Gabi Dao

Playfully collapsing the space between Hollywood Cinema and what Dao refers to as 'Domestic Cinema', The Protagonists explores relationships between representation and reality. Motifs of a clumsy animatronic hand, colorful smoke bombs, a backyard garden and a metronome become characters – protagonists, so to speak – in the deconstruction of filmic colonisation.

A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling the binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.

A bat marionette’s odyssey through colonial mythologies, echoing the xenophobic scapegoating of COVID-19. Puppetry becomes a tool to dissect the "uncharismatic fauna" of capitalism.

Playfully collapsing the space between Hollywood Cinema and what Dao refers to as 'Domestic Cinema', The Protagonists explores relationships between representation and reality. Motifs of a clumsy animatronic hand, colorful smoke bombs, a backyard garden and a metronome become characters – protagonists, so to speak – in the deconstruction of filmic colonisation.

Playfully collapsing the space between Hollywood Cinema and what Dao refers to as 'Domestic Cinema', The Protagonists explores relationships between representation and reality. Motifs of a clumsy animatronic hand, colorful smoke bombs, a backyard garden and a metronome become characters – protagonists, so to speak – in the deconstruction of filmic colonisation.

A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling the binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.

A bat marionette’s odyssey through colonial mythologies, echoing the xenophobic scapegoating of COVID-19. Puppetry becomes a tool to dissect the "uncharismatic fauna" of capitalism.

A bat marionette’s odyssey through colonial mythologies, echoing the xenophobic scapegoating of COVID-19. Puppetry becomes a tool to dissect the "uncharismatic fauna" of capitalism.

A bat marionette’s odyssey through colonial mythologies, echoing the xenophobic scapegoating of COVID-19. Puppetry becomes a tool to dissect the "uncharismatic fauna" of capitalism.