Rita Macedo
Rita Macedo lives and works in Berlin. Her practice takes moving image as its point of departure, understanding film as a privileged site of both artistic and research-based production. In Macedo’s work, cinematic, textual, and spatial means are differentiated in order to make their everyday entanglements tangible and fundamentally rework the relations between them. Her practice is therefore concerned above all with questions of perception, the production of subjectivity and its limits, and the forms of death it takes. Macedo investigates the infrastructures through which subjectivities become livable and legible.
Her work has been shown internationally at film festivals and in exhibitions since 2010, most recently at IndieLisboa (Lisbon, 2025), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück, 2023), Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (2024), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2023), and Kasseler Kunstverein (2024). In 2023, she also received the Grand Prize of the German Competition at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg.
Interim Professor of the Foundation Class Film/Video at the Braunschweig University of Arts
PhD Candidate in the Binational Artistic PhD Program at the University of the Arts Bremen
Film programmer for the International Selection of European Media Art Festival (EMAF)
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 loop: a film that thinks through its own act of looking. It considers what it means to witness, to be witnessed, and to exist as an unstable subject within mediated space. Time folds, locations dissolve and the cinematic frame becomes a relational apparatus. 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.
Inspired by Eugene Wigner’s quantum thought experiments, in which observation and knowledge are entangled across frames of reference, 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