Rita Macedo

Black Hole Descending

Film • 10′19″ • sound (stereo) • ENG • 2025

You are about to die. Your death rite of choice is Celestial Bridging.

In “Black Hole Descending” the boundaries between life and death blur as an obscure ritual unfolds. The ritual, named “Celestial Bridging”, involves journeying to the edge of a black hole, from where a subject’s near-death vision is relayed outwardly, transmitted to distant observers beyond the black hole’s distortion. As time behaves differently near the event horizon, what is experienced as a fleeting moment by the dying subject, stretches into prolonged stage for the living watching.

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.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

“Black Hole Descending” moves alongside the intersections of death, mediation, time, and observation through a fictional funerary rite known as “Celestial Bridging”. In this fantastic ritual, a dying subject is transported to the event horizon of a black hole. From this threshold, their final mental image is transmitted outward—relayed to distant observers, prolonged by gravitational time dilation. What is perceived as a fleeting moment near the black hole extends into a slow, durational vision for those witnessing at a distance – “temporal memorials” suspended across spacetime, stretching conventional understandings of mortality and remembrance.

By situating the ritual within the gravitational field of a black hole, the work draws out how perception and temporality are shaped by position and scale: interiority  turns inside-out, while time materializes as relational and contingent. The curved spacetime near the event horizon acts as an amplifier for mediated experience, engaging questions surrounding the infrastructures of mediation, the persistence of archival presence and the evolving boundaries between body as- and with apparatuses.

A key moment relays a near-death vision, unfolding as an action historically tied to a fetish subculture that flourished within early web economies of erotic exchange. It arrives unexpectedly and unnamed, subverting the anticipated tone of solemnity. Its visual and sonic textures allow the scene to unfold as a layered intersection of desire and absurdity within which death is neither purely tragic, nor transcendent, but refigured into a space open to sensuous, embodied and even humorous expression.

The subject of the ritual remains intentionally ambiguous, allowing the viewer’s position to be at once a distant receiver of transmitted visions, while also the one undergoing the rite. This shift in the function of viewing elaborates a layered place of observation where watching becomes entangled with participation, and where the act of witnessing itself becomes part of the ritual: one finds oneself learning about a fantastic piece of ethnography, to ultimately be implicated in it. In so doing, the work foregrounds the role of spectatorship, questioning who is observing whom, and from where.

Throughout, “Black Hole Descending” employs a methodology that merges documentary sensibilities with fabulated poetics. It makes recourse to material histories of scientific visualization and astrophysics – fantastical in their own right – while pointing towards logics not fully legible to scientific discourse. This reflects a broader commitment to queering dominant logics of representation into plural epistemologies, thereby resisting the narrative closures often imposed on bodies in death or transition.

Written, directed and edited by Rita Macedo • Cinematography Andre Elbeshausen, Hannah Jung • Sound Yair Elazar Glotman, Rita Macedo