Biography

Paula Albuquerque is an artistic researcher living between Lisbon and Amsterdam who works within the field of found footage and surveillance, including the making of films and installations with archival films and imagery produced by armed UAV’s, CCTV and Deepfake technologies. Albuquerque combines her own footage with images from mass media in a transmedial artistic research that involves media archaeology, cultural analysis, film and media theory, semiotics, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and drone studies. The resulting film-based artwork scrutinise links between “hauntology,” artificial intelligence and pre-existing race and gender biases in proto-surveillance archival materials and war technologies. Her work with film archives is informed by intersectional decolonial and anarchival practices, focusing on visual technologies both analog and digital, surveillance and the deconstruction of “othering,” stereotyping modes of image production.

Research fields

• Film philosophy
• Media studies
• Surveillance studies
• Decolonial studies

Selected publications

• Albuquerque, Paula, “Glitching Colonial Film Archives Digital File Manipulation and Ecological Analogue Processing as Decolonial Anarchival Strategies,” in Slow Technology Reader. A Tool for Shaping Divergent Futures, edited by Carolyn F. Strauss. Amsterdam: Valiz, in press. [link]
• Albuquerque, Paula, “Fainting at Work: Anarchiving Gendered Stereotypes in Silent Cinema at EYE Film Museum,” in Performative Representation of Working-Class Laborers. They Work Hard for the Money, edited by Jennifer Vanderpool and Colin Gardner, 39-56. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. [link]
• Albuquerque, Paula. The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. [link]

Main projects

• Individual project ‘Proto-Surveillance, Subjectification and (Bio)Politics of Dispossession in Film Archives – An Anarchival and Decolonial Comparative Analysis Between the Colonial Film Collections of Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam and the Portuguese Cinematheque in Lisbon‘ — Hosted by the IHC and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (2023.07214.CEECIND). 2024-2030
• Filmmaker/Artistic Researcher at the group exhibition ‘(Upcoming) Eye(s) Open – new perspectives on film heritage from colonial times‘ — EYE Filmmuseum, funded by the Mondriaan Fund. 2025
• Artistic Researcher of the solo exhibition ‘Colonised Landscapes and Spectral Deterritorialised Flora‘ — Zone2Source, Platform for Art and Ecology, funded by the Mondriaan Fund, the Dutch Creative Industries Fund, and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. 2024 [link]
• Artistic Researcher of the solo exhibition ‘Embodiments of dissent (on proto-surveillance, the gesture and vitality)‘ — Bradwolff Projects, funded by the Mondriaan Fund, the Dutch Creative Industries Fund, and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. 2023 [link]