Filipa Ramos

Filipa Ramos

Lisbon-born Filipa Ramos is a writer and lecturer based in London. Interested in the relationships between contemporary art and cinema, her research focuses on how moving images address environmental and ecological topics and in particular on the modes in which artists’ cinema fosters interspecies relationships across humans, nonhumans and machines.

Ramos is Curator of Art Basel Film. She is a Lecturer in the MRes Art:Moving Image of Central Saint Martins, London and the Master Programme of the Arts Institute of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Basel.

Ramos is a founding curator of Vdrome, a programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers, which she co-founded in 2013 with Editor Edoardo Bonaspetti, Curator Jens Hoffmann and Haus der Kunst's Director Andrea Lissoni. In the past, she was Editor in Chief of art-agenda (e-flux), Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed for Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She co-curates the symposia series The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Lucia Pietroiusti for the Serpentine Galleries, London. She is Head of Research and Publications for the 13th Shanghai Biennale, taking place between November 2020 and July 2021.

She co-authored Theater, Garden, Bestiary A Materialist History of Exhibitions ed. by Tristan García and Vincent Normand (Sternberg Press, 2019) and The Wild Book of Inventions, ed. by Chus Martinez (Sternberg Press, 2020). She edited Animals (London: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2016), and authored Lost and Found (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009). She is a PhD Candidate at the Film and Philosophy Department of Kingston University, London. She curated “Animalesque”, a group exhibition on becoming other at the Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden (Summer 2019) and BALTIC, Gateshead (Winter/Spring 2019/20).

Her writing and research on art, film and nature has been published in magazines and catalogues worldwide, such as Afterall, art agenda., Cura, Frieze, Mousse, Nero, Spike, South, The White Review. She has also extensively written for exhibition books catalogues, namely for Amalia Pica's please listen hurry others speak better (2018), Chris Marker's Catalogue Raisonée (2018), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's Animal That Doesn't Exist, Heman Chong's Abstracts from the Strait Times (2018); Haus der Kulturen der Welt's 2 or 3 Tigers; Allan Sekula's OKEANOS (2017); Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky's One head too many (2017); Insomnia—Sleeplessness as a Cultural Symptom (2016); Archaeology & Exorcisms: Moving Image and the Archive (2016); Emma Smith's Practice of Place (2015); Christian Andersson's Legende (2015); Stadt/Bild — Image of a City (2015); Ursula Mayer's But We Loved Her (2014); Performing the Institution(al), vol. (2011), She co-authored Lost and Found (2009) and edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press).

Interested in the ways in which moving-image-based technologies (film, video) are able of inaugurating and establishing new forms of relationship across human and nonhuman animals, her research focuses on the intersection of art history, eco-activisms and film studies, with a particular emphasis on animal presences in artists' cinema. At the same time she is interested in the way the cinema and the zoo look at one another and shape each other as cinematic entities and spaces. In 2017 she held a public conversation at Tate Modern with Donna Haraway and Fabrizio Terranova on the occasion of the London film premiere of Storytelling for Earthly Survival (2016). In 2018 she was in conversation with writer and poet Eileen Myles, discussing animals, companionship and loss on occasion of their book Afterglow (A Dog's Memoir).

With Serpentine Galleries' Curator of General Ecology, Lucia Pietroiusti, she initiated the symposia project "The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish". The first symposium, entitled "on language" was held at the London Zoo in May 2018, featuring Diana Reiss, Ted Chiang, Superflex's Rasmus Nielsen and Peter Gabriel. It also featured the performance Sleep Walkers/Zoo Pieces by Simone Forti, interpreted by long-time collaborator Claire Filmon, and the screening of Michela di Mattei's videos. The second symposium, entitled "we have never been one" took place at Ambika P3/University of Westminster in December 2018, featuring Heather Barnett, site-specific practitioners Gruff Theatre, swarm robotics engineer Sabine Hauert, science historian and writer Daisy Hildyard, neuroscientist Leah Kelly, science sociologist Hannah Landecker, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, anthropologist Germain Meulemans, biological systems scientist and network architect Phoebe Tickell and artist Anaïs Tondeur plus film and sound works by artists Sophia Al-Maria and Jenna Sutela and composer Annea Lockwood. The third symposium, entitled "PLANTSEX" took place at Cinema Lumiere of the French Institute in London in April 2019, featuring Melanie Bonajo, Maria Dimitrova, Chloe Aridjis, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Emanuele Coccia, Jenna Sutela, Laurence Totelin, Alex Cecchetti, and Victoria Sin. The fourth symposium, entitled "The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Plants" took place at EartH Hackney, London, in May 2019. It featured Tabita Rezaire, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kapwani Kiwanga, Miranda Lowe, Kim Walker, Saelia Aparicio, Carlos Magdalena, Chris Watson, Natasha Myers, Michael Marder, Teresa Castro, Antoine Bertin, Elvia Wilk, Amy Hollywood and Vivian Caccuri.

In 2019, she co-curated with John Akomfrah, Guilherme Blanc and Gareth Evans the Forum do Futuro, an annual programme of debates and performances held in Porto, Portugal, whose main objective is to invite guests from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds to discuss key issues facing contemporary societies. The five hundredth anniversary of the first circumnavigation of the world by Fernão de Magalhães inspired the edition. Symbolically adopting the title "Crossings/Travessias", the Fórum do Futuro rethought this journey and its wide-ranging multiple effects at a historical, political, and cultural level. Invited speakers included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sonia Guajajara, Danny Glover, Christina Sharpe, Elizabeth Povinelli, Vandana Shiva, Coco Fusco, Arthur Jafa, David Adjaye, Fred Moten, Ralph Lemon, Fiesta Warinwa from the African Wildlife Foundation, and others.

She maintains a keen interest as well as an advocacy position in supporting the efforts to acknowledge the rights and welfare of non-human animals, in diffusing pro-animal sensibilities as well as in promoting ethic and humane knowledge advance in animal studies.