Spicy AI

The world replaced six thousand phones this morning. All of them are burning in Agbogbloshie, in the heart of Accra, where six thousand people make a living stripping copper from what you replaced. They breathe air five times more polluted than what the WHO considers safe. No one keeps track of what they die from. He lives there. And while everyone else scavenges for weight, he searches for the part that still works. With a washing machine motor, laptop batteries, and spliced wires, he raises a streetlight in the middle of the alley where he lives. That night, for the first time in twenty-two years, the street had light. That's why they found him. Fiction set in a place that exists.

Set in a dystopian Rio de Janeiro, where the urban reality consumes the mental health of those on the periphery. The plot follows a young man who did not choose conflict, but is forced to inhabit it. On screen, the protagonist manifests in simultaneous versions (child and adult), drawing on elements of nature and ancestry to re-enchant a dehumanized world. The visual construction leans into an aesthetic that oscillates between the hyper-realism of urban textures and the metaphorical distortion of a world in collapse, creating an experience that is simultaneously visceral and poetic. Although it visually engages with the urgent themes of our time, the aesthetic of armed conflict functions as a metaphor for the invisible battles each person faces within themselves. The final revelation reframes the entire journey: the war the protagonist moves through does not take place in the outside world, but inside his own mind.