Toxicfest 2021

About

Festival program

1. TERMINAL SPACE

Terminal space s a serialized film directed by the artist group Kotz, and is composed of works submitted by the curated selection of artists for the group show Maman.

BabenShin, Borsos Lorinc, Guillermo Ros, Helin Sahin, Ian Bruner, Jennnital, Biyavili, Juan Covelli, Kajta Novitskova, L3X Shemanski, Most Dismal Swamp, Poncili Creacion, Andri Schatz, Plague, Rolf Nowotny, Tadpole Origin+ Valerie You, Torre Alain, Virtue Village and Matt Hanson.

Directed by: Kotz 
Narrated by: Torre Alain, Valerie You, Jennnital
Screenplay written by: Ian Bruner 

An unnamed narrator is sent to the site of a toxic lake to find a water rights lawyer who has gone missing. Each artist's work is woven into the plot of the film. Through the process of the cut-up, the film becomes a polyvocal narrative, narrated by three individuals that are one. As the search proceeds one mystery leads to another mystery, to another mystery....everything is erased and replaced, and erased and replaced. The film focuses on possible futures of current malignant trajectories, a time that comes after a space of non-remembrance, of forced forgetting, of erasure. Terminal space’s meaning becomes evident throughout its process and arrives at its exact moment.

2: GENESIS

The GENESIS project began as an offsite exhibition installed at the polluted banks of Kayu Ara river: a found image pool was worked into collaborative collages, finally evolving into an offsite which staged them as efflorescence taking form over the unseen totality of global logistics, like divine rubbish. This visual flotsam and jetsam emerges as excess signification to surplus production, overcoded visual compressions repressed by a world it renders palpable.

GENESIS: REMEMBRANCE enters the terminal space in a hallucinatory sequence with the aim of narrativizing this drive towards overcoding, simulated as a kind of divine self-negation, achieved through the exhaustion of the infinite. Footage taken during the installation process is cross-referenced with events in the producers’ memories and phone archives, cut up with parallel narratives from popular culture and found media. The result is presented as a hallucination that does not cease even after desire is demonstrated as a coincidence between memory and verisimilitude. The audience is reminded to forget that film is an archival medium - are we left with hierophany?

Directed by: Valerie You
Graphics: Kaspar Sczech
Additional script, sound, and footage: Torre Alain, Rasheed Mirza

2. MUTANTS OF READINESS: DIRECTOR'S CUT

Kostis Stafylakis & Theo Triantafyllidis ft. Joshua Citarella

MUTANTS OF READINESS is a new chapter in the Readiness SAGA, a serialized simulation of social conflict in the US. Kostis Stafylakis and Theo Triantafyllidis, alongside a shifting synthesis of collaborators, tailor real and fictional, often scary and fringe, collective identities to a clandestine world permeated by fantasy aesthetics and hopepunk trash. Readiness foreplays the pending scenarios of an upcoming American Civil War. It playfully enacts the conflict between groups such as the “Preppers” (the cult of doomsday enthusiasts who marshal for the “end of the world as we know it”), the “Boogaloo Bois” (Civil War accelerationists, flexing tactical gear and Hawaiian shirts), and the “Golden Horde” (the alleged criminal horde of the unprepared citizens featured in preppers’ jargon and literature). The Readiness SAGA was initiated by Kostis Stafylakis, Theo Triantafyllidis, and Alexis Fidetzis in the framework of ENTER by Onassis Foundation (2020).

TOXICFEST is organized by Underground Flower and Rhizome Parking Garage