Ethics and Parafiction: A Conversation

Salomé Lamas, Eldorado XXI (still), 2016.

On December 6, 2025, e-flux Screening Room presented an afternoon with artist and filmmaker Salomé Lamas, featuring a screening of her films Eldorado XXI (2016) and Gold and Ashes  (2025), as well as a presentation of the record-cum-publication Salomé Lamas: Gold and Ashes (Mousse Publishing, 2025). Following the screening of Eldorado XXI, a conversation between the artist, Lukas Brasiskis, and the audience took place. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.

Question: Eldorado XXI is a special film, grounded in being on site, working with contingencies, and making decisions with a small crew as things unfold. Could you give us some context on how the project began, what brought you to La Rinconada, Peru, and how the form of the film took shape from there?

Salomé Lamas: Maybe I can start with something simple that most of us know. In the classical production model for narrative film, you have a script, and once you start making the film everyone looks at that script to figure out what is needed. You have a preproduction based on that manuscript, and you go “by the book,” in a way.

Of course, everything in cinema has to do with production value and how to manage resources, both human and financial. The calendar and the production model will be reflected in the outcome of the film. Even if you are working within that conventional structure, you still make trade-offs and try to create conditions through production.

With documentary or moving image, you usually work with a cinematographic treatment that outlines the work’s intentions, almost like a script for a film. But there are other films, like Eldorado XXI, where even if you have intentions, the challenges are different. The first challenge was the location itself. Could we breathe up there? Was it sustainable? The altitude in La Rinconada is comparable to what people face during expeditions to Mount Everest. It requires a certain physical condition, and I could not bring crew members who would not be capable of doing the work.

At that point I had not made many films. I trained as a filmmaker and went to film school. I had made a film with Paulo de Figueiredo, a former Portuguese commando turned mercenary, Terra de Ninguém (No Man’s Land, 2012). After that I was working with a producer who was very much oriented toward fiction films and the European auteur and industry context. He asked me: “Why don’t you try fiction? Why don’t you make a short fiction?” I came up with an idea connected to El Dorado. It was not really fiction, but I wanted to adopt a fiction framework. I wanted to work with a miner, get to know his routine in this place. I was intrigued. I think I first saw pictures of La Rinconada in the Los Angeles Times or something like that.

So, the initial idea was to go to La Rinconada, cast a miner, and write a script with him (a kind of script) and then follow a plot line. But once we were there, it became clear that the film could not be built around a single character in the way we had imagined. What held everything together for me was the place itself, and especially a particular view that I had filmed during scouting. We returned to that framing and worked from there. The film shifted from searching for a protagonist to working with what the location, the time, and the daily life of the community made possible. We shaped the final structure of Eldorado XXI around that.

Question: You mentioned that you translated material from La Rinconada into an exhibition context back home in Portugal. Could you say a bit more about that, and about what changes when your work moves from the cinema’s black box to the museum’s white cube?

SL: In 2015, I had one of my first institutional exhibitions at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Porto), and there was a possibility to commission a new work. So I transferred twenty minutes of La Rinconada to 16mm and projected them. I also recorded interviews that are similar to what you hear over the film’s first shots and put them on a vinyl record. The record did not “play with” the images. One could simply listen and flip it. I worked with the space, too, because when you work in an art context you can think spatially, and there are different factors.

Question: You’ve produced more than thirty projects that have been shown both in cinemas as well as contemporary art galleries and museums. How do you adapt to these two different ecosystems for different moving image languages and forms?

SL: I have a mixed background in film and visual arts. I see fluidity as something natural, in fact, as the only coherent path. My approach is distinct from those who master a single discipline. Each project requires its own particular approach, and material questions emerge according to the needs of the work. Projects invariably arise from a process of questioning, or, if you prefer, from a sense of wonder or desire. They feed from me, from the world we inhabit, from the mystery of existence. There is something spiritual that I want to preserve, which aligns with the idea of coherence across different projects that informs the ethical principles by which I operate.

Question: Watching Eldorado XXI, I kept thinking about the ethical problem of filming a community without turning people into background or material for a pre-made story. I kept returning to Georges Didi-Huberman’s “People exposed, people as extras,” where he critiques cinema’s hierarchy and its industrial logic, which always subordinates people as “extras” to what is foregrounded.1 In Eldorado XXI, in one take you record all the people who pass by your camera. There is no singular protagonist. It is a film about people in duration. Could you speak more about the ethics here, and also about the formal thinking behind this shot?

SL: You’re pointing to many questions at once, but they are related. It’s an ecosystem. When you deal with nonfiction cinema, and really with any film, one thing is clear: you are working with people, and there are many ways to do that. Each filmmaker deals with it through their own morals and their own consciousness. We could talk about Foucault and power, and how power can be made productive. For me it is very clear that when you work with “the real,” it is never peaceful. It’s a bloody business in a way. No matter how much you try to balance the power you have, how much you try to be fair, it’s never fully solved. That is something you have to accept, or at least that is how I see it. After accepting that, you look for a way you can sleep at night. You try to work in a way that is respectful, that does not violate your own beliefs. But this is also true in life. Who am I to my mother, to my relatives, to my friends? Whenever you have someone in relation to you, there is a power link.

So, one way to work is to acknowledge that it is a transaction. The person in front of the camera and I are both working for the film. There are several ways to do that. In No Man’s Land, for example, I tried to clean the environment, to create a one-on-one situation where the person could choose words, could choose how to be portrayed, what he wanted to say. And for me, when I meet someone, my time is that person’s time. I don’t work “by the hour.” The conversation ends when the other person says it ends.

There is also another vector that matters to me, which is the spectator. I am responsible to the people I work with, but I am also responsible to all of you. That is why I often try to make films that are reflexive, that provide paradoxes or frictions, so you can think along with them. The only thing that interests me is for you to have a dialogue with the screen, and for that to happen, there has to be space. Who am I to tell you what to think? I also think people don’t want to be told what to think, although that might be changing. A lot of products today are packed, canned, easy to consume. I am very critical of that direction.

I can give you a concrete example. After we were there, National Geographic approached the Peruvian producers we worked with and said, “we want to shoot in La Rinconada, and we want a pregnant pallaquera.” What you see in Eldorado XXI was not enough for them. They wanted spectacle. They wanted a “character” shaped for consumption. That is not aligned with what I want to do. I will never make campaign films. Things are more complex than black-and-white.

So, we tried to respect these principles while we were working in Peru. Then, regarding structure and framing, when I don’t have a lot of control over other aspects, I tend to become very formal. I try to hold the film inside certain structures. That leads to an economy of means. I think we already have too many images. I call it orthopedics. You hold something in place. If it doesn’t work, maybe I’m not making it right and I try again. This relates to duration. It has nothing to do with trends like “slow cinema.” It has to do with structural needs. When I work in places like this, not knowing where I am going day by day, trying to access things that are not guaranteed, I need to ground the film in something I can hold. That is structure. I am a bit of a control freak, so structure is what I can hold in my hand.

Question: In that long shot with people moving up and down the mountain, what time of day are we seeing?

SL: It was rush hour. There are shifts for the miners, I think a morning shift and an evening shift. We were there in the evening. The shot begins around sunset and continues from there. It’s exactly the moment when you see a lot of traffic.

Question: Was that shot repeated?

SL: It was a continuous long take. We shot one two-hour take and then cut the ends. The mines operate twenty-four hours a day. You have different mines, different flows. You see people going down toward the mines and people going up toward their houses, going home. It’s a passage. It’s not that everyone is going straight to one entrance. It’s a circulation route. At the time, I remember reading that around eighty thousand people were living in La Rinconada. I assume most of them are connected to mining, but there are also people providing services, as you hear in the film, like the women from La Cantinita and the shaman. We tried to portray different typologies of people, to show that ecosystem.

Question: The long take is exactly one hour long in the film. How did you decide where it ends?

SL: It was a metrical decision, and also an editing decision. At some point, the timeline becomes like Lego pieces. It becomes a kind of visual writing.

But also, that frame encapsulated the whole community for me. What you see there is a neighborhood, a passage. Some viewers think you are inside the mine, but what you are actually seeing is the space people cross as they move between neighborhoods and toward the mine tunnels. You see traffic, different kinds of people passing through. For me, the people you see elsewhere in the film, the people you hear, they commute daily through that space.

Question: Could you tell us what you think about the role of sound in shaping the experience of that long shot?

SL: Sound is a problem in that sequence, because the shot is one thing and the sound complicates it. It was never fully solved in Eldorado XXI, but there weren’t other options. I think it was the best way to put it together at that moment.

It is very different to see that shot without all the voices, especially if you are not a native speaker or you are not familiar with Spanish. After making Eldorado XXI, I had a chance to work again with material from the film because a curator invited me to rework some elements. I didn’t want to make a “detour” of the film. I wanted a reason to make something else out of the footage. I used footage that is not included in the film, and I thought, “maybe this is a chance to rework this shot and get rid of the voices, or at least to create a different spatial arrangement where audio can sit differently, and where you can relate to the image without being pulled into those conversations in the same way.” That limitation is something I recognize.

As for ethnographic film, I don’t “go native,” and that connects again to ethics. If I went native, I would have to be there forever. It would have to be my whole life. Each person does what they do, and that is fine. But for me, even when we talk about ethics, it matters to acknowledge the filmmaker’s position. Think of Claude Lanzmann and Shoah (1985), and the famous barber scene. I am glad his voice is there, because it allows me to understand what is happening and to judge what he is doing. It doesn’t excuse him, but it changes the ethical terrain because he makes us aware of his presence and the pressure he applies. That reflexivity matters.

Question: What was your relationship to the community of La Rinconada while you were filming? People rarely look at the camera, and the camera feels almost invisible. How did you communicate with people in that space?

SL: Those people don’t care about a film. You listen to their life stories, you listen to what they live with. But they will not stop what they are doing for you. The women won’t stop, nobody will stop, just because you are there.

So that was one thing to accept. They have higher motives than participating in a film. Then it was a process of paying attention and saying: “Okay, this meeting is happening there, we want to be there. Can we be there?” And it was also about conditions. They are not staring at the camera because they are trying to solve their problems. They allowed us to be there. That was it.

It is not always like that in other places. Sometimes people are paid, sometimes not. But even if people are paid, they are not “coming for a job.” Even if you pay them, they won’t come if they are called to go to the mine. And for me that is totally understandable. It couldn’t be the other way around.

Question: In the film, workers talk about politics and express skepticism about elections, about whether anything will change for them. From what you observed while filming, what did you learn about how collective organization functions there, and where solidarity breaks down, if it does?

SL: This is something I keep learning and trying to understand. When problems are tied to survival, politics becomes different. It’s not like discussing politics in a comfortable situation, or discussing public affairs when you have a ceiling over your head and basic stability. When you don’t have those things, the horizon shifts. Who am I to project, but it becomes a different kind of awareness.

What I noticed there is that the women are more grounded and more willing to change and work on behalf of the community. I don’t know why exactly, but they are mothers of kids left behind, mothers of kids growing up there. There are fathers too, but the women carry a particular burden. What they want is for their kids never to step into La Rinconada. They go there expecting to stay a week, and they end up staying for twenty years. That thought structures everything.

When it comes to organizing and structures, it felt like something done part-time, with the limited time people have, and with a lot of effort. Many in the community are not really interested. The male community is different too, partly because the work inside the mine is different from pallaqueo, which is traditionally female labor. There are several factors.

The sense I got was that some voices are persistent and genuinely concerned with getting better conditions, in opposition to workers who are not organized. Some want to formalize, some want to remain informal. And if you formalize, what does that mean? Do you still want to work there for a paycheck at the end of the day? Many would rather keep the dream alive, keep feeding the stories of the few who “made it.” Otherwise, you risk your life for a paycheck, and that would not be enough.

I don’t know how to answer in a perfect way because I don’t have all the information. But that is part of what I understood while I was there. And I do think that when problems are very big, people tend to become more political, more willing to speak up and identify what constrains their lives.

Question: Thinking from Eldorado XXI outward to the borderland of Transnistria in Extinção or the war-scarred landscapes that haunt Fata Morgana, and your current ongoing project around the Niger Delta in Pantheras, how do you decide which places to make films about?

SL: I look for places that are critical zones, friction zones, these kinds of “no man’s land” spaces. Some of them can explode at any moment. Think about the Niger Delta. Think about Transnistria. Think about a project I did in Lebanon. It’s not just me. There are others who are trying to think about what is happening around us, and there are places that feel like ticking bombs because they contain the ingredients for an eruption.

I’m also drawn to subjectivity and ambiguity. That connects to what I was saying earlier. Things are not one-sided. They are not black-and-white. So, I look for these places because I want to contribute to the discussion, to make you aware that they exist, that people are working under these conditions, that these systems persist.

Question: You have adopted the term “parafiction” for certain representational strategies in your work. When did this idea come to you, and how do you explore the tension between fiction and nonfiction in your work?

SL: I begin from the principle that we do not have access to a stable reality. Instead, we have an excess of meanings, interpretations, explanations, manipulations, constructions, and evaluations that go into the narratives and systems that sustain and occupy us. So my use of the term “parafiction” comes from that questioning, from thinking about how subjectivity is formed, drawing on psychoanalysis, and from trying to clarify and expand how we understand the real, reality, the symbolic, and the imaginary. This questioning leads me to operate at the border between fiction and nonfiction. I work with representation and with the generation of hypotheses, guided by what I consider plausible and by a deontological position that I try to maintain. I consciously assume what I call the “task of the translator,” something close to illusionism, and I try to push its limits rather than conceal them.

In that sense, I draw on different nonfictional strategies: ethnographic research, thought experiments, reflexivity, re-enactment, and performativity to explore the limits of fiction. In my work, fictional structures intersect with the world as we experience it. These strategies retain a certain exactitude with reality while also questioning its authority. Through parafiction, I can take a convention, distort it, expose its constructed nature, and raise doubts about its claim to truth, while still allowing it to function as plausible.