Silvia Martes

Visual artist and filmmaker Silvia Martes has gained renown for her short, experimental films in which she evokes a fictional world within film sets of her own design. The films often seem both futuristic and timely: while they may be set in 2085 or 2121, themes such as the climate crisis, technology and racism make them unmistakably relevant today. More recently, her work has taken on a more documentary aspect and she has begun collecting visual material on location. Autobiographical elements figure prominently in her work.

Martes’s creative process includes an element of spontaneity. Her ideas often take shape while building a film set or during a shoot, rather than based on a previously established script. Like a painter applying successive layers, she builds her films using text, setting, editing and sound – all of which she considers equally important. In addition to disorienting voice-overs and found audio fragments, she also uses ambient sound recordings made on site. Her use of colour helps set the atmosphere as well.

The Revolutions That Did (Not) Happen premièred in De Pont Museum in autumn 2021. In this film, Martes depicts the collapse of world order, after which a group of Black women sets out to save humanity. Other films explore the psychological impact of the first wave of the COVID pandemic; a surrealist clinic where people voluntarily have their tongues amputated; and the artist’s own family history in connection with the era of colonialism.

Rather than relaying straightforward chronological accounts, Martes’s films sketch intuitive visual collages of loosely connected and sometimes absurdist scenes. She avoids taking an explicit stance in her work: ‘It is not my goal to tell you what to do or what to think. But I do hope to make you feel something.’