Janaina Wagner

Film

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my home-world that truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Licantropia is an essay on the figure of the werewolf, an expiatory creature shaped by man in order to put a contour around the cruel acts perpetrated by humanity in the course of history. Recounted by the moon over the course of a night, various figures of the werewolf are embodied by a wolf, a woman and a man. Wandering through the empty, dreaming streets of a forgotten city in the North of France, these three figures merge with old and present archives, with ruins of the past and future. Merging fiction and reality, the film is made from an assemblage of different types of image: 16 mm, digital, paintings, engraving, historical documents, literary excerpts, personal texts and oral statements.

The werewolf, a hybrid being, still operates in an “intermediary” space, moving between the limits of reality and the imaginary, falsehood and truth, history and stories. It is an amalgam that mixes man and animal in a unique image, functioning as a bridge in order to investigate the processes of civilizational domination through history.

Janaina Wagner

Janaina Wagner was born in São Paulo, Brazil. An artist, journalist and video teacher for children, she holds a master’s degree in artistic- political experimentation (SPEAP). Working with installation, video, photography, books, drawings, screenwriting and painting, she explores the points of friction between the human and its constructions. She looks at forms and subjects that refer to the relations of limit, control and contention that man establishes with the world, as well as with finitude in itself. Wagner has benefited from several artistic residencies, such as FID Campus - Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille (Marseille), Festival Mondes Possibles - Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers (Paris), Bolsa Pampulha (MG, Brazil), Red Bull Station (SP), Casa Tomada (SP), Anarcademia, (W139, Amsterdam) and NES Skagaströnd, on the rural coast of Iceland.

Holder of diplomas fine arts and journalism and a master’s degree on the Artistic and Political Experimentation programme, and a video teacher, her references concern the procedures whereby humanity inscribes and articulates its progress and its heritage. Janaina Lives and works between Roubaix and São Paulo.

Production

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