Er is een geest van mij / Hay un fantasma mío

Experimental, non-fiction short. 6 min, 2021.
Distribution enquiries: info@li-ma.nl.


An attempt at mourning both personal and political futures that never arrived, organised around a broad interpretation of the trope of the ghost. We see depersonalised figures, urban ruins, consuming fires and microscopic images of decaying bodily matter — set to a poem that shifts between Spanish and Dutch.

Directors Statement

Creating this film was a stretched-out and intuitive process. It’s a poetic and associative take on the personal archive. It combines footage shot in Washington DC and New York in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, in Lima around displacing fires in 2019, and in Amsterdam the months before the corona outbreak, where I was researching gentrification and urban renewal. As a project, it originated at a DIY, artist-run residence I organised in Lima, Peru.

I'm greatly inspired by ideas of hauntology, once described by Mark Fisher as a "nostalgia for futures that never arrived”, in which the notion of the ghost is used as a metaphor for something that is both there and not there: the present being perpetually haunted by traces of the past and its failed futures. After encountering this theory, a lot of ideas I’d been already reflecting on – consciously or unconsciously – fell into place. In the end, the process became a way for me to mourn both personal and political futures that never arrived. In assembling this piece, I brought together issues that fascinated me but also scared me: urban and bodily decay, failed neoliberal promises of progress, the rise of fascism, self-image and adulthood. Ghosts that might continue to haunt me, but that through this film I could better grasp.