroduction of a theological device that reclaims, for matter, the veiling of grace, as opposed to the mere functionalism of bare life, divested of all symbolic vestment.3 What we encounter, then, is a gesture of re-envelopment or re-velation of mystery, of re-creation of a primordial play between light and shadow; or, returning to the poem with which I began this text, the construction of a kind of cinema in which it might be possible to “love bodies in bloom.”
Mariana Caló e Francisco Queimadela, State of Spirit. Exhibition view at Galeria Municipal do Porto, 2025. Photos: Dinis Santos and Sérgio Monteiro. Courtesy Galeria Municipal do Porto.
- Line from the poem “(Je, tu, il, elle),” from my 2017 book Tão Bela Como Qualquer Rapaz.
- There is a vast body of scholarship on forms of intermediality between cinema and poetry, the full exploration of which would lie beyond the scope of this text. In the Portuguese context, it is worth mentioning Rosa Maria Martelo's O Cinema da Poesia (Documenta, 2012), which informs these brief reflections.
- See Giorgio Agamben, Nudez, Relógio d'Água, 2010.