Ricardo Yui is a Peruvian-born Visual Artist and Filmmaker living and working between Lima (PE) and Amsterdam (NL).
He holds the Master of Arts degree from École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles ENSP (FR).
His projects and films have been produced and supported by institutions such as Institut Français (FR), CulturesFrance (FR),
CentroCentro (ES), Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst AFK (NL), and Programa Ibermedia (ES). The National Film Fund DAFO (PE) has awarded
him twice. In 2018, with the Short Film Award for CONTINUIDAD ; and in 2020 with the Production Grant for Feature Film for DEVENIR.
Having produced, written and directed five short films, his work has been internationally exhibited and screened by places
such as the 23rd Festival de Cine de Lima (PE) ; 4th Beijing International Short Film Festival BISFF (CN) ; CC Conde Duque (ES) ;
Seoul Photo Festival (KP) ; Lishui Photo Festival (CN) ; Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento BIM (AR) ; ICPNA (PE) ; Casa de América (ES) ; CentroCentro (ES) ;
MusraraMix Festival (IL) ; de Brakke Grond (NL) ; Les Rencontres d’Arles (FR) ; Itaú Cultural (BR), and Musée du quai Branly (FR).
Nowadays, Ricardo develops his first feature film project, DEVENIR, which is the story of a group of uprooted people seeking the progress of modern life.
CV (en) (es)
DOSSIER (en) (es)
LA COSTA VERDE photo series
During the decline of the West, the Mother Culture lost the control of its own destiny. Yorgos is a Greek homeless man stuck in a monotone life, when a trip to the old ruins wakes him up.
After finding some pieces of the broken Europe on his way back, he sets the fire to offer a second chance.
Das Neue Athen (The New Athens) is a fictionalised document which tells a story of second chances and redemption.
Following the so-called Greek debt crisis and its consequences since the early 2010's, I decided to make this film
as a possible answer to the Present time, in which the European Project seems to be in a clear decline.
This film is political in its particular way. Not from explaining the necropolitical agenda of the neoliberals,
nor their punishment methods; but by constructing a plot in which the character (a homeless person),
the title (in German language) and the coins (the Euro as a currency), are all of them clues to imagine
the reason related to the very last defeat.
Faust wants to develop the city. Theodor is looking to govern the territory. They both have a different vision, but non of them will stop until turn everything on ruins. To destroy and smash is the path to make dreams come true.
Orthodoxie et Orthopraxie is a short film in which the act of destruction is simultaneously seen as a gesture of modernisation and war. The violent demolition of a house in Lima is set as a scale evoking the renovation of the whole city.
Cesar drowned, he doesn't know it. A geometric form in the centre of the city is the starting point of a path leading to improbable places. Cesar must find a new place in the World.
Continuidad (Continuity) is a short film about death and redemption in which, through a spiritual journey, the character experiences the center and the periphery of the city as if both places would be mutually contained by each other.
In the outskirts of Jerusalem, standing on the edge of the Green Line, with an Israeli settlement
in the background, and over the ruins of a small Palestinian village, this film begins by attributing to paper
a poetic -almost magical- function. Paper is the support of the written word, the one related to the memory, as well as to the law of Man and to the law of God.
It Never Pours but It Rains is composed by a flow of images that intertwine a performance
with a happening. The first is an evocation of paper as the law, as a tyrant power oppressing a group of people, from whom
a powerful -almost impossible- body gesture is asked to get redeemed. While in the second, paper
is evoked as a fragile piece of memory resisting the disappearance. In this action, a sheet of paper
is left on a random sidewalk in Tel Aviv, while water drops make slowly vanishing the name of a
Palestinian village massacred during the Nakba (al-Dawayima).
With belief and hopefulness in the progress, certain human and mechanical gestures join a precarious process of modernisation. Despite the useless of their actions, that process is seen as an epic journey, as an exciting anthropocentric adventure that transforms simultaneously the territory and ourselves.
Under the form of a visual essay, Entropía Limeña (Lima Entropy) evokes a flow of contradictions in which the city and the landscape are spaces in constant transformation and in permanent evolution. In the context of the late awakening of a city to the vertical line, this vision defines the territory as a theater of choreographies that is fed by the human effort. Body gestures are the raw material of the change and the transformation of the world.