Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Performance arts, music, film, drama and literature, creative expressions presented on the world stage seeking earth balance, harmony, dissonance, abstraction and concept.
Austrian media artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has custom-built a record player that is able to “play” cross-sectional slices of tree trunks. The result is his art piece “Years,” an audio recording of tree rings being read by a computer and turned into music, much like a record player’s needle reads the grooves on an LP.
Walkabout, vision quest, walking in Dreamtime, all of it refers to a particular rite of passage from the indigenous Australians, but also in evidence in animist cultures throughout the world. The 1971 film of the same name narrates a young woman and her brother’s journey beyond their Western frame, but never quite able to follow the ancestor paths, or songlines, of the land.
We celebrate the late Colombian magical realist Gabriel García Marquez, exploring some of the highlights from his Nobel Prized Literary career.
Paul Gauguin, the bourgeois-turned-bohemian artist who left France for Tahiti, reveals a darker, almost menacing mythological vision, in contrast to his exploitative picture-postcard fantasy-native Polynesian paintings for which he is known. The exhibition continues at MoMA in New York until June.
Apart from articulating a debate on race and rhythm, black nationalism and the urban struggle in the 1950s US, the 1959 experimental film “The Cry of Jazz” shows cosmic philosopher and Afro-futurist Sun Ra during his Chicago period.
Jorge Luis Borges forged into the realm of literary magic, he led his readers down through the Garden of Forking Paths, wandering the red and tranquil labyrinths in Elegy, growing old in so many mirrors, seeking in vain the marble gaze of statues, compiling regrets of a fantastic nature. Watch the BBC profile on him as an elder of strange destiny who had seen nothing, or almost nothing, but the face of a girl from Buenos Aires, a face that does not want you to remember it.
“The Atrocity Exhibition” is J.G. Ballard’s instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualize technology in a dystopian landscape overrun with industrial waste and technological white noise. Watch the piece on Ballard and the Motorcar, that careens across the landscape of his controversial novel, “Crash.”