The Snake Inside Eve

by Ana Vaz

Travelling by car from the backcountry semi-arid lands towards the Atlantic coast, it is known that travellers are led to stop and contemplate the impressive scenery of Serra da Mantiqueira. The lush mountain range is called Mantiqueira after Amantikir, from the Tupi Guarani meaning “crying mountains”. The range is replete with cascades and waterfalls; a vast network of natural springs supplying fresh water to large cities in the country. Mesmerized by the timeless beauty of the ranges, travellers tend to stop their serpentine journeys to contemplate the land.

The story goes that one family taken by awe, stopped their car and walked into the forest to drink from the mountain’s tears. They were surprised to find a blue waterhole standing majestically below a thin and crystalline waterfall. The family approached the fall and each of them used their hands as cups to drink from the flowing water. The younger of the family, a curious and entranced young girl, mesmerized by the intensity of the scene, decided to open her mouth wide and drink directly from the fall. Oh, I think I swallowed a leaf! Not a minute had passed until the young girl began desperately screaming. Raging pains attacked her stomach while her parents watched her in shock. The young girl was now possessed by a new being hosted inside her: a small snakelet coiling and expanding inside her stomach. The young woman’s tale reverberates timelessly across the ranges, now transformed into a cautionary proverb: beauty is treacherous. T h e s n a k e i n s i d e E v e

We were traveling by car, crossing over 300km of soy monoculture plantations that have exponentially taken over the Brazilian cerrado.1 I was taken back by the brutality of the scene: endless green fields of soy pushing back the wild, rough, uneven and savage vegetation of the semi-arid. This is a road I thought I knew, yet the extensive green layer of soy transformed the landscape into a perfectly green dystopia, or rather a murder scene.

This is when my mother begins to tell me in great detail about the snake-swallowing tale. Maybe because of the amount of dead snakes by the road, maybe as a warning. All I know is that the image of the young girl drinking from a fall and swallowing a snake rested with me. She appeared to me in recurrent dreams, serene and whole. The tale resonated with me as a founding myth: a snake, a family, a deviant

1 Tropical savannah that extends over Brazil’s centre-west states: Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do

Sul and parts of Minas Gerais and is home to the country’s most notable river beds.

Terminals, black & white photograph, Sandra Lahire, 1985.

young woman who entranced, drinks directly from a waterfall. The waterfall of knowledge?

In the Genesis, when the serpent dares Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, she warns: then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Daringly, she eats. In Judeo-Christian faith, snakes are threatening tricksters not to be trusted. Neither good nor evil, both venom and cure. The snake’s venom can both heal and intoxicate, expand consciousness or kill. In the garden of Eden, the serpent is commonly interpreted under a simplistic heterosexual psychology of the snake-as-phallus and sex-as-sin. Yet, here the idea I would like to propose is that falling from the garden of Eden seems to be rather a release from a despot god  —  who uncannily mediates all access to resources  —  allowing Eve the autonomy to inquire, question and see  —  your eyes shall be opened.

For Sumerians and Dahomeans, snakes are taken to be an umbilical cord tying all humans to the Earth. For the Tupi Guarani, first inhabitants of the southwest Atlantic coast, the Earth was once a luminous serpent in the cosmos coiling itself in the galaxy until transforming into a turtle-turned-world. In the Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation, compiled by John de Patmos  —  even if originally written before Christ as an eschatology made from dreams and visions  —  the ancient serpent reappears transformed into a seven-headed dragon. Enemy, satan, divinity, creature of the underworld, spell of fertility, lust and healing, the serpent-dragon is vital energy and stands one of the most ancient symbols in human consciousness. In D.W. Lawrence’s last book Apocalypse, he describes the dragon-serpent as “symbols of the fluid, rapid, startling movement of life within us. That startled life which runs through us like a serpent, or coils within us potent and waiting, like a serpent, this is the dragon.”

In Sandra Lahire’s very first film Arrows (1984)  —  a personal and brave testimony of her experience with anorexia  —  real, drawn, animated, photographed and cut up snakes appear as hypnotic figures until the pagan phrase is spelled on screen: the snake inside Eve. The brief animated phrase appeared to me as a lead and metaphor to interpret all of her work. The snake inside Sandra devoured her, all the while instigating her radiant rage.

Here, the serpent’s bite, dare or ingestion seems to be rather a calling from a much larger body. Bitten by the luminous cosmic snake  —  the earth’s body?  —  Sandra, Eve, the young girl walk the earth alongside a polymorphous assembly of bodies knowing no distinction between in or out, person or animal, land or body. The outside becomes inside. The luminous serpent, origin of the planet, coils inside Sandra, it coils inside Eve embodying knowledge and suffering, life and death. The suffering of the earth is a suffering of the body. No distinction, no boundaries. Affected by most planetary phenomena, the women’s body knows no distinction between itself and the earth.

snake is her condition

the earth, her body snake, her fate

the snake, the earth

Snake is lived experience for many women whom I have had the chance to listen to, accompany, film or simply be in the presence of. In Há Terra! (2017), Ivonete dos Santos Morais tells me that ever since being bitten by a snake, her foot swells up with the full moon. Years have passed and she tells me the swelling is the same. Unbeatable, timely, the full moon, her swollen body.

Bitten by snake, it is within the body-mind that the barbarian devastation of the earth’s tissue manifests. G. suffers from post-traumatic stress after the inundation of her home with toxic mud coming from the collapse of a mining dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil (Olhe bem as montanhas, 2018). Y. is forced into seclusion after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown “dreading the rain on a rainy day, the wind on a windy day and the leaves in a warm tea” for their possible contamination (The Voyage Out, in becoming). Ivonete dos Santos Morais (A Idade da Pedra, 2013, Há Terra!, 2016) has exhausted her search to re-occupy land persecuted by large landowners of monocultural plantations. A. combats an unknown illness while resisting to maintain a garden within the fields surrounding the Fukushima Daichi collapsed power plants (The Voyage Out). Land-bodies torn by the toxic consequences of drilling, extracting, nuclear fission and latifundia monoculture fuelled by the never ending hunger for more, more, more.

The luminous serpent coils and turns. Her sparkle, bright, her body curved. Meanwhile, armies of man puncture, dig, excavate and pierce her body searching to extract from her the luminous sparkle that glows somberbright. She is made of fire and the more they pierce, the more her venom jars from her veins intoxicating her river-scales, soil-flesh, water-blood and killing huge assemblies of life, exhausting territories, sculpting endless deserts.

Looking like luminescent or blood-red capillaries, t h e R i v e r s n a k e s i t s w a y o v e r a n atomised country.2

In Sandra Lahire’s Serpent River (1989), a juxtaposition of creatures: flying birds, curious dogs, X-rayed bodies, blue waves, fish and children make for a cinema of the elements.

2 Sandra Lahire’s notes on Serpent River (broadcast on

Channel 4 Television in 1990)

One in which bodies are placed side by side as to compose a much larger body. A landscape is never empty, nor single. Amidst the elements, it is Sandra’s body that appears as matrix in all of her films. Furious, moving, fragile, broken, scanned, X-rayed, as canvas, instrument or means it is her body that connects all the broken pieces of her films. Alongside a multitude of beings, her body stands as if to scream: we are one of the same.

Curiously, cinema, the medium that has historically embodied modernity’s inherent separation between observer and observed, becomes the instrument for a necessary collapse: imagebodyterritory, undergroundaboveground, bodyimageland. Layering images upon images, Sandra’s anti-nuclear environmental manifestoes (Serpent River, Uranium Hex, Plutonium Blonde, Terminals) seek to collapse borders and distinctions in raw statements against the devastation, extraction and intoxication of the Earth’s systems, always akin to the suffering of her own body, naked, walking or dancing — fired by the serpent.

Zooming into experiences and testimonies from workers, specialists and doctors working around rare earth mining and nuclear energy power plants, Sandra weaves these perspectives through her own, becoming her own miner. Excavating layers upon layers, heading far underground until arriving at a space where language is not sufficient and neither is a single image. A throbbing persists. Holes, holes, holes and more holes are pierced on stone ranges, mountains, rock walls as if piercing through the skin, an arm, a leg. Each piercing goes through the imagebody. A woman’s voice describes the effects of uranium mining on the borders of Serpent River: miscarriages, down syndrome, neurological damage of unknown kinds. In Serpent River First Nation lands, uranium extraction tears apart and pollutes native land while protecting only “the white community living on one side of the river” through “a water purification system installed only on the white community’s side”3 (sic). Sandra focuses on the white female workers of the mines and I wonder: where are the native women? Their testimonies, voices? The anthropology of Sandra’s work is above all a self-anthropology alongside one of hospitals, workspaces and the industrial complex.

In Serpent River, we see repeated X-ray images of bodies being brought to light by delicate hands of doctors and nurses. The medical images, at once ominous and hypnotic, attest to the equation: disease + image = proof. In the language of science, the invisible is always rendered visible. In the language of cinema, the proof can be opaque. Yet, in the earth’s language the invisible remains invisible. Evidence need not to materialise as images in order to exist, they simply do.

In thinking of Sandra’s anti-nuclear films, I can’t help but think that her efforts to visualize the toxicity of rare earth mining is made through visual techniques often alluding to the very toxicity of image making. How can we look at an X-ray and not be stunned that the image itself is made from radiation? If exposed directly onto the body without the appropriate lead protection, electromagnetic radiation can trigger the deterioration of cells, malignant or benign. Curiously, in 1895 when Roentgen first discovered the imaging capacity of X-rays, he photographed his wife’s hand. When looking at the image, Mrs. Roentgen wisely and infamously exclaimed: I have seen my death.

Anna Bertha Roentgen hence enunciates the image’s fate as pharmakon, both cure and venom; akin to the serpent, image making has been the fate and pathos of modern life. And I ask myself: in a time in which images are as contagious as a virus, can watching images still release us from our despot gods?

The young girl reappears to me, this time transfigured into a seven headed female dragon. She coils and dances spitting fire from her mouth. As a sphere, circle or spiral her body, enraged, spits fire and blood. The smoke from her breath makes for indescribable images, coiling into themselves, in colours and shades never seen. The vision lasts the length of a breath. Looking over the ranges, the vision disperses itself. The murmurs of water, the warmth of the sun take over. An eagle crosses the sky, too quick for any image to be made.

The most vital comment I would like to make about Sandra Lahire’s films lies not in her films alone, but rather in her embodiment of the snake as vital energy, radiant rage, mingling with the earth. This is the force of her work and the greatest contribution for the recent history of moving images in its discreet and firm effort to prevent cinema from being an art of extinction, to being an art of livelihood, rage, chaos and invention — an art of the dragon.

Brasília, January 2021

3 Voice-over in Serpent River (1989).