'deixem passar (it favors the house)' (2025) is a video essay exploring diasporic masculinity, grief, and cultural identity under neoliberalism. Through the retelling of a familial experience (the loss of a father), a broader expansion of the Madeiran diaspora in South Africa situates intimate memory within broader systems of economic and gendered expectation.
Tracing a path from Madeira as the first testing ground for sugar plantations to Madeiran-owned corner and liquor stores in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the film examines structures of extraction and assimilation and how these roles shift and transform.
The Bailinho da Madeira, a folkloric dance, emerges as a final site of embodied tradition, seemingly innocent yet also embedded with the same underlying forces of performance and systemic pressure. The casino model presents itself as an embodied ritual favored by neoliberal understandings of 'luck' and 'self-made opportunity', masking a system that 'favors the house', mirroring community experiences of gambling and intergenerational obligation.
Filmmaking and montage-stitching of the family archive becomes a cathartic site of processing and re-understanding, weaving seemingly disjointed thematic threads together.
Exhibited as part of the group exhibition ’Geographies of Return’ at VARIA, Rotterdam (4 – 12/12/2025)
Exhibited as part of Videoclub's Experimental Video Screening ’Cloud Ecologies’ in Cape Town, South Africa (3/02/2026)
‘tar’ (2024) is a 26-minute film that, by utilizing the archive and recently taken footage, reads into potholed roads as a reflection of a political past crossroading a precarious present within South Africa; memory becomes a site of nostalgic contention and re-construction. These asphalt veins that connect cities are generally regarded as a benchmark standard of judging efficient governance. This is viewed within the now and disregards past urban planning structures that were rooted within exclusionary Apartheid systems.
This enquiry into the past is an attempt to understand how the future could pan out. In order to recognize our responsibility, our standing within tomorrows and the future to come, an in-depth, unfiltered look into the past needs to be confronted. How can we take this unearthing of trauma and reconciliation into a future that too often appears anxiety ridden and polarized?
This film does not offer suggestions of sugar-coated Utopias; instead it points to one singular country's grapplings with a history untreated and turns the microcosmic into the macrocosmic by joining our collective need to pay attention to our Earth and the impending consequences of climate change, analyzing themes of past colonial infrastructures, nostalgia, personal memory and the Anthropocene.
Exhibited as part of La Fuerza's ’Sur Sur’ exhibition in Santiago, Chile (21/01/2026)
Screened at Video Club’s 18th Edition ‘Ecologies of Collapse’ in Berlin (27/08/2024)
I came across user Gina*&*%$ in a comment section battleground where users were arguing about AI. More specifically, whether an image of the (apparent) Galapagos Islands was real or simply another piece of artifically constructed content. This led me to the profile of Gina. Pinterest is probably one of the few ‘social’ platforms that’s not as intentionally curated and reflects a multitude of facets of a user: the dream wedding references, ideas for quick meals, religious or spiritual memes, self-help quotes, etc. You seem to grasp an idea of who the person is. The mask slips.
A love letter (fan zine) to a very kitsch and beloved interior decor style of the Free State, Mangaung, South Africa (Vrystaat). I grew up visiting friends whose grandmothers, aunts and mothers all made their own decorations. You could immediately sense who the inhabitants were. The house became them. As opposed to the interior style trends of the now where it’s very much dictated by trends, all beige, minimalistic, generic. This is a homage to homes and the people who make them. Also a nod to the South Africanisms: barbed wire, top-to-bottom fencing.
‘Oooof_____aged badly’ is a reflection on the current phenomenon of social-mediated, skincare-brand weaponized ageism in the form of a 7-minute film. Narrated by a variety of AI voices representing individual users, a comment thread from one niche celebrity gossip account - showcasing how different women celebrities have aged - is re-performed. Skincare influencers, miraculous serums, anti-aging masks and filtered promises of perfect, youthful skin frame the visual backdrop to this online argument.
Navigating Instagram and TikTok as a user whose dataset pertains to the algorithmic bias of: female involves witnessing reels upon reels of beauty expectations coupled with product placement. The message is clear: to allow your skin to age as a woman is sacrilegious. The textual clash between these users - which took place over a 4-day period - displays industry-backed, manufactured insecurity as spectacle. The microscopic layer of Demodex folliculorum face mites, enveloping the manicured imagery of influenced sponsorship, speaks to the parasitic nature that’s embedded within this capitalistic amalgamation of internalized sexism and ageism.
Sound Mastering by Jack Colleran
Screened at Div.fuse Media Arts Festival, Argos Centre, Brussels (5 - 15/12/2024)
Harvesting Traces / a digital archive \ served as a space for the Socio-Political Context (Pre)MA '23 & '24 class at Sint Lucas Antwerpen to document their processes and deep-dives.
Experimenting with technique, learning from one another, and researching frameworks and methodologies, Harvesting Traces was created with the intention of being a site/sight of collective gathering.
Conceived with the premise of maintaining an ongoing archive, the site became a space for documentation and reflection. How could we share the knowledge that we were privileged to encounter as Master’s students at an art academy, and how could it be presented and made easily accessible to a broader public?
Collective workshops and sessions were held to share research and techniques, and the platform was open for anyone to contribute.
'Character Coding' (2023), video, essay.
(width: 2048px / iPad Pro 12.9, personal device) (‘limitless’ in scrolling for UI ease)
Character Coding presents the bridge and barrier of screen-touch-obsession for a particular user (female. early 30s. instagram / youtube / reddit / tiktok / google).
Located within the attachment of screen to hand as additional appendage, digital visualisations are far removed from abstract pixelation and are now, through the transitioning to additional appendage, connected through the main artery straight to the hippocampus.
Look! A screenshot of a text message received from a ‘potential client’ – share this interaction to social media.
Look! Replies, construction of identity as = feminist, #metoo movement, struggles of the gendered.
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iPhone shots of the phallic graffitied all over a city. Same day shot at gynaecologist office. Share to Story = solidified solidarity in replies of: ‘Fuck! Hate going for this’, ‘that steel speculum is the worst (insert link) apparently a woman designed a silicone one recently?’.
Search for ‘vanilla’ porn = snake inserted into vagina, masochistic habit of reddit scrolling to purposefully ignite indignation, read world news = ‘trapped’, ‘alleged’. New code of chaos scattered across video search = jumbled sound effects, collaged spinning faces meme-ed, score composed by currently relevant social platform = genZ, adaptation, incelled tate, pronouns yelled. The server is trying to establish a connection, error of widely opposing results.
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Agency in witnessing the link ____ 90s barbie button face scissor-scratched in retaliation to not being blue-eyed & blonde as five year old + tap-to-change facial featured filtered into current acceptance (small-nosed + massive-lipped). Green screen of omission acts as a reminder of the continuous flow of information overwhelming, faces and names and institutions will change, consistently, but there will be more and more and more for you to process.
Keep up.
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The interface is no longer clean and easily experienceable, it festers mixed-up. The pictures turn post-traumatic. The pictures turn enlightenment.
Character coding gone awry, there is an imprecise assigning of said code to a document with a different default coding than its location.
Mojibake (=japanese origin) is composed of: 文字 (moji) = letter / character (eng.) + 化ける (bakeru) = to appear in disguise, to take the form of, to change for the worse (eng.) === character mutation. Particular user feels like misplaced code in misplaced location. Spaghetti. Spinning without direction. Taking in too much, spending too much aimlessly. Current power apparatus defined by reoccurrence of imagery presented with, insert = influence of consumerism, a creation of desire for manipulation of gain. Non-human prone to error.
Answer – closely analyse the mutation and its infrastructures, examine the entry and exit of stimuli into reaction as sacrificial offering of time.
Awarded the Re:Touch Photography Prize (Kulturprojekteberlin with metaLabHarvard)
’Bordering Thirty-One’ documents the process of analyzing the interior of the mentalscape over a 31 day period. Dissecting the features of experiencing a particular mental disorder and the subsequent inherited space of accompanying disillusion the artworks, poetry and soundscape presented by Gabriella Achadinha and the 3D render video piece by artist Kim Rosario aim to present the felt as visual.
The past two years have enforced a collective state of limbo - an environment in which mental illness was pushed to its limit. The struggles of neurodiversity have come to the forefront and this particular body of work observes these said struggles.
Exhibited at Galerie Grolman, Berlin (March, 2022)
Graphic Design of Poetry Book: Maxim Marais
