Guilherme Proença: Human Trials

Director Guilherme Proença; Photographer Diego Riera; Art director (no art director credited); Stylist Sophia Eden; Designers Bonnetje, Martin Quad.

Guilherme Proença’s Human Trials sits squarely within a practice that treats clothing and posture as research. Shot on 16mm in a Copenhagen archival shop, the film trades runway drama for controlled ritual: garments and objects are read as instruments in a series of tests, and the camera’s tight, voyeuristic gaze turns styling decisions into behavioural data.

That mode of working is deliberate. "Normally, I don’t get to build a universe from scratch in this way in my work. This comes with great freedom and greater responsibility in a way, there is such a thing as too many possibilities." (the director speaking, not the artist)

Proença’s visual world borrows the stillness of 70s performance pieces and the cropped, fetishised details of 90s fashion ads, but it’s neither nostalgic nor decorative. Movement director Eline Slotsdal sculpts near-human poses that make fabric function as prosthetic and constraint; Leonor Arnaut’s atonal score and David Gardener’s drone score the film so image and sound optimise one another. The result is a distinct visual grammar — austere, tactile and rigorous — that advances Proença’s ongoing dialogue between performance, fashion and image-making.

Credits: Director Guilherme Proença; Photographer Diego Riera; Art director (no art director credited); Stylist Sophia Eden; Designers Bonnetje, Martin Quad; Movement director Eline Slotsdal; Editor Sia Thit Tuborgh Solmer; Sound Leonor Arnaut, David Gardener; Producer Madalena Matos.