Rita Macedo
Filmmaker, artist, and film programmer based in Berlin • Rita’s work fluidly traverses non-fiction, speculative narratives, and narrative disruption, exploring the unstable terrains of meaning and memory • Through a practice that resists fixed interpretation, the work investigates the shifting relationships between image, perception, and time • Artistic associate at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2018.
Rita’s work has been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals, including, European Media Art Festival, Berwick Film and Media Art Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, São Paulo International Short Film Festival, Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, New Horizons International Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, Encounters South Africa Documentary Film Festival, amongst others.
rita.macedo.inbox[at]gmail[dot]com
@rita_void
This particular nowhere
Film • 09′ 07″ • sound (ST) • EN • 2015
“This Particular Nowhere” constructs a perceptual feedback: a film that thinks through its own act of looking. Rooted in Eugene Wigner’s thought experiment — in which observation and knowledge are entangled across frames of reference — the work considers what it means to witness, to be witnessed, and to exist as an unstable subject within mediated space.
Time folds. Locations dissolve. The cinematic frame becomes a relational apparatus — at once container and participant. What emerges is a meditation on the contingency of presence. Through durational slowness, formal ambiguity and language, This Particular Nowhere gestures toward a state in which experience exceeds coordinates — a nowhere that is retraced back to the viewer, asking not only where one is, but how one is watching.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
“This Particular Nowhere” unfolds as a cinematic reflection on the act of observation — not simply as a means of seeing, but as a condition that alters what is seen. Inspired by Eugene Wigner’s quantum thought experiments, the film explores how perception collapses potentialities into form, and how the observer is never outside the event they perceive.
A field of distant lights — stars, perhaps — slowly reveals itself to be a drift of human heads suspended in darkness. Among them, one becomes central, its movements intermittently syncing with the surrounding voice. Yet the voice is not stable. It slips between registers: reflective, plural, undeterminable. There is no fixed speaker, no linear time. We are held in sound, and the visual field disorients more than it anchors.
Across these dislocations, the work considers the cinematic frame as a site of observational entanglement, a place where the boundaries between self and image dissolve. What emerges is not a narrative, but a condition: one in which space and presence are co-produced through the act of watching.
“This Particular Nowhere” inhabits uncertainty, staging a “here” and “now” that are continually elusive.
Written and directed by Rita Macedo • Camera and light Martin Sulzer, Vika Kirchenbauer • Editing and post production Rita Macedo, Martin Sulzer • Text Rita Macedo • Original soundtrack by MAUD • Sound mixing Daniel John Boyle • Sound mastering Douglas Henderson • Funded by Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian