Rita Macedo is a filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. Her practice unfolds primarily through moving image, where film functions both as an artwork and as a site of research. Working across cinematic, textual and spatial forms, she investigates questions of death, subjectivity and perception, as well as the infrastructures through which they are organized and rendered legible. Her work draws on science fiction, psychoanalysis and queer theory as ways of examining the historical and material conditions through which experience takes form.
She holds a diploma from Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin). She is currently Interim Professor of the Foundation Class Film/Video at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK Braunschweig) and has been a film programmer for the International Selection of the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) since 2024.
https://ritamacedo.org/
BLACK HOLE DESCENDING
**a preliminary study**
In Black Hole Descending the boundaries between life and death blur as an obscure ritual unfolds. Invoking tropes of science fiction film canon, the work contemplates end-of-life moments, convoluting the roles of witness, participant and spectator. The solemn tone is unsettled by the arrival of a near-death vision that hints at desire and its inescapable physicality, while underscoring the unpredictability of memory and experience. As the arising vision inevitably figures moments of existential contemplation, the moment of death is reframed as an unforeseen presence of queer imaginings.
FAREWELL RECORDING FOR AN OBSERVER OF AN UNKNOWN TIME AND PLACE
Part speculative history of the future, part worldbuilding rendering, Farewell recording for an observer of an unknown time and place is an essayistic digression on capitalism, environment, technology and death.
At the center of the work is Invasive Landscape Phenomenon, a mysterious, fast spreading malady that manifests as unbidden mental visions of indistinct landscapes. Reminiscent of dissociative trauma response, this fabricated affliction emerges in a world in which direct experience has been supplanted by mediated replacements.
Notions of loss, trauma and placelessness intertwine with environmental degradation narratives. Science fiction becomes both vehicle and methodology to express and investigate hypothetical temporalities; a ground in which time wraps upon itself.
Farewell Recording for an observer of an unknown time and place is a dense, many-layered piece, steered by the thoughts of a moving-image sequence editor and their first-person account of their way out of life itself.
WEEKS OF SAND, MONTHS OF ASH, YEARS OF DUST
I look at you and I see your gaze devouring the world, but I have no idea what world is being devoured.
Weeks of Sand, Months of Ash, Years of Dust is a personal yet distant essay film on the instability of memory and the complexity of looking back. Weaving together the filmmaker’s childhood in the territory of Macao, the legacy of Portuguese imperialism, and the slow disappearance of her mother to dementia, the film interrogates how landscapes and bodies become sites of buried histories.
A work about the unarchiving of invisible narratives, Weeks of Sand, Months of Ash, Years of Dust asks how one remembers when memory itself is no longer shared, and how one re-reads the past from within a present that is fragmenting in real time.
Resisting narrative resolution, the film instead lingers in uncertainty, allowing gaps, repetitions, and silences to hold space for what cannot be retrieved. How does one gaze back?