Six hours and 30 minutes upriver from Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state Amazonas, we reach our destination: a once-glamorous town, now abandoned and infested by fire ants. The only inhabitant is a Japanese man. Soap opera blasts from a TV in his hut as he explains how one should unfold a hammock to avoid the ants. At 10pm the power generator shuts off, leaving only darkness and the progressive myth of the Amazon – a populated forest connected by drones and long-distance technology that lives as a dream-resource reservoir for the dream of preservation itself.
In the morning our expedition into this technological environment continues. Moments of an Indian shaman wearing a sleeveless Panasonic t-shirt intertwine alongside tourist-friendly swimming with dolphins and a gigantic river filled with trash. The notion of natural resources and how gate-cities operate is renewed by Manaus’ dedication to religious processions and its belief in Santa as a valued asset.
Inspired by a non-linear view of reality in shamanism and an increase in ADHD patients, Shahaf Blumer designs a clinic in Manaus whose space addresses the notion of psychedelic as a form of treatment. As an alchemist and mad scientist Stefan Jovanovic recreates the call of rain and floods in the Amazon basin. Utilising people as participants he generates a sonic environment that reverberates in the slow burn of an instrumental totem. Alvaro Fernandez fever dreams of beaming the Amazon Theatre broadcast to his ‘Digital Operas of the Amazon’ at the Royal Geographical Society in London. In a desolate ant-infested city northeast of Manaus, Gordon Gn Guanlian designs a blood bank outpost that operates as a node-giving lifeline to humans in need of transfusions.
What is a resource? If the alchemical world operated as proto-science in its confusing clash of obscurantism and truth, would preservation be a proto-environmental phase? A transition stage? A moment of shift? If so, it is necessary to re-search for what the bricks and mortar of this transformational world could become.
Unit Staff
Nannette Jackowski
Ricardo de Ostos
Thanks to our visiting critics
Manuel Jiménez García
Apostolos Despotidis
Chryssanthi Perpatidou
Giles Bruce
Javier Castañón
Mollie Claypool
Oliver Domeisen
Laura Barbi
Kasper Ax
Marianne Mueller
Gian Luca Amadei
Abel Maciel
Roberto Bottazzi
Nate Kolbe
Charles Walker
Alice Labourel
Yael Reisner
CJ Lim
Tyen Masten
Ellie Stathaki
Alex Kaiser
Alvaro Fernandez
An Operatic act which is shaped after the digitally captured Amazonian Journey
BROADCAST AS A SELF-REFERENTIAL WORLD
The broadcast, not unlike the diary entry, is an articulation of a place that has always subdued any human desire for systematic appropriations. This ‘recording’ is composed by travelling DATA. Its Odyssean journey does not belong to the Amazon any longer, now it is violently cruising the infinitude of channels and entry points provided by the WorldWideWeb; a network of hyper-saturated interfaces known to us as the Internet.
Traditionally, once made visible, the broadcast, which comes from a place lacking of human harmony, is sadly trapped in between a gridded space composed by wired circuits fuelled by electric impulses, then generating images imprisoned in between two glass plates [the computer screen & its interface].
However, now, this Amazonian Broadcast has become interdependent from its Natural origin, It has been filtered digitally. Pixel-organisms are the ones articulating this mad jungle-intelligence the Amazon is constantly displaying the fever-dreamer.
The Amazon exists inside this individual broadcast, a product that due to detachment from its generator, slowly becomes a world for and in itself. A stellar universe unfolding within the flickers of the medium. Operas that once upon a millisecond ago belonged to the harshness of gigantic sepia watered rivers and impenetrable forests. I propose to access, enter this space that the broadcast has created for itself as an Operatic experience, not grounded to the real, but to the impossible, to the ecstatic; to a deeper strata of truth.
The audience of my DIGITAL//OPERAS_from_the_AMAZONAS will be fully immersed into a substance, alien to the one we generally breath in, this will allow them to freely gaze into those portals, that once entered will trace over the journey of the one that is physically struggling to articulate this immeasurable place_fever taking over…now it is being expressed and lived in.an audience,…a fiction, a dream…trance; waterfalls and jungles taking the abstract form of pixel-organisms that have helped the desperado to convey the impossible…an extreme feeling of being burdened by nature was captured as a human product…this captured object(broadcast)contains emotions that have left the realm of the harmonic, they are extreme, hence its access by the spectator should also be extreme, TORRENTIAL.