In 1968, Herberto Helder included a poem in Apresentação do Rosto (a censored edition), later revised, compiled, and ultimately published in the 1971 book Vocação Animal, the opening stanza of which reads:

“This place does not exist, it is in Saudi Arabia, in the desert.”

Later, this text would be omitted from the poet’s collected works (Poesia Toda) by the author himself. The episode that led to this decision is described in a fragment titled "(magia)” (Photomaton & Vox, 1979). In it, Herberto Helder explains how watching a film adaptation of this very poem led him to renounce the work:

“I began watching and became frightened. It was a beautiful film, surpassing my poem in various ways and proportions. Perhaps it should be explained that the film revealed certain hidden intentions of the poem and made some of its images blossom in a disturbing way. So much so that I began to understand the text through the filmmaker’s reading of it, and realised that my words, as well as my way of arranging them, had been stricken by an incorrigible error, a kind of inherent inefficacy. The efficacy that should have belonged to the poem had been entirely displaced into the film. And so, the metaphor or symbol that was the poem, suddenly absent, came to exist in full force only in the film. I had been dispossessed of the place, of the poem, and so I decided never again to consider that text as mine.”

Coincidentally, the poem's first line—“This place does not exist”—had transformed into This poem does not exist [1], replaced by an ill-fated film, apparently directed by Leopoldo Criner, and which few people seem to have seen or remember.

It is worth noting that the infamous poem is marked by a distinctly genesis-like character: “I divided myself into seven days. … first, I created the heavens and the sands of that place that did not exist. / Then the two luminaries: one for the day and the other for the night of the desert…” Demiurgic and prophetic, the text is at the same time deeply profane: "I brought planks and nails. / Tools, / the beautiful tools of men.” Constructions, musings, a self-referential heretical work fabricated by language and substantiated in the word—the origin and destiny of the essential poem after the death of God. Yet, within the poet's visions, the humanity-to-come bursts forth: “I cast around me (the seeds) / the future birth, / and I stood in the midst of birth, / surrounded by the future birth.” Introducing the sinister into this clarity, a surrealist nightmare unfolds: “For they began to rise from the sand on the evening of the seventh day, and bloomed, shadowy and sweet heads of children—it was grim.” The poem turns into a poem—ex nihilo, from nothing, from that place that does not exist, in the desert. A Poem-Verb it is, until it collapses acutely, plunged into a profusion of tiny giant nothings, the emergence of the absolute “other”—infinite, irreducible, terrifying.

The four films now gathered in this cinematograph (Let Each One Go Where He May, Ben Russell, 2009; China Not China, Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy, 2018; Beijing 88, Rose Lowder, 1988–2011; Sack Barrow, Ben Rivers, 2011) suggest the material and symbolic dissolution of the places they reference.

Unlike in Herberto Helder’s poetry, however, they are not about establishing a primeval space (“a place that does not exist”) within poetic fiction to subvert reality into a metaphysical real; the metaphorical content of these film titles operates in precisely the opposite direction of the poet's—ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing. The apophantic dimension of the poem's mythologeme is absent from the objectivity (or even the prosaic reality) haunting the cinema of these landscapes.

These films awaken no Christian sensibilities. Human figures drift in and out of the frame in places where they do not belong but, through mere indexation, inscription, or recording, inherently should. This disconnect between subject and space (“I appear in the image, but I am not in this film”) generates and articulates sequences of non-diegetic shots that, in dwelling on the apparent insignificance of the figure within the image, hypothesise a factual tangibility of another order. The question is not "To be, or not to be" but rather “Do I exist, or do I not,” as a material, spectral enquiry—a ghost of today and now, not the immemorial ghost of all times.

These films do not contain a narrative because the characters do not perform any roles or follow a normative script. Yet, even if they do not tell a story, their historical exclusion is evident. These are people wandering across a stage where all attention is directed towards the big picture. The nature of these films implies a specific spatiotemporal awareness that accentuates, codifies, and reflects on this depersonalisation. The camera and editing predominantly adhere to structuralist cinema strategies, where the latent form of the film (the predetermined structure accommodating the images) takes precedence over its explicit content (what the images capture specifically). The essence of the film becomes the predetermined conditions that give rise to image capture—the big picture in a small frame.

In this set of works, this operation is not detached from the filmmakers' commitment to socio-economic realities. These are relational, reflective, and propositional works that reveal a depletion of the indexing function, a kind of vertigo consisting of the subtle effacement of the subjects within the images—the true subject of these films. This place does not exist because there are no conditions for a subject to exist, just only for it to be nothing anywhere.

While this sense arises from the accumulation of cinematic material, from the non-diegetic duration, and from the silence of voices and depicted images, it also conceptually emerges as a brain-image of a portrait that carries the historical fates of passers-by in these places into a certain unreality, a minimal total of existence.

Collectively, these works question to what extent the coexistence of peoples tolerates the self-determination of subjects as an inalienable notion of spirit and body; and how freedoms collapse in the face of supernumerary, excessive, and superlative symbolic orders.

These four films observe interwoven ongoing historical processes that forebode a criminal, unjust future—processes perhaps never as crystallised as they are now:

Migration and border control, triggered by brutal wealth inequality and the emergence of new protectionism:

— Let Each One Go Where He May

The dislocation and obsolescence of the means of production, the alienation of the labour force as effected by macroeconomy, the globalisation of capital, and financial speculation:

— Sack Barrow

The ideological collapse of the great collective projects of the 20th century, the unraveling of the post-war global order, the entanglement of geopolitical blocs, and disputes over strategic interests

— Beijing 88

The territorial ambiguities and expansionism of imperial agendas in the competition for resources and advantages:

— China Not China

All these issues grapple with subterranean (spectral) tensions, namely colonial pasts, cultural hegemony, and trauma; as well as surface (economic) forces, particularly capital accumulation, surplus value, and financial speculation.

What we present here does not seek to resolve or negotiate these antagonisms. Preaching to the converted cannot in any way turn the aesthetic experience into a repository of good conscience. That has only one name: hypocrisy.

Here we just describe; all we have is what remains.

Going back to Herberto Helder's poem: a place that does not exist is precisely what it is.

[1] Leonardo Chioda, 2019, “This Poem Does Not Exist: A Case of Intermediality (and Magic) in Herberto Helder”, CESP Magazine, Belo Horizonte.
Translation PT—EN: Diogo Montenegro