“In the late 1980s, after I quit engineering at university to study art, the cineclub Estação Botafogo in Rio de Janeiro was my classroom and film became my artistic universe. I immersed myself in the films of the period from many different countries, including my own.

For the Metrograph program, I am taking a poetic approach, bringing together some of the films that have opened doors in my own art. 

My selection might seem eclectic but there are discernible themes and genres—eroticism, excess, science-fiction fatalism—that connect to my own work. I am attracted to the science fiction genre because it is possible to abandon linear temporality and the political and scientific limitations of the present. The baroque aesthetic, with which I so strongly identify, connects with the idea of ​​artificiality, of excess for pure pleasure, and the creation of other possible realities. These aspects are present in my own art in the representations of flesh, in the historical parodies, in the saunas that reveal themselves to be imagined environments rather than real. My program also includes some more recent remarkable Brazilian productions that resonate with my own thinking.”—Adriana Varejão