HÆG

Reel Brazil, creatively directed & co-curated by Nina Shen is a time-based media festival featuring historic and contemporary works of video art, experimental cinema, live and digital commissions that interrogate systems of control, elevate outsider voices, and reimagine art as a tool of social and political transformation. It draws cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years, exemplified by the UK’s National Disability Movement – the festival explores a lineage of creative resistance, enabled by new technologies.

Opening Reel Brazil’s Season 2, Queer Resistance we commissioned a new piece of live performance, ‘Hæg’ by artist Ash McNaughton. McNaughton created a circle with jars of honey, a powerful antiseptic somewhere between solid and liquid, temporarily transforming the project space into a ritualistic site. The body became a branch, strong, tender & expressive; mis-shapen stones were sewn onto the body and dipped into the honey, synthesized, purified and transformed into objects of wonderment. The performance lasted approximately one hour, but transcended time and space.

The objects that remain from the performance have now become a piece of sculpture exhibited in the gallery space until the end of the festival period.

Below is the text by Ash McNaughton that accompanied the performance.

[re] puls [iv] e

witch, sorceress, enchantress,

sister three

fury

cognate with haga

enclosure. becoming boundary

portion of woodland marked off for cutting

Hedge-rider

faery; crippled daemon, spirit

to fly about, smoke, be scattered, vanish

one

of the magic words

for which there is no male form

diviner, truthseeker, soothsayer,

of prophetic and oracular

greatly feared and respected

haga is the haw-

in hawthorn

confusion blending with the heathenish

we who straddle the hedge

the boundary between the civilised world and the

wild world beyond

a foot in each reality

local healer

root collector

living in the open

sleeping under bushes

moving from village to village

[Text By Ash McNaughton]

Their actions foster a synergetic exchange between their physical, psychological, and spiritual body, and the environment(s) they inhabit. Attuning to memory, transcorporeality, and somatic practices, their embodied approach navigates thresholds that evoke precarity, balance, tension, and fragility, while holding in reverence that which lies in between.

This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us.

A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.

Reel Brazil features historic and contemporary works of video art, experimental cinema, and digital commissions that interrogate systems of control, elevate outsider voices, and reimagine art as a tool of social and political transformation. It draws cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years, exemplified by the UK’s National Disability Movement – the festival explores a lineage of creative resistance, enabled by new technologies.

Brazil has long stood at the crossroads of authoritarianism and democracy, a nation marked by deep post-colonial struggles, social inequality, and vibrant cultural resistance. Emerging in the wake of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), a generation of artists and filmmakers embraced accessible video technologies to document authentic Brazilian realities, challenge mainstream propaganda, and give voice to the marginalized. This body of work forms the powerful core of Reel Brazil, connecting past creative mutinies to urgent contemporary struggles.

Creatively directed and co-curated by Nina Shen and presented by CT20 in Folkestone, a coastal town at the intersection of art-led regeneration and class conflict, Reel Brazil also confronts the tensions of gentrification, cultural erasure, and experiences of displacement for local residents. It reclaims space for radical creativity through the power of storytelling.