Porto/Post/Doc presents, in partnership with the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, a programme dedicated to Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, a duo whose work occupies a distinctive place at the intersection of cinema and the visual arts. The programme brings together a screening of three films and the launch of “Trabalho s / Work s”, a publication that explores and documents the two artists’ working methods.

Coming from a visual arts background, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca have developed a body of work in which cinema, performance and practices of community engagement come together. Often working with people and communities whose voices remain outside dominant structures of representation, their films create space for faces, bodies, gestures and territories that inhabit the margins, while questioning the ways in which they are seen and represented.

Conceived primarily for exhibition spaces, while also maintaining a strong presence on the film festival circuit, their works explore the possibilities of the moving image and the relationship between those behind and in front of the camera. Performance plays a central role, not simply as cinematic material, but as a space for expression and collective creation, where different identities and modes of representation can be explored in front of the camera.

This programme is funded by National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology under the project UID/00622/2025.

PROGRAMME WORK S
Bárbara Wagner, Benjamin de Burca

RISE
BRA, CAN, 2018, DOC, FIC, 20'
A subway extension linking central Toronto with its outskirts becomes a stage for poems and musical performances by young artists connected to R.I.S.E., a spoken-word community rooted in Scarborough. Many are first- or second-generation Canadians of African and Caribbean heritage. Their words and music meet the city’s architecture and public spaces.

One Hundred Steps
DEU, FRA, 2020, DOC, 30'
"One Hundred Steps" visits two house museums: a seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish manor in County Cork and a nineteenth-century bourgeois mansion in Marseille. As the tours unfold, Irish and North African musicians, singers and dancers fill the spaces with sounds and traditions absent from their histories, questioning who gets to narrate Europe’s past.

Swinguerra
BRA, 2019, DOC, FIC, 21'
On a school sports court, dancers rehearse demanding routines while rivals watch. Moving between disciplined practice and imagined performance, "Swinguerra" explores dance, competition and self-expression in Recife. Its performers, many of whom Black, transgender or non-binary, assert their presence through movement and collective work.