INSIDE
The black tent
The Black Tent
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The tent functions as a visual mediator, hosting an audience inside that looks out from within it. It is a sealed, controlled vessel that creates darkness within, while a front frame serves as a window to the outside. With this it frames a new reality, while its subject to forces that contemporary art institutions often disconnect from: day, sunset, night, weather, curious passers-by, or the sounds of cars, machines, and howling jackals.
The temporary theater opens a portal to a disturbing and mysterious realm, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. As the images unfold, it transforms familiar landscapes into an immense stage, where the world is a theater and the theater is the world. Unusual creatures lurk in the automatic irrigation systems, everyday people are momentarily cast as leading actors, and industrial areas become nostalgic circuses.
The tent strives to get closer to the real, to break the institutional walls, and look at life itself as it is. It seeks to intensify the poetic and theatrical elements revealed within the newly framed world, creating a different view in its temporary-local fabric with all that it implies.
As an entity, the tent is a traveling performance intended to intervene in urban and rural areas, from the suburbs of the city to the edge of society and nature. It reinterprets mundane spaces and creates a form of moving image with the open sky of an abandoned parking lot, the fields behind the local bar, the foothills of an enchanted mountain, and the very threshold of a vast forest.
The Black Tent, other than being a window to the world revealed outside, is also
a wide-open glance upon the act of watching and being watched - or perhaps the
act of one watching himself being watched altogether. In the frame: nature doing
its thing, and far in the distance, a band getting ready to play.
It frames itself within the spaces of theater, expanded cinema, and moving image, investigating and dissecting their rules and borders. It aims to create a case of cinematic/theatrical/moving image exaggeration to pull apart its rules and explore where the borders of these mediums lie.
The Black Tent draws inspiration from figures such as Guy Debord, James Turrell, and Alexey German. Cinematic elements are used to set the narrative structures in the performance, which are there but perhaps difficult or unintended to be read. The performative actions, in their interventional state rather than clearly readable narratives, allows the audience to forinstance observe nature or the setting as an important character. This gives the opportunity to see the scenes as moving image paintings, blending from one into the other, heavily interrupted by the unexpected events that come with public space.
Furthermore, long-form aesthetic and performative motifs are used to destabilize the sense of time, frustration, joy, and even the medium through which the audience is looking. Inspired by the Situationist movement, the performance removes the constant and allows for mundane or unexpected situations to naturally form and even become sublime.
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