FUTURE COMMUNITIES.
The Name of the Father, IN MEMORIAM.
A film/living art project by The Unified Field.


Blog in spanish:
www.futurecommunities-sp.blogspot.com

"The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) 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. What then keeps mankind alive?

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 prelingual 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.

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This transdisciplinary project consists of 4 parts:

i - an installation at an expansive wasteland.
A.- an improvised shanty-town made of industrial recycled plastic materials inspired by different models of community life: nomadic, gypsies, travellers, the japanese homeless encampments, the international community in India Auroville...
B.- a goat
C.- bonfire
D.- spotlights (green filters)
E.- a mound of stones
F.- 1.000 kg of vaseline / jelly

ii - a performance with amateur volunteers.

iii - documentation of the work in the form of
- Book
- Making of ... Video
- Website

iv - film.


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SYNOPSIS:



Responding to the call of an oracle formed by two Siamese twins, a goat leads us to a strange landscape ...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 in which the community would be involved, actively implicating an audience which normally remains outside the sphere of contemporary art.

link Future Communities INTRO SOUNDTRACK (by Sigmoon.)
www.umabeecroft.org/osho.mp3

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 eliptical movement.

We see some children climbing over a block made up of stone cubes as they begin to demolish the block without speaking. Their behaviour 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 suprapersonal 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.

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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...

TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE

Theoretically, this project has got many lines of coincidence with the concept of TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE described by Hakim Bey.
www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
http://biblioweb.sindominio.net/telematica/taz.html

"The TAZ is a microcosm. The TAZ in an encampment of guerilla ontologists.
Mysticism has something we need: self -overcoming" exalted awareness, reservoirs of psychic potency, the perception of the marvelousness of everyday life.
We are looking for "spaces" (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open.
The TAZ is "utopian" in the sense that it envisions an intensification of everyday life. Because the TAZ is an intensification, evoking a new prototype of all-potentiality , of continual creation. TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance.
To create a communal artwork disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time. The artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist. Where and when is the world of unmediated creativity?
The TAZ is only possible "time and place" for art to happen for the sheer pleasure of creative play.
Disappearance is not necessarily a catastrophe.
As an image of anarchis society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in convivialitiy and neo-pagan celebration.
The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern.
To rediscover the more archaic and yet ore post-industrial possibility of the band.
The negative refusal of Home is "homelessness" which most consider a form of victimization, not whishing to be forced into nomadology. But "homelessness" can in a sense be a virtue, an adventure.
The positive alternative springs from the realization that life can be happier without the nuclear family, with its attendant oedipal miseries...."

>>>Thanks to Wild Shores to introduce me to TAZ.