>>> FUTURE COMMUNITIES



Having been working in different time-based art fields such as performance art, conceptual projects, video performance and experimental film, I am currently in a transitional period where I start to conceptualize larger scale projects wishing to explore the complex interchange between performance art and cinematic language. This has led me to imagine my most ambitious interdisciplinary project to date: FUTURE COMMUNITIES.

Future Communities is a work in progress. This project is divided into 2 chapters:

I. Future Communities / The Name of the Father, In Memoriam (to be filmed in Granada, Spain. August - December 2010)
II. Future Communities / Lost Paradise (to be filmed in Java, Indonesia. May - July 2010)



THE PROJECT IN PROGRESS.

I. Future Communities. The name of The Father, In Memoriam. Installation/Performance/ Video by The Unified Field.

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone is a microcosm. The TAZ in an encampment of guerrilla ontologists. Mysticism has something we need….To rediscover the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band….” Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey.
As the specter of the economic collapse looms, we enter yet another phase in the progression, or some might say regression, of human existence. Perspectives shifts with altered expectations, uncertainty haunts our visions of the distant faraway infinity but certainty pervades our immediacy with guaranteed financial meltdown, a result of the adverse reaction to a century of the burgeoning model of capital. Disintegrating, crumbling, decomposing of an economy reflects not only failed models of finance, but models of society as a whole, of modern civilization as we know with its tendency in a value system that treasures material, capital, strife, poverty and war to love, community, cultural wealth and imagination.
The prevailing climate permeates Future Communities - a living art installation leading eventually to a film, based on an interest in exploring future models of community life and new mental landscapes suggesting a post-human psychological scenario. Existence as creative resistance. One of the ideas this project explores is the notion of pre-oedipal nostalgia, the returning to a pre-lingual stage of development where individuality disappears. This idea is portrayed by the performers´ bodies being covered with a gelatinous substance, seemingly melting unanimously into a unified field of consciousness.


The first part of this interdisciplinary project is composed of :

i - an installation at an expansive wasteland in Granada, Spain:

- an improvised shanty-town made of industrial recycled plastic materials (inspired by different models of community life)
- a goat
- bonfire
- spotlights (green filters)
- a mound of stones
- 1.000 kg of vegan jelly (such as agar agar)

ii - a performance with amateur volunteers from the local community where the performance takes place.
iii - documentation of the project in the form of: website and eventually in a book
iv - HD video (45 min)

SYNOPSIS


Responding to the call of an oracle formed by two Siamese twins, a goat leads us to a strange landscape where some children hurl golden blocks of stone whilst some bodies piles up around a fire are covered with a gelatinous substance.

(This event could close with a ceremonial feast actively implicating an audience which normally remains outside the sphere of contemporary art).



SCRIPT


The action unfolds in three stages within the same space.

Exterior / First Light. The scene is lit by the bonfire and green lights emerging from the ground of the wasteland.
a) Extreme Wide Shot of scene showing general view … Camera gradually closes in on subjects in an elliptical movement. We see some children climbing over a block made up of stone cubes as they begin to demolish the block without speaking. Their behavior and the way that they pass the stones to each other is strangely mechanical (It is not a spontaneous improvised game. They show a serenity which is uncomfortable for the spectator. There is a feeling that they belong to a system, a supra personal intelligence or organism). When the camera gets closer one of them throws a stone violently towards the camera.
……….
b) Twin sisters are tied with chains to a goat walking across the barren wasteland. A strange tension emerges between the seemingly absent sisters and the impulses of the goat, which at times, leads them… Improvised choreography of three. The sisters trip and fall frequently, they get up and carry on walking as if in a trance. As the camera retreats we can see a partially extinguished bonfire in the distance, which they are heading towards…. Beyond, piles of bodies can be made out. They surround the fire. The goat leaves the camera’s field of vision. Elliptical movement of the camera… The twin sisters fall out of view and we see the goat sniffing the embers. From this angle the piled up bodies of the performers can be seen more easily.
……….
c) A group of people, some around the bonfire, form part of a ritual whose logic escapes the spectator…The bodies of the performers, rapt in an unconscious stupor, pile up irregularly… and are covered by a gelatinous substance (such as vaseline) with help from the twin sisters morphing into a continuous fluid mass. The action takes place very slowly over a few hours… little by little a collective body emerges diluting the individual identities…



VIDEO SKETCH (First rehearsal in Pavlikeni, Bulgaria. August 2009)

*This video sketch of the project was filmed in the framework of the Nomadic Village, organized by On The Road Productions in Pavlikeni, Bulgaria, in August 2009.
It was exhibited with the other works produced by the artists during the Nomadic Village residence at Schmiede09 in Hallein, Salzburg (Austria).

Future Communities (Trailer) from umabeecroft on Vimeo.


CREDITS


Director: Marta Moreno Muñoz
Assistant Director: Marc Chia
Cast: Bean, Marc Chia, Emile Sidaraviciute, Martina Dandolo, Christiane Peschek, Rania Grigoriadou, Martin Lukanov,
Alexandrina Georgieva, Gergana Lepoeva, Ralitsa Grigorova, Venkoslava Savova, Vicktoria Heistova, Vili Plamenova.
Sound Design: Marc Chia (aka One Man Nation)
Field Recording: Martin Lukanov
Music: Kirdec
Special Thanks to: Klaus Mähring, Nomadic Villagers, Town of Pavlikeni, Martin Lukanov, Gerald Schober, Schmiede.













































































II. Future Communities / Lost Paradise.

Currently in Yogyakarta (Indonesia), I am working on the pre-production of the second part of the Future Communities project called Lost Paradise as well as co-directing with One Man Nation the collective and experimental art space The UnifiedField which also functions as the production organization of the Future Communities project.
This video is the continuation of Future Communities / The Name Of The Father In Memoriam. It is composed of 3 scenes set in 3 different scenarios in Indonesia.

Below is a short description of each scenario:

a) A central Javanese gamelan song is played over an image of a volcanic crater, The lyrics to this song, showed as subtitles, are taken from the introductory poem in Houellebecq’s ‘The Elementary Particles’ translated into the Javanese language:

“We live today under a new world order…
Now that we have settled by the water’s edge,
And here live in perpetual afternoon
Now that the light which surrounds our bodies is palpable,
Now that we have come at last to our destination
Leaving behind a world of division,
The way of thinking which divided us,
To bathe in a serene, fertile joy
Of a new law,
Today,
For the first time,
We can revisit the end of the old order.”

While we read the subtitles translated to English, appears the image of a defiant woman holding a large stone over her head as if intending to hurl it into the volcano. This scene tries to invoke the idea of the destruction of the old world leading to a new order.
……….
b) The same performer is bathing with wild water buffaloes in a river, in the process, becoming one of them.
……….
c) In this last scene, a group of people are seen laying down on the stones along the confluence of the Elo and Progo rivers. The female performer of the 2 scenes above, covers them with the same gelatinous substance as seen in the 3rd scene from the first part of this project
Future Communites. The Name of the Father, In Memoriam.