SUPER NATURAL is a film created in collaboration with two performing arts companies.
The Madeira Island-based dance company Dançando com a Diferença—founded in 2001 with a mission to bring together people with and without disabilities for the creation of artistic objects—invited myself and the Lisbon-based Teatro Praga—founded in 1995 and focused on the development of works of theatre, performance, curation, and pedagogy—to create a new work in collaboration with their artistic team.
The alliance began by simply spending time together on Madeira. This was not only to meet each other but also to learn and understand the context of the company’s members—both in relation to their familiar environment and their associations with the geography of the island.
When we returned to the island to shoot—already in the midst of the pandemic—we knew that we wanted the film to be a journey that contemplated both the early beginnings of humanity and the uncertain future of the planet.
This narrated voyage is long but simple. Everything emerges and evolves from the water, plants, and oxygen, with beings gradually developing and multiplying according to various criteria of desire: from fur patterns to nail colours. SUPER NATURAL unfolds—with the spectator as a part of it—sustained in the experimentality that is the very act of existence. The city of concrete merges with the island, as food with stomachs or constellations with our comprehension of the sky. Everything triggers everything else, and everything is related in a sensorial experience enhanced by colours, landscapes, and sounds.
SUPER NATURAL reveals that "the natural", whether that of a body or an object, is always more complex than it seems. The film’s line of thought belies concepts such as “inclusion” and “difference”, preferring procedures and historiographies about the humanization process that intertwine quantum physics with neurology, biophysics, engineering, and poetry.
Everything triggers everything else, and everything is related in a sensorial experience enhanced by colours, landscapes, and sounds.
SUPER NATURAL takes place on an island inhabited by biology that survived the Ice Age and flora born out of a coexistence between endemic species and human presence, informed by various migrations and the traces of passersby who crossed and continue to cross it. Shots in the film reveal landscapes inhabited by the performers of Dançando com a Diferença, as if we were leafing through an album of portraits. Offering a space of improvisation for performers in locations as diverse as a natural swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a garden, an orchid nursery, the beds in their homes, a cable car, or a spa, SUPER NATURAL puts the spectator in direct confrontation with the multiplicity of "the natural”.
SUPER NATURAL was conceived from the beginning as a performative film: a film that is constantly looking to interfere and interact with what is in front of it.
The film begins by thanking the audiences in the screening for their presence and projecting itself into the room, in a desire to see the space and the gathered spectators. When voice and light install themselves on the screen the journey begins, in chapters or stages, through images captured on multiple forms of media: surveillance cameras, mobile phones, film, and video cassettes.
The film begins by thanking the audiences in the screening for their presence and projecting itself into the room, in a desire to see the space and the gathered spectators.
Alongside these images, the film itself speaks to the audience, through written text and a voice inspired by meditative atmospheres, intensifying this relationship between film and audience, searching for an osmosis that is itself a statement about filmic existence and ontology.
SUPER NATURAL proposes a world in which performers are human beings, as well as a mermaid, a passionfruit, or a cat, in which the emotions and the tears of the audience who see the film are as complementary to fiction as those of Instagram filters, or in which the sound of the wind, captured in pure cinema vérité, is as musical as an electronic beat.
In this history of cinema and media, we leave the urban centre of Madeira’s capital Funchal and enter the rooms where the performers sleep. We move from natural pools to the colossal base of an airport built on a beach. SUPER NATURAL guides us on the journey of life, sharing contexts, geographies, historical curiosities, music videos, confessions, and moments of humour, culminating in a proximity that confuses fiction with reality, drones with birds, and robots with spiders.
And so, the lives portrayed riding along with the passage of time recorded in the film become increasingly diverse, as diverse as its performers—human, non-human, mythical, or robotic. SUPER NATURAL is that: perpetual motion. Finding in movement and its continuity a superpower. SUPER NATURAL is an ode to all life forces.
Jorge Jácome
