Competition 3: Feeling OK, I Guess

40-year old Irma goes on a vacation to an all-inclusive resort. Soon after her arrival she realizes the place is meant for young families. Irma has to find her own place in this holiday paradise.

Love punch love.

REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan “We won’t go back” is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court’s decision.

No. 28 is a film version of the animation installation composed of the fading remains of the director’s childhood memories without overt or linear narrative structure. The hand-drawn animations of fragmentary memories with different temporal, spatial, and narrative qualities suspend the chronological development of events and their immediate interpretation. The perception of No. 28 is kinaesthetic, which depends on walking between projections in the gallery space or moving the eyes between frames on the film screen. Through the back-and-forth movement between discrete pictures, their concepts blend into each other, revealing the memory of innocent childhood life in a remote, peaceful environment against the surrounding political affairs of post-revolutionary Iran.

By projecting our sense of self into intangible, conceptual representations while neglecting our transparent senses, we are risking becoming disembodied, two dimensional. In our virtual worlds we may be gaining certain kind of freedoms, but at the same time we are sacrificing the profound depth of human experience, one that is fundamental to our wellbeing, as previous examples showed us. In our obsession to chase “other worlds”, we are choosing a voluntary exile from the flesh of reality, enamoured instead with surface and appearance. Floating in cyberspace, we are becoming lost, disoriented, no longer fully active agents enmeshed in the fabric of reciprocity, responsibility and interaction, enacted on our common ground. Our pain may be reduced but so is our joy. The more disembodied our world becomes the less meaningful it is. With our diminishing sensory skills, we are simultaneously weakening our ability to access our own emotional worlds, thus also losing our ability to understand and empathise with each other.

The lovingly compiled collection of shells, the life’s work of Maria Cândida Consolado Macedo, comes to life in a rhythmic ritual of hand-processed 16mm footage and trancelike sounds of capiz shells.