Three works by Pedro Neves Marques

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, July 14 at 7pm for a screening of works by Pedro Neves Marques, featuring Meat is Not Murder (with HAUT, 2021), The Bite (2019), and The Ovary (with HAUT, 2021), and followed by a conversation with the artist. Neves Marques’s films and video works are rooted in a genre of speculative auto-fiction and investigate a range of pressing issues from ecology and animal ethics to body and science politics, as well as preconceptions about what is deemed natural and unnatural.

In these three films, technology and intimacy, fantasy and reality, health and threat, the natural and the unnatural, the stable and the mutable, are constantly in and out of balance.  While The Bite’s pulpy environment and feeling of imminent (I’d say almost immanent) danger came as an answer to a moment of hopelessness and collapse, where retreat into one’s body seemed like the only refuge, the serene melancholia of Meat is Not Murder (a Voltaire-like anecdote) and The Ovary (a music video of sorts) make whatever science-fiction there is in them almost mundane. I see them as very meaty films, palpable and organic, not only thematically but also musically and visually. And while they are all films imbued with critiques, I hope they are also pierced by the possibility of better realms. 
—Pedro Neves Marques

Pedro Neves Marques with HAUT, Meat is Not Murder (2021, 5 minutes)
Courtesy of the artists and Galleria Umberto di Marino. Commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial with the support of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Meat is Not Murder is a short film narrating the dilemma faced by a vegan animal rights advocate when confronted with the possibility of eating lab-made meat. Both funny and gruesome, the film is imbued with an intimate and sensorial relation to images and music, creating an emotional narrative about the making of bodies, whether human or not, in science and preconceptions surrounding what is deemed natural and unnatural.

Pedro Neves Marques, The Bite (2019, 28 minutes)
Courtesy of the artist. Distributed by Portugal Film – Portu­guese Film Agency.

Between a house in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and a genetically-modified mosquito factory near São Paulo, a polyamorous relationship struggles to survive a mosquito-borne epidemic spreading across Brazil. While in the factory millions of genetically-modified mosquitos are born daily inside test tubes in order to fight the virus, the power dynamics between the three lovers only intensifies. Drawing lines between psychological and bodily horrors, political and medical crises, the sterile heteronormativity of the laboratory and non-normative images of reproduction, The Bite is a film found somewhere between horror, science-fiction, and a queer drama. 

Pedro Neves Marques with HAUT, The Ovary (2021, 5 minutes)
Courtesy of the artists and Galleria Umberto di Marino. Commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial with the support of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Ovary narrates the attempts of a gay couple to experience gestation through an ovarian implant in a cis man. Accompanied by a cover of Lana Del Rey’s pop song “Let Me Love You Like A Woman,” The Ovary is a raw and haunting approach to the online fan fiction genre Mpreg (male pregnancy) and its tense, but also visionary, relation with gender, class, surrogacy, and homonormativity.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.