BRITTANY DOWDEN | FILM ARCHAEOLOGY 2025

BRITTANY DOWDEN

Archaeologist Underwater, Surfer and activist for the preservation of underwater archaeological sites on 8 km of coastline in Brazil and 300,000 km of river sites in Brazilian territory, she carries out educational work in environmental reserves in the city of Rio de Janeiro with professional surfers and immigrants who went to the Brazil fleeing the advance of the European and American extreme right. He is a character who chooses not to come into conflict with the political system of privatizing Brazilian beaches and the action of treasure hunters who destroy underwater sites and with the corruption and leniency of national and international public and private policies that operate in Brazil in the year 2035. Brittany chooses to form local partnerships with surfers at Macumba beach in Rio de Janeiro, where she lives and takes care of refugees. She is an observer who cares about exposing the gap between identity and otherness. The images and art of the character's scene are open to the ambiguity of appearances and statements. They resist in practice, in the real world and the atmosphere, are the attempts at a unifying synthesis of sensation and idea that characterizes the character of the film Archaeology. Brittany's dialogue and images are driven by emotion, empathy and sensuality that produces a character who becomes sensitive to the force of indeterminacy rather than determination. The character demands, for her understanding, long texts in which the actress — turned critical — takes her proposal, sometimes very simple, as the object of an in-depth discourse. In Brittany Dowden, the character attends to the sensitive, the experience of the body in a situation, on the diffuse border between the rational and the sensitive. In it, she begins to enroll the subject in writing, simultaneously neither mental nor merely perceptive, which makes the character's character subject to disappearance, annihilation or extinction. This oscillating character of the image of the actress on stage is never fully realized, because it is not subject to an external purpose, or merely planetary and dependent on moral or political conception. The visuality of the scenes involves the crossing, in the given image. A roll of the dice will never abolish chance. The fringe of indeterminacy that gives life to the image and allows the character's poetics to touch our sensitivity and our local and Brazilian customs comes with the strength of character, and this is repeated and reinvents the resilience of the Brazilian female archaeologist. In the character's text, the meeting is a way of prolonging current relationships - the facts - with more emotional thinking and language, based on this question of how she will form alliances with surfers, fishermen and local people. Visions of an anonymous identity, dealing with circular repetition, without origin or destination. The character makes passages and accumulations that always return to the central theme, which is the preservation of underwater heritage and how to transmit knowledge. The character's vision is consecrated and abolished, and shows his internal insistence. No matter how much she tries to fill, with her own narrative, the proposed sequences, her place of speech and gaze, inscribed in the structure of the experience that the character makes available, is that of deferred repetition, without chronology. With this, she will always be reiterating her commitment in which we see, experience and think about the otherness of time. For the narrative's linearity, the character Brittany Dowden replaces a spiral circularity, with no happy ending. She is subtly led to the strangeness of the image and the interruption of speech. In place of rhetoric and its arguments, even implicit ones, we have a poetics of the enigmatic that characterizes it. The viewer becomes a participant, like a reflex, as Brittany always returns the dialogue with the other characters as an enigma.