Autofictional Science Fiction - Films and Writings

Isadora Neves Marques looks at two of her recent films, My Senses Are All I Have to Offer (2024) and Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (2022), to consider the relationship between her writings on science fiction and her work as a filmmaker. Historically and culturally situated, her science-fiction writing stages encounters between distinct cosmovisions that disrupt divisions between natural and artificial, normal and abnormal. Intimate in tone, her films are equally conscious of different artistic histories, playing with genre expectations to surprising effects.

This event is the fourth iteration of Rehearsing the Not Yet, a collaboration between choreographer Ingri Fiksdal, Marie Nerland’s curatorial project, Volt, and dancer and choreographer Louis Schou-Hansen. Rehearsing the Not Yet looks to explore alternative histories as a means of envisioning and creating room for diverse modes of physical practice by asking: ‘What could have happened?’ Intended to unfold over the course of several years, Rehearsing the Not Yet will comprise various components – including talks, seminars and reading groups – culminating in a performance that will premiere in 2026.

Isadora Neves Marques is a Portuguese film director, visual artist and writer working across poetry and nonfiction. In 2022, her work was shown as the Portuguese Official Representation at the Venice Biennale and, that same year, she was awarded a Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize. In 2018, she won Artissima’s Present Future Art Prize.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues, including: CA2M, Madrid; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Gasworks, London; The High Line, New York; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; Kyoto City University of Arts Gallery; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; and Wellcome Collection, London. She has premiered her work at Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week, Toronto International Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam, where she was awarded the Ammodo Tiger Short Award in 2022.

She is cofounder of the film production company Foi Bonita a Festa and of the poetry press Pântano Books. She has contributed regularly to e-flux journal as well as to publications by Archive Books, MIT Press and Sternberg Press, among others.