Directing

Tetsuya Maruyama

Tetsuya Maruyama is a multidisciplinary artist based born in Japan and based in Rio de Janeiro. Though working mostly in analogue film, his works range from performance to installation, text to found sound compilations.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Dead See poster
NR

A near-alchemical process: made with local plants and flowers collected during the 2020 Port-au-Prince carnival. The film was then developed with vitamin C/sodium carbonate and fixed in a salt water bath for four days. The fix was never washed away, allowing salt crystals to form on the print from which this digital transfer was made.

Dead See

2020

Corredor poster
NR

A play on the Portuguese word for “to run”. Tetsuya Maruyama’s film, informed by his background in architecture, examines the corridor, a space many wish to eliminate when designing a home, but one that is essential for functionality and connection. A single-take meditation through time on an oft-forgotten domestic space.

Corredor

2023

Shashin no Ma poster
6.0

The scratched and faded – and at times almost abstracted – home movies that pass through the projector in Tetsuya Maruyama's "Shashin no Ma" simultaneously welcome and resist nostalgia, in what is both a meditation on the physical nature of the analogue film strip and the ghosts that reside within it as well as a poignant tribute by an artist-filmmaker son to his amateur-filmmaker father.

Shashin no Ma

2020

FOTOGRAFAR poster
NR

When tasked with an open ended writing exercise, Tetsuya Maruyama used the opportunity to write a near diaristic text about his artistic practice. But, crucially, he decided to forgo words, and instead inscribe his meaning through light on a roll of Super 8. FOTOGRAFAR is a film about a glass of water.

FOTOGRAFAR

2026

GIRA 2 poster
NR

Dual projection Super 8 of a ride through Rio. An enviable beach day flipped literally on its head as the cameras spiral along with the bike pedals. Moments of stability render people enjoying the pleasant setting until it all goes topsy turvy again!

GIRA 2

2024

GIRA 2 poster
NR

Dual projection Super 8 of a ride through Rio. An enviable beach day flipped literally on its head as the cameras spiral along with the bike pedals. Moments of stability render people enjoying the pleasant setting until it all goes topsy turvy again!

GIRA 2

2024

Antfilm poster
NR

Entombed in a single frame of each second of Super 8 film is the corpse of an ant, illuminated by a small burned-out hole, much like the tunnels within an anthill. A haunting miniature tragedy.

Antfilm

2021

Q&A poster
NR

Hazy images created through a homemade pinhole camera: palm trees and parasols are reduced to flickering impressions of light and shadow. Familiar sounds of the scene are garbed by magnetic pulses. The title, taken from a jazz piece by Dave Holland, serves as an unheard soundtrack to a meditation on time and space.

Q&A

2026

Pedra e Montanha poster
NR

A continuation of Tetsuya Maruyama’s ongoing research into contemporary mining activities in Brazil and beyond. Multiple 35mm slide projectors cycle through images captured by a Brazilian mining company while being manipulated live by a roving aperture machine made by the artist himself.

Pedra e Montanha

2026

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Study of Color and Gesture

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Cachoeira de Macacu

L.O.V.E.S.O.N.G. poster
NR

A sort-of found-footage film. Tetsuya Maruyama uses a super 8 film of a Jewish wedding from 1980 found in a downtown Rio flea market as its starting point. Bleached, scratched and rendered beyond recognition, the film forms an alternative love song that is more focused on cinephilia than marital bliss.

L.O.V.E.S.O.N.G.

2020

No artwork available
NR

An owl finds a dove in a twilight bankruptcy, entering the territory he knows it does not belong. Inside this unknown universe of sound/image, two worlds always seem to collide; Whistle of cassette tape/walker, voodoo ritual/new morning and funeral/fisherman's boat.

O conto do Coruja

No artwork available
NR

In school, we learn to remember to live, but in life, we learn to forget to enrich living. Frozen from the film-propaganda, Let the student study (1962), by Jean Manzon, made against the student movement in the pre-coup-d'etat context, a frame is photocopied, stretched and submerged in the cave of time.

24(Twenty-Four) Burned Eyelashes

2018

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Os Mortos Veem

untitled (three moons) poster
NR

a moon, two moons, three moons *No projector runs at the same exact speed as another, even with the standard frame rate of 24 per second. There is a (d)effect that could not be counted in number and this "imperfection" is apparent to our retinal perception throughout a long transformation, as if it were the lunar orbit.

untitled (three moons)

2024

Third Mountain poster
NR

As mining projects excavate and extract, new landscapes and third mountains are formed. Part of an ongoing series based on 35mm slides given to Tetsuya Maruyama by the Brazilian mining company MBR (Minerações Brasileiras Reunidas), the film reconciles the awesomeness of these sites with their inherently destructive and enduring impact.

Third Mountain

2026