By: Heidi Kwok, Staff Writer
On October 6, the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre presented Vessels: A Visual Journey Through Latin America’s Open Veins as part of Latin Expressions 2025, a festival celebrating Latin American art and culture during Canada’s Latin American Heritage Month. Vessels is an animated short film, a collaborative effort between two Vancouver-based artists: Cuban-born multimedia graphic designer Yaimel López and Brazilian composer and sound designer Alexandre Klinke. Heavily influenced by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, the film visualizes a haunting, historical account of the continent through the lens of violent colonial dispossession and ongoing resource exploitation.
The film opens on a blank canvas. It wasn’t until short strokes of black paint danced across the background that a white silhouette of the South American continent slowly emerged from the chaos. A single red line proceeds to carve down the empty landscape, splitting into tributaries and forming a fractal pattern reminiscent of a leaf. Here, the name Vessels can be interpreted in two ways. First, it serves as a metaphorical representation for the complex network of conduits that carry the shared flow of colonial legacies uniting Latin America. Second, just as the human vascular system circulates blood to keep us alive, Vessels evokes the centuries of imperialism and its vampiric draining of Latin America’s lifeblood. López’s vibrant and vivid brushstrokes mesh organically with Klinke’s unsettling soundtrack of guitar and percussion instruments, bringing to life abstract depictions of the visceral wounds slit from settler exploitation of resources such as gold, silver, cacao, coffee, rubber, and other precious resources.
Unlike typical animation techniques, where each frame is drawn on separate canvases and combined to create a seamless scene, López works on a single sheet of paper, photographing each stage before layering over new paint strokes to activate the next movement, effectively erasing any physical remnants of what came before. It takes a certain bravado to part ways with your own art in such an intentional yet beautiful manner — destroying the old to make way for the new — and I admired him for that. Despite its short runtime of only eight minutes, Vessels left a lingering impression. The closing scene, in particular, remains deeply etched into my memory. In it, the recurrent motif of the red trail reappears as red gashes that sliced indiscriminately into the plain backdrop, underpinned by an auditory assault of screeching strings worse than nails on a chalkboard. This, for me and the rest of the audience, was the physical rendering of the pains of colonial violence.
The theme of memory lies at the core of López’s art, drawing inspiration from old photographs to capture the past. Vessels revisits the shared memories of colonial trauma, laying bare the unhealed wounds left by this violence. Yet, for many members of the predominantly Latin American audience,
the film’s ending facilitated conversation and quiet reflection, proving collective memory can serve as a form of resistance against further violence.