FR/PT

Juliana Zepka is a French-Brazilian artist. She lives and works in Paris.


Her work explores the spectral and memorial dimensions of the image and the archive in the context of their policies of reproduction, digitalisation and restitution. In 2022, after finishing her degree at the Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), she wrote a manifesto on the anarchive as keystone of her artistic research: the study of the archive through its blank pages, through the invisible, the fictional, the anonymous, the forgotten. She also works on request to create visual content (graphics, web design, video) for artists, cultural institutions and associations.

Reboot

Video, archival images, voice-over

2 minutes

2020

1969: after performing the first spacewalk in 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first man to set foot on the Moon. At the same time, an American journalist, completing his article on the Santa Maria oil accident, looks back on his family heritage and the broken line of the Kennedys.


Through a selection of archive images, both real and manipulated, Reboot highlights the importance of choice and the narrative value of historical events. Guided by an artificially generated voice-over, the succession of images examines the fabric of reality at work during the Cold War, a vehicle for bloc ideologies whose geopolitical influence still imposes a dominant world order today. By mixing historical details and fictional anecdotes, the video borrows an omniscient narrative from the photo novel genre, and reveals the different states of mind of the protagonists, whose roles as historical and secondary characters have been reversed.