My last couple of visits to Cultivamos Cultura in Alententejo have stirred my cinematic imagination and with the encouragement of certain desperados - all prominant artists and thinkers working at the intersection of art and biology, I have begun to work on a bio-western. It's a sub-genre of a sub-genre, a thrilling deritivitive of spegetti westerns but with a renegade biologic artistic bent, it positions bioart actions alongside a series of western pastiches and tropes, choreographies of bodies withinin the enironment inspired by western.
During my last visit to Cultivamos Cultura in May this year I made some small photographic studies with the help of Adam Zarestsky, Blu Zarestsky, Marie-Pier Boucher and Jamie Ferguson, ostensibly for location research but it quickly manifested into something else and elsewhere yet to be taxonomically catogorised.
The Alentejo Bio-western is a whimsical and astutely rigourous project, increasingly being informed by the desperados themselves and the typical velocity that seems to imbue projects conceived and realised at Cultivamos Cultura.
Marie-Pier Boucher suggested it be an 'endless film' borrowing from architect Frederick Kiesler's 'endless house' concept, allowing it's genesis and forms to become an elastic process, defined by what is pragmatic and possible and undefined by not being bound by production values, technology, narrative or funding.
The next phase of production will be during Cultivamos Cultura's annual summer school this July, the school is under the tutelage of Marta de Menezes and Marie-Pier Boucher as well as artist in resident Adam Zaretesky inputting and they've made the bio-western part of this years syllabus. So I expect us to take our pipette guns into the landscape amist the non-human ecologies where we will squint and cast long shadowns in long silences in the relentless sun. We will be sweaty and grubby and out of vengence, we will live and die and die and live, as we create maverick biologic enquires.
Current reading Place of Dead Roads, William S. Burroughs.
Current watching Antônio das Mortes
