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Contemporary flax textile-based

In Canada, flax and linen have deep historical and cultural resonance, especially within Indigenous and settler agricultural traditions. Flax (*Linum usitatissimum*) was cultivated by Indigenous communities long before European contact, not primarily for fiber, but for its nutritious seeds (flaxseed or linseed), valued for their oil and medicinal properties. With colonial settlement, particularly in the Prairie Provinces (Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta), flax became a major cash crop in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not for linen production, but for linseed oil, used in paints, varnishes, and industrial applications. Canada remains one of the world’s largest producers of flaxseed today, though commercial linen fiber production has never been widely industrialized here, due in part to the labor-intensive processing required (retting, scutching, hackling) and competition from global textile markets.

Conceptually, flax and linen in the Canadian context evoke layered themes: resilience, transformation, and entangled ecologies. As a plant that thrives in cool climates and marginal soils, flax symbolizes adaptation and quiet endurance, qualities that resonate with prairie identities and Indigenous land-based knowledge. Linen, as a material historically associated with purity, ritual, and domestic labor (e.g., heirloom linens in settler households), opens up discussions around gendered craft, memory, and intergenerational transmission. Contemporary artists and designers – including those working in textile-based practices – have begun revisiting flax as a site of decolonial inquiry and ecological reparation, experimenting with localized, small-batch linen processing to reanimate dormant agrarian skills and challenge fast-fashion paradigms. For a practitioner invested in alternative temporalities and resistance to algorithmic determinism, flax offers a potent metaphor: a slow, embodied, cyclical process that insists on duration, care, and material specificity, qualities that stand in stark contrast to extractive logics.

  • Fabio Bola
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 39 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 1, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Brazil
  • Country of Filming:
    Brazil
  • Language:
    English
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Fabio Bola

Fabio Mourilhe (Fabio Bola) has a PhD in art from UERJ, a post-doctorate in art from UFRJ, a master's degree in design from PUC-Rio and a degree in web design. He also has a PhD and a degree in philosophy (UFRJ and UERJ).

In 2025, his movie “Burn” received a prize at Yeosu International Web Drama Film Festival, KOREA, it was selected and presented at Imbizo Music Film Fest, and was selected to the Egyptian American Film Fest in New York. Since 2024, he has been producing new productions and curating diverse works in art, video art, and integrated arts, including exhibitions such as "Aion," "Artificial Landscapes," "Anthropozoic Nanovideo," "What I Do Is Music," "Transbólide," "Artificial Nature," "Blind Drawing," "Nature," and others, with Fernando Gerheim, Alex Hamburger, and Franklin Cassaro. He won the audience award for best video art for "Aion" at the MFL 2024, with screenings at CCBB RJ, SP, and Brasília, and Estação Net Botafogo RJ. He was selected for the "Aion" exhibition at the Piccola Arena in Petrópolis in 2025, with Alex Hamburger and Tchello d'Barros. Two video works, "Burn" and "Robot Crab" (with Franklin Cassaro), were selected for the 24th Frame Future Film Fest (2025) in Modena, Italy. Two works were selected for the Hélio Oiticica Municipal Art Center in 2024: "Transbólide" and "O que faço é música" (What I Do Is Music). His video art work "Natureza" (Nature) was selected for the Lift-Off Global Network festival in England and the Morphos exhibition in Venice in 2025. In addition to "Aion," he curated the exhibitions and projects with Franklin Cassaro, "Paisagens Artificiales," "Natureza Artificial," "Desenho Blind," and "Maracatu Intergalactico" (also with Suely Farhi); a group show with several artists based on the work Neuromancer; and a collage exhibition with Regina Pouchan. One work, "Máscara Futurista" (Futuristic Mask), was selected for the cover of the CCBB Brasília website, and his model "Pencil Morph" was promoted on the Civitai website. Some of his works have been featured in group shows, such as "Caranguejo Robô" (Robot Crab) at Galeria Poste in Niterói and "Bird in the Head" (Little Bird in the Head) in the exhibition "Longevidade." In 2025, the Neuro Masters festival (Moscow, Russia) selected the following video art works for screening: Burn, Natureza, Aion, Nanovideo Antropozoide, and Caranguejo Robô.
Latest updates can be found at https://www.instagram.com/fabiobolax/ and https://www.behance.net/magneticstudiobr

- In the late 1990s, he began developing work with flash animations and their expansions through javascript. The technological resources available with these tools allowed him to create works that are close to both design and art. In this context, we have Cinepoemas (2006 and 2023) with the writer Fernando Gerheim, animations on typography for Magnetic Records, animated websites based on artistic works (on a painting by Malevich, for example), websites with animations for Ziraldo (Eternet website), various animations for Alexandre Perlingeiro (Dakshina Tantra Yoga), animations for the text of designer Luli Radfahrer (Cyberparnasianismo) and animations on comic strips.

- Recently, at the end of the 2010s, he began developing educational videos for music lessons, with scores that move in parallel with the musical sequence and with the action of the hands playing the pieces on the piano. For music, he also began developing video clips mixing real images and animation for the Hipecirco and Fabio Bola X projects.
- In 2023, he began using image generation and image sequence resources to create videos through Stable Diffusion Deforum installed on the Google Colab notebook or simple SD on Automatic 1111, Runaway Gen 2.0, Leonardo AI, Seaart with ControlNet and Wombo Dream.

- He is co-author of the book Philosophy of art, which provides a specific space for audiovisual (cinema); and the chapter “Beyond formalism”, which discusses cinema, phenomenology and Jean Luc Godard.

- His doctoral thesis in art, “Expressibles, sensations and expressivities in comics at the end of the world”, uses some concepts that Gilles Deleuze used in Cinema 2: Time-image, such as crystal-image and pure optical image; and in Cinema 1: Movement-image, such as the northern line. He also works with other concepts specific to cinema, such as the sequence shot, and addresses the aesthetics of German expressionist cinema; relationships between comics, video games and cinema; relationships between cinema, futurism and surrealism in the dream-image; events between comics frames and Michelangelo Antonioni; and theoretical comparisons between the disnarrative in cinema and comics.

- In his article “Simulated make-believe games: reality and fiction in comics”, we use concepts from the cinema of Epstein, Pasolini and Jean Rouch to think about comics.

- In his article “Aesthetics of violence in comics”, we discuss silent film and adaptations of superheroes from comics to cinema. - In his article “Grotesque in Comics: Considerations on a Bakhtinian Bias”, we have an exposition of the parodies of cinema produced by Mad Magazine and the graphic experimentation of cinema foreseen in comics.

- In his book “The Frame in Comics”, we have comparisons between the framing of comics and cinematographic practice.- In his article “Milo Manara: An Adventure in the World of Eroticism”, we have analyses of the joint work between Frederico Fellini and Milo Manara.
- In his article “Ontology of (Mass) Art in Comics”, we have an analysis of certain aspects of the transposition of comics to cinema.

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