COLLIDER

Concept

 

The COLLIDER project works with space-time, science, urbanism and history. COLLIDER examines the iconic places of USA, Russia and Ukraine of C20-21 political history. The film deals with events, which took place in different urban landscapes that had influenced subsequent historical development. This work began in the USA, in Dallas – on the site of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The Collider could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel in time. Under experimental conditions, colliders set quantum particles on collision courses with one another to generate strange matter, anti-matter. Under planetary conditions we set human particles on collision courses that generate accidental matter, violent, discursive, political, ethical matter of great weight. In the film space-time is presented in panorama that consists of 24-60 fragments of moving images, which are revolved with acceleration in an artistic collider, activating a mechanism of audio-visual jumps where certain fragments gradually are substituted by archival videos. COLLIDER is a visual naration about some of the world’s most perilous political flashpoints: Dallas, Texas, USA; Watts area in Los Angeles, site of the LA Riot, the Russian White House, Moscow, site of a 1991 failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in USSR; Independence Square, Kiev, Ukraine, site of 2004-2005’s Orange Revolution events. It is an art that testifies today’s social reality and its traumas. The collider complicates space-time – as do globalised capital, networked communications and the growing contemporary political resistance. How many tipping points do we need before moving to reframe the system?

A collider accelerates two beams of particles that are directed against each other under experimentally controlled conditions, so that the particles collide while flying in opposite directions. This process can be used to make strange and anti-matter. If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher – could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time. Focus of the project revolved in a sector, defined by the vector of «end of history» thesis by Frencis Fukuyama, the ideas about a liberal capitalism as the ideal world settling and vector of doomsday in interpretation by Lars von Trier in «Melancholia». And time is one of the fundamental concepts for physics and philosophy, one of the key co-ordinates of space-time. In the project a fragmented representation of a space-time makes reference to the quantum theory. The crisis in socialist system, followed now by corporate greed and the virtual collapse of capitalism, non-stop wars in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Irak, the Arabic Revolutions, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have all clearly revealed that the now challenged hegemony of the West has been fatally compromised by its unenlightened self-interest. Public space events: the Geumnamno street in Kwangju (South Korea), the Tiananmen Square in Beijing (China), the former Berlin Wall (Germany), WTC memorial in New York (USA), Freedom Square in Tbilisi (Georgia), Paradis Square (now Freedom Square) in Baghdad (Iraq), Mexico City’s Zócalo (Mexico), Fukushima (Japan), Tahrir Square in Cairo (Egypt) and St Paul's Cathedral in London (Great Britain). In fact, the resounding crash of global financial capitalism and spectacular manifestations of discontent all over the world are telling us that the world of unrestrained consumption is already on its deathbed. It is important as an approach in art to certify and record some corporeal feeling of contemporaneity, for sake of the future.

The COLLIDER project, working with the events that have formed our world, raises the question: is a person a particle in the system of accelerators of global forces, or the energy of interaction investigating new values, new forms of thought and new ways of existence in the world – insisting that another world is possible?