Echoes of A Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos)
2014- present
A live and video performance suite imagining our world in a future timeline which covers 1500 years. The landscape of this future world - its denizens, artifacts, and culture - provides both a site for considering new realities and alternative histories, unfettered by the current social order, while serving as a distorted lens aimed at our present in keeping with the tradition of dystopian science fiction. Though interested in the possibilities for liberation that lie for those of us oppressed under capitalist systems and the violent organizational frameworks of race, class, and gender, this work is seeded with ambivalence about what possibilities lie on the other side of ecological decline for our species.
The piece is scored by original music ranges from long form experimental scores to reworkings of pop songs originally in English which are translated into Spanish and radically changed to reveal abstract timelines and narratives from within this speculative fiction. These songs are scored by XUXA SANTAMARIA, my music project with Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland.
The performance BILONGO LILA: Nobody Dies in a Foretold War is a live synthesis of the scores, movement and stories from the Echoes universe.
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Stills from Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) Livel 8: COOERPOH A COOERPOH, 2016-2017
Once a god, having achieved the singularity, the yt man RayKay_16 is now an irradiated pariah and seeks to be mortal again at any cost.
Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) Livel 8: COOERPOH A COOERPOH and The Kingdom is Me (left) as installed at Southern Exposure, 2017. (images by Phil Maisel)
Selections for SIGILOS, pigment prints on silk
Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) Liveles 5-7
Three apparitions based on cargo cult inspired interpretations of Santeria's Orishas conjured up to examine the role of myth-making and spirituality during times of duress.
Livel 5: La Irmanda’ Thel Glaci
Livel 6: OxúmOxosi
Livel 7: Las Saturnales
Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) Liveles 1-4
Performances in order of appearance Echoes 1-8: Sofía Córdova, Bebe Huxley, Tyler Holmes, Cristina Victor, Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland, Patrick Hillman, Gary Walker, Saturn Risin9, Elvi Barrigan, Alexandra Buschman aka Sandy Sleeper, French Clements, Nic Feliciano, Adee Roberson, +Las Sucias (Danishta Rivero Castro + Sandy Sleeper)