Ballroom nominated Apariciones / Apparitions by Carolina Caycedo as the film selection for the 2019 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery, London, AFI is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation.

Caycedo’s Apariciones depicts ghost-like dancers inhabiting the historic Los Angeles landmark, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The brown, black, and queer bodies haunt these iconic and traditional spaces with dance and sensuous movements informed by the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian deity, Oxum, an Orisha (or goddess) representing water and sexual pleasure. The bodies of the dancers, or phantoms, become sources of knowledge, and their gaze holds the viewer accountable, something that is too often missing from history and art; inhabiting historically white spaces in ways that they have never been inhabited before.