BRUTOLOGY.
AN ONLINE ROAD MOVIE
Montserrat Gardó Castillo & Petr Hastik / Design Moritz Simons ©️ 2021
“Brutology. An Online Road Movie” is conceived as a virtual “road movie”, bringing to the fore the aimlessness that characterises cinematic existential road movies. The passengers, however, are no longer young rebels or social outcasts, but 12 spectators who have signed up to participate in an online performance.
We propose a direct link between hypnosis and streets: If all that we psychically perceive but perhaps cannot yet verbalize or bring to consciousness belongs to the subconscious level of the mind, infrastructures form their own subconscious level at the scale of cities, regions, and countries.
As Michael Truscello points out in “Infrastructural Brutalism,” the concrete architecture of roads, dams, or power plants can be directly linked to Brutalism, even if these infrastructures themselves are not conscious of this condition.
The spectators are inserted into a fiction in which they are assigned a role to re-enact different texts and situations. The deep and enticing voice of a narrator, who conducts the whole car journey as a kind of hypnosis session, embodies the fiction and makes the passing vehicles and landscapes seem different, as if they were open to completely different meanings and perceptual possibilities.
The performance ultimately aims to introduce some of the ideas and materials we engage with in “Brutology”: a constellation of ghosts, cosmonauts, rituals, inflatable buildings, and nebulous architectures that we associate with the contradictory aspect of Brutalism between materiality and spirituality.
Following our research on online formats, we would like to develop new pathways for multimedia and digital performances, focusing on online perception and attention, and proposing new ways of engagement to facilitate the experience of an ubiquitous community.
In addition, we would like to incorporate our recent research on video performances to propose an online work that challenges the live and streaming dimension with pre-recorded images and interprets the online (video) experience as a “time-shaping machine” (Tarkowski).
“Brutology. An Online Road Movie” is also intended as a performative introduction to a site-specific upcoming work (as part of Emscherkunstweg and FFT Düsseldorf): “Brutology”.
In addition, we would like to incorporate our recent research on video performances to propose an online work that challenges the live and streaming dimension with pre-recorded images and interprets the online (video) experience as a “time-shaping machine” (Tarkowski).
“Brutology. An Online Road Movie” is also intended as a performative introduction to a site-specific upcoming work (as part of Emscherkunstweg and FFT Düsseldorf): “Brutology”.
FROM AND WITH
Concept/Artistic Direction/Video: Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Petr Hastik
Narrator: John Rowley / Richard Morgan
Music/Sound design: Nicolás Kretz
Concept/Dramaturgy: Marc Villanueva Mir
Production management: Linda Pilar Brodhag
Costume design/Figure: Marc Aschenbrenner
Technical direction: Jörn Nettingsmeier
A production by Montserrat Gardó Castillo & Petr Hastik in collaboration with FFT Düsseldorf, supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste.
The site-specific performance “Brutology” will take place for the first time on the 3 September 2022 at the Emscherkunstweg in Dortmund-Huckarde. Further performances will take place in cooperation with FFT Düsseldorf on the 28/30 September and 1 October 2022.