Friday 5 December at 7PM, Performance directed by Dafna Maimon
Address: Second Line Stages, Digital Cinema. 800 Richard Street
In collaboration with New Orleans Film Society
Tickets: Free
A video program presenting the new live video Other Odyssey and short film The She The Same by Dafna Maimon, accompanied by the teaser of Lindsay Lawson’s new feature film The Smiling Rock.
Other Odyssey is a live video by artist Dafna Maimon. Set in a cinema it rethinks the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey from the perspective of the matriarchal Bonobo primate, humans closest relative and the only being on the planet that practically eliminated violence from her society. Other Odyssey fantasises about returning to that moment depicted in the film when the early human apes realise that a bone could be used as a weapon and tool for oppression or dominance, and proposes an other use for it, a use more in line with the affective and sensual lifestyle of the Bonobo’s.
The She The Same (2014, 20 min.) is a part of a bigger homonymous project including a performance and artefacts, in which the experience of our “true other” is set parallel to phantom limb pain. By looking back at mythologies in which each human was once separated from his or her “other half” in the beginning of times, this “lost other” could be considered to be a phantom limb or body. This research project, developed with the help of a neuroscientist, explores the way in which we construct our own bodies and those of our lovers. Simultaneously the idea of a double body or our true other half is a convenient tool for the production of expectation, desire and the romantic industries such as the capitalist ventures that profit from societal construct of romance and love.
Dafna Maimon (FIN/IS, b.1982, lives in Berlin) works with film, video, and performance. Her work explores human drama and the construction of the self through invented autobiographical characters that battle with the configuration of individuality, alienation, the body, and the perception of reality. Her films showcase the economy of close personal ties as well as to materialise through them, placing value on the idea of community on a grassroots level. Equally central within Maimon’s practice is the research and employment of the constructs of cultural artefacts such as cinema, TV, theater and science.
Other Odyssey is supported by the Finnish arts promotion center TAIKE