An Angelic Transmission
Curated by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
The air is heavy and the residues of life, endless. Energy is transmitted through chimneys, windmills, pipelines, radioactivity, engines and turbines. Our physical environments absorb the vibrations of all these combusting channels. Systems and structures are recipients of material efforts where immaterial desires are consumed, perpetually in flames. This heavy atmosphere is also where everything angelic resides. In the shape of whispers, fragrances, exhalations or dreams, immateriality dominates everything solid.
Energy is the field not only of the potential, but also the sacred: angels, spirits, dragonflies, ancestors, corpses, sunsets. Frequencies and scents of the unspeakable gather across immateriality. According to Anne Boyer, ‘‘Angels leave no artifacts. And the instant is always at risk of being strangled by a more contemporary unit called –the moment–, which is the present’s vacuum substitution for the deep immeasurability of the quasi–eternity, the instant once made possible inside of time.” In an inconsolable and compassionless present, the value of life has been reduced to nothing but a commodity. Embodied beings as material entities, can be subjected to transactions, murdered, dispossessed, burned alive. Condemned to move from one logistical moment to the next, we need to come up with an angelic transmission. If we are to die, let’s reinvent eternity. Let’s melt the foundations of this material world into an angelic sphere.
An angelic transmission, –the organizing principle for this series of films– considers the non–tangible, somatic and immaterial variables that guide a potential transformation of energy: one that is compassionate, transformative, ephemeral and powerful.
Alejandro Alonso Díaz is a curator and writer. Since 2017 he directs fluent, a non–profit organisation dedicated to contemporary art. His practice considers the semiotics of energy as a site of contestation and a way of thinking through. He has developed research and curated projects for Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon; dOCUMENTA 15, Kassel; Fundación Botín, Santander, and Foundation KADIST, Paris among other institutions and museums. His writing moves across genres, mostly from theory to poetry, and it has been published extensively by e–flux, Sternberg Press, Mousse Magazine, frieze, Concreta, or Terremoto.

June 5 – 26, 2025
Alice dos Reis
Our Lady Who Burns, 2024
16mm film, 8 min.
Portugal’s Serra da Gardunha is a mountain known for the paranormal. Where before it was revered as a site of saintly apparitions, nowadays it is known for mysterious light sightings, with rumours of a UFO hangar hidden inside it. Atmospheric and dream-like, Our Lady Who Burns guides us through this mountain and an intergenerational lore of infatuations. In parallel, two friends lament the pregnancy of their old cat, speculating on whether the mystical energy of the mountain might be able to interrupt its gestation. Shot on 16mm, Our Lady Who Burns is a voyage through a biographical landscape, in which the presence of the otherworldly, the geology of the territory, and a biography of unwanted bodily gestation are expressed through acts of cinematic apparitions.
Alice dos Reis is a visual artist, filmmaker, as well as a founder and co-editor of Pântano Books. Finding particular comfort in the slippery traditions of fiction and poetry, she is lured by film as a primary narrative and poetic medium, but her work also takes the form of text and textiles. Her work has appeared in arts institutions, screening rooms, bookshops, and the web. In recent projects, she has explored themes such as the connection between outer space and the subterranean, inter-generational histories of reproductive care, and most recently, somatic experiences of religious rapture, gestation, and queerness. A PhD researcher at City University of Hong Kong, she strives to engulf these interests by investigating visual histories that enmesh the plant world with human reproductive care.








↳ Screen Archives
- An Angelic Transmission
- Curated by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
- An Angelic Transmission
- Curated by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
- What the Olive Branch Has Seen
- Curated by Àngels Miralda