On April 1, 2025, e-flux Screening Room presented a screening of Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023), the latest film by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. The screening was followed by a conversation between the artist, Lukas Brasiskis, and the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.
Question: Thank you for being with us. I’ll start with the title, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. It signals political stakes—ancestors, rights, reclamation—while foregrounding “clouds.” After seeing the film, the title seems to hold a tension between the elemental and the material. Could you unpack that?
Arjuna Neuman: Sure. We more or less accidentally started giving our films two titles; except for the first one, they all have them. Usually one title is mine and one is Denise’s. She can speak to “ancestral”; for me, “clouds” places the film in air, the element. Clouds are spaces where multiple senses are engaged and sight—usually at the top of the hierarchy of senses—is reduced. You can taste the moisture, feel it; it changes how you hear. I wanted to think of clouds as a multisensory space of immersion, and then ask how to make a film from inside that sensory space.
Denise Ferreira da Silva: With ancestral we’re touching on two things that come together in the film—and in the clouds. On the one hand, not just blood lineage, that which has been around since before humans: dust, stars, the elements. On the other hand, the political sense of the word in Indigenous discourse, where ancestral claims are made over land and arealso thought through elementally. I began developing this in a paper on climate change and against the Anthropocene, asking how to account for capital’s role in greenhouse gas accumulation without recentering the human. My argument is that the processes of extraction and expropriation that enable capital accumulation become materially legible as particular greenhouse gases—nitrogen and others—each tied to moments of land appropriation and resource extraction. The film plays with these different meanings of “ancestral,” including but not limited to the usual biological one.
Question: In your film, the wind and other elemental forces almost take on narrative roles. Many critics of the so-called visualization of the Anthropocene warn against attributing agency to nature, as if elemental forces acted independently from humans. In your work, the elemental is shown as entangled with extractive infrastructures and human histories, but it still exerts its own presence. By the end, it even seems to acquire a metaphorical weight. I’m curious how you situate yourselves in these debates on visualizing the Anthropocene, particularly in relation to thinkers like T. J. Demos.
DFdS: I wouldn’t say I’m in that discussion directly. What I take very seriously—and what we deliberately avoid—is the kind of new materialist animation of “things.” Except perhaps in a playful way, like the brief animation at the end, that’s not really our approach.
AN: Yes, the question of visualizing the Anthropocene wasn’t our primary concern. In this film, we focused more on demoting visuality altogether. The work tries to feel the Anthropocene rather than visualize it. Of course, there’s still an attempt to depict the destructive impact of extractivism and neoliberalism across past, present, and future. But we do so while undermining the privilege of vision as the “noblest” sense—so there’s a paradox. We also play with nonhuman perspectives. For example, in 4 Waters (2018), we worked with the water cycle as a point of view. But we don’t fully claim the film is told from the perspective of water or wind. It’s more like an experiment. In Ancestral Clouds, there’s also a reference to The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2020), a book by Julius S. Scott about gossip and how it traveled during the Middle Passage as a form of informal organizing. So, as always, there’s a double meaning: the wind as elemental force and the wind as a figure for social and political organization.
Question: I recall in one of your texts you reference Sylvia Wynter’s idea of a “new genre of being human.” That also seems relevant here, because it offers a framework beyond anthropocentric accounting.
DFdS: Yes, though for Wynter the human remains central. Our position is different: we have no hope for the human. Already in our 2016 film Serpent Rain, the question was: what if the human could be figured through, or expressed by, the elements? But the aim there was to displace the human altogether. In Ancestral Clouds, we try to image that displacement. The centrality of the human is precisely what we reject. That might sound strange now, but when we began ten years ago, it was more obvious how policies and discourses still placed “the human” at the center. In the past decade, however—especially after the COVID pandemic—something else has become visible. This doesn’t mean the concept of “the human” is no longer problematic, but it changes what can happen to actual human beings today.
Question: And in connection to this, in the introduction, you mentioned that at some point the film is very much about ghosts. I found that intriguing. Ghosts seem to move through the film: we hear Pinochet’s voice, references to specters of Marx, and, by the end, the ghostly presence of ancestors is very felt. It seems to me you feel positive about this connection with ghosts. Could you elaborate on the role of ghosts in the film?
AN: Yes, I think the film raises that question—what do ghosts do?—and proposes only tentative answers. What is protest? What is resistance, or even revolution? Some of those words feel inadequate, but the question remains. In the Chilean context, the disappeared Marxists still haunt us, and there’s a speculation that their presence lingers even in our lithium devices. That thought suggests one form of resistance to neoliberal authoritarianism. But Ancestral Clouds is less about resistance than about understanding neoliberalism’s entanglement with authoritarianism. We made it about five years ago, before Trump’s election, when we already saw a rise in authoritarianism partnered with neoliberalism. We wanted to revisit Chile to better grasp that history—the failures and occasional successes of the resistance—and how those political structures took shape. Of course, this raises the question of what can be done now, but at the time, we weren’t ready to answer it. Our next film will address that more directly. In Ancestral Clouds, we spoke of “mineral solidarity” and suggested being haunted by the political opposition to Pinochet. But the urgency of resistance feels much sharper today.
DFdS: Yes. It is a ghost story, and the animation of the slave ship at the end is in reference to those ghosts. But we emphasize from the beginning that the ghosts are material. Lithium powers our devices, but lithium is also materially linked to the bodies of the enslaved—those who died and those who survived. Their elemental particles remain present in the things that surround us. So the ghosts are not metaphorical; they are material. This is where our idea of “mineral solidarity” comes in: it is an acknowledgment that what constitutes minerals is not only tied to economic and political structures but also to our bodies.
AN: I often think about Margaret Thatcher’s statement that “economics is the method; the object is to change the soul.” That quotation points to the connection between neoliberalism and extraction—not only material extraction, but also extraction through social media, affective labor, and identity. These processes are then leveraged in nationalist projects. These forms of extraction are then mobilized in nationalist projects, enabling the strange partnership between neoliberalism and authoritarianism. The “soul” thus becomes a contested site—and, in a sense, a ghost story. In the film, we approached the concept of soul not only through the animation, but also through soul music, especially improvised soul, which channels what has come before us and perhaps offers a kind of antidote to the logic of extraction.
Question: That leads to my next question about the soundtrack, which seems to almost narrate the film. Could you also speak more broadly about the production of sound? The work includes interviews and what might be called an essayistic voice-over, but in the documentary segments characters don’t appear on screen, though we hear them. Who are these people, and how did you work with them?
AN: They’re real people. In earlier films we used direct interview recordings, but here we shifted toward a more scripted mode. Still, the conversations and interviews were real. When we’ve shown the film as an installation, we sometimes include the full interviews—for example, with a marine biologist—so they’re accessible. While the documentary parts are crucial, at the same time, this film is also a musical. Holding those multiple modes together—serious documentary and upbeat song—creates a certain effect.
DFdS: Yes, that’s one of the differences here. We worked with conversations as well as interviews. For instance, one of the conversations I recorded happened spontaneously on a train. Others were more structured. What is explicit in this film is how interviewees react to our questions. Some scientists looked at us as if we were out of our minds when we made certain proposition, and yet they also admitted it made them think differently. By weaving their voices into the narrative but not showing them speaking directly, those reactions became part of the story.
Question: And in terms of your collaboration—how does your production process unfold? Do you visit sites together, conduct interviews, record, and then build the narrative? Or is it more intuitive?
DFdS: It’s not ethnography, but we do go to sites and film. Arjuna often manages to get to the most interesting locations. I’m usually stuck in the US or Europe, though I managed to travel to Brazil for the filming in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, for Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020). We conduct interviews wherever possible.
AN: Many of those interviews are with scientists working in the specific places we visit. We find this research mode effective, though it’s never the only one. We also read extensively and use other forms of research. In Ancestral Clouds, some material came from more personal encounters—a dinner party that really happened, though the names are changed; a conversation Denise had that isn’t exactly an interview. In that sense, the film edges toward memoir.
DFdS: Exactly. And because we’re always working toward the next film, we read across fields. Recently, for instance, we’ve been immersed in scientific articles about fungi, algae, and lichens for a project in Tierra del Fuego. These readings, conversations, and site visits eventually filter into the films. We don’t really have a fixed process—it’s a mix of intuition and research, with decisions made at different stages.
Question: I was struck by the camera work and editing in the opening sequence and would like to hear more about it.
AN: The first sequence takes place at ALMA, the astronomical observatory in Chile. What you see is largely drawn from an ALMA promotional film. We also filmed there, but it was very difficult: we were five thousand meters up, with oxygen tanks, and very little time. So we decided to work with their 3D footage. We selected two-dimensional frames from it, using the automated camera movements to convey the mechanical nature of that site.
Question: Could you elaborate on how your approach to the elemental and material differs from new materialism?
DFdS: My reading of new materialism is that it “elevates” matter by describing it with qualities usually reserved for humans, treating it almost as a subject. That is not what we are doing. I’m interested in matter as such—what Aristotle called the “material cause.” How do we think from that which does not “act” in the usual sense, but which, in its constitution, is just movement? For us, matter doesn’t need to be given agency. It is already active because it is always transforming, without needing to be animated.
Question: Toward the end of the film, there’s an establishing shot of dense clouds. As the camera moves into the clouds, the silhouette of a transatlantic slave ship emerges. It’s such a powerful image. How did you achieve that shot?
DFdS: It’s an animation. We worked with Nurah Farahat, an incredible animator. There’s not much to add beyond saying she was amazing. Our first film, Serpent Rain was inspired by the discovery, in the 1970s, of a sunken slave ship off the coast of Norway, which changed the narrative about Norway’s involvement in slavery. Back in 2014 we couldn’t film that ship, as almost nothing remained. So there’s a sense in this new animation of the slave ship “returning.”
Question: Today when we say “the cloud,” we often mean data storage—Dropbox, Google Docs. In the film there’s a line about organic and inorganic matter. But our digital “cloud” seems almost purely inorganic, powered by energy-intensive data centers. How do you see this shift toward the inorganic?
DFdS: We were certainly thinking about data clouds, and about lithium, copper, and other minerals. There’s a sequence in the film where one kind of extraction depends on another, leading to an infinite chain of interdependent extractions. “The cloud” is one more link in that chain.
AN: Behind that is a larger question about conditions of possibility. I remember visiting Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, where components for computer chips are made. Even a tiny chip part requires huge machines—steel, minerals, materials. We talk a lot about gadgets and how we relate to them (or to one another through them), and about virtual worlds like Second Life, but we rarely think about the lithium, copper, and other elements that make all this possible. We wanted to foreground those materials. Our cameras are made of them, too. Bringing these layers together lets us ask old but pressing political questions about how our present is materially organized. Extraction affects Indigenous communities and disturbs bacteria released from glacial waters; it implicates all of us who use these devices. If we connect the atmospheric “cloud” to the data “cloud,” what kinds of political actions become imaginable?
Question: About the drone footage: drones stabilize against wind and produce an uncanny smoothness, almost a mastery of wind. What drew you to using them?
DFdS: In 4 Waters we thought more conceptually about drones as tools of surveillance and remote warfare. Here they were mainly functional. How else do you film the vast scale of a lithium mine? From the ground or a car you can’t grasp its extent. The drone was the best tool. Of course, because this film is about wind, that vantage point also mattered. Practically, it was tense—filming near the mines meant dealing with wind and the risk of security chasing us off—but it worked.
Question: How did you decide which sounds to describe and which to leave uncaptioned?
AN: We collaborated with a collective called Carefuffle, who work with hard-of-hearing consultants and have a long practice of captioning. In some places—Canada, for example—standards are more established; elsewhere, less so. For us, captions are also a creative space, a form of writing. Too often they’re produced automatically by software; we wanted them to be composed, attentive, expressive.
DFdS: Carefuffle also captioned 4 Waters. That film exists in versions with and without captions; Ancestral Clouds is captions-only. The process became another collaboration: we didn’t dictate how sounds should be described. Sometimes the phrasing is funny, strange, or beautiful—after the film is “finished,” it becomes something else through their writing. Viewers will inevitably experience the work differently because of that. We’re also developing our own captioning language—symbols in the frame, for instance—to give more space to hard-of-hearing viewers. Demoting sight isn’t only an image question; it’s about access across senses. The discourse is evolving; eventually this will be standard, but change is slow.
Question: Could you expand on what “mineral solidarity” means for you?
DFdS: In the film, the idea of mineral solidarity is intentionally left open, a provisional response to our analysis of the partnership between neoliberalism and authoritarianism. One vector comes from unmarked graves, where minerals, matter, and bodies fuse. What alliances—metaphorical and political—might emerge from these sites of burial and entanglement? It’s a question we expect to develop further in the next film.
AN: For me, mineral solidarity attends to minerals as constitutive, not only extracted, and asks us to rethink conditions of existence and exploitation. Someone remarked that “Chile is everywhere” because of lithium and copper. Our political decisions should take that seriously. Mineral solidarity isn’t a closed concept but an invitation to connect, for example, electric cars and depression medication—both reliant on lithium—and then ask, so what follows? We spent a long time trying to “solve” the concept; we decided to keep it open.