Artist: Gabriel Abrantes

Represented by: Galeria Francisco Fino

Actors: Brigette Lundy-Paine, Inês Castel-Branco 

Production: Artificial Humors

Producers: Gabriel Abrantes & Margarida Lucas
VFX Studio: IrmaLucia

Music: Gabriel Abrantes

These four animations are a series of distinct works. Blending wry, ironic
humor, with overt melodrama, the animations feature ghosts in the
midsts of arguments, reconciliations, or singing laments. Envisioned
as floating sheets with eye and mouth cutouts, these specters, and
the arguments they embody, explore autobiographical fragments and
personal tragedies within the context of broader existential themes
such as climate change and anxieties of a digitally-dominated future.
The stories reveal ghosts in various states of limbo, trapped in
perpetual cycles.

Bardo Loops: Sad Singer

A singing ghost performs a pop-classical ballad on a grand piano, within
the decrepit setting of an abandoned Lisbon palace that might once
have been a political party’s headquarters. The song mourns ‘being too
late’—but too late for what? Halting climate change, offering forgiveness,
reconciliation?

Bardo Loops: I want to have a baby

Against the backdrop of a wildfire-ravaged forest, two ghosts engage
in a heated dispute about having a baby after suffering a tragic loss,
seemingly unaware of their devastated surroundings. Their cycle of
argument and reconciliation appears endless.

Bardo Loops: Victims

On a hurricane-ravaged coastline, the looping conflict between two
ghosts touches on genetics and systemic oppression related to class,
colonialism, and imperialism. Amidst this strife, one ghost debates the
potential and importance of genetics in aiding children with life-altering
genetic mutations.

Bardo Loops: Break-up

An apartment, inundated by floodwaters, becomes the stage for a
couple’s breakup. Their cycle of weeping, break-up sex, and role-reversal
continues without end.

In these settings, environmental catastrophe has stripped away all
life, and with it, any remnants of failed utopias and even of reality
itself. What remains is a poetic representation of the digital echoes
of humanity, mourning their failure to prevent their own demise. The
hyperreal animations imply they are harbingers of a bleak future—a world
devoid of humans, leaving only digital vestiges and spectral entities to
traverse a barren digital wasteland forever.