The puppet theater reminds us about our over- automated perception: we are shown a piece of paper, but we see all kinds of different things: a person, an ocean, a chair, a package of cigarettes. This is how we walk through our life, how we perceive ourselves and our surroundings. In this digital puppet theater show, we try to question the systems of perception and language through an imaginary stay on the island psathoura.
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Encountering someone who actually witnessed the deserted Island is an additional layer of protection for the observer to not spoil the desertedness of their imagination. When the isolated witness shares its contemplation of her/his experience, the thoughts translated into language create and form a reality that separates itself from its origin.
In the exhibition, what you are looking at are TV screens that show a projection moving paper objects and projected videos within the puppet theater space. They are embedded into a wall with two sides: the front, where you can look at all the material of the projects (videos, scenographies, booklets), and the back, from which you approach, showing you the constructed part: wood, the theater boxes, cables of the TV's and speakers, weight to hold the structure. One of the scene objects, a paper chair, is up-scaled and brought into the exhibition site.
Program booklet
play this while reading the booklet
The deserted island is a singular and disconnected space, a theatrical space, and everything that happens here almost inevitably condenses into stories, into chamber plays in the middle of nowhere, into literary material.
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The deserted island is a body without organs. It is an “egg before the formation of the organism”, the pure becoming of the body. Disorganizing its organism - internal structures - and removing its context - the relation to the self - allows the body to become. Societal delusions and frames that are placed on individuals can now be detached, and so an undefined space with characteristics of in-between allows the rethinking of concepts which are crucial in a world of categorization and automatization of routines.
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All of the images of the deserted island are of course originated only in our imagination. Because of that, the deserted island is a space that should not be visited by the human if it wants to preserve the idea of a deserted island. The human as an observer that keeps distance from the context transforms the island into a stage, a plateau, where elements are not subjected to an external plan of organisation, but rather stay in an abstracted state of reorganization.
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In the theater, the production is not only shaped by the actors, but also by the light, the music, the stage, the venue it is performed in, the program book that accompanies it, the mood of the spectator, the quality of the seating. Although they are all ›actors‹ and play a crucial part in the performance most of them however are neglected, or understood as subordinate or servile to the human actions. In the puppet theater however, it is different: While looking human, puppets actually are not, so what you see there are always those actors, which live only through the imagination of the spectator: things.
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In reality we project ideas and systems on things and bodies we see, eager to find titles, blending out what's underneath: the material. By projecting moving images on white paper in the puppet theater we try to exploit this prolongation of perception to find what may lay underneath the surface. Sometimes the projection finds difficulty in matching with its designated object and so new space emerges.
The collage as a visual and literary language is a tool that allows us to re- arrange parts of systems, change their hierarchy and create new ways to perceive.
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