Feasting Fools at the Foot of the Mountain
Oct 19-Oct 31, 2020
ONLINE EXHIBITION
Feasting Fools Closing Zoom Performance
& Online Dance Party:
FRIDAY, Oct 30, 8pm-late PST
*View recording of online event HERE!
Participating Artists
Click below to explore and view works in the exhibition on the individual artist pages
Didactic Statement
Feasting Fools at the Foot of the Mountain is a route to explore the absurd, the unreasoned, and the sideways approaches to human life. From October 19 to 31, we present audio, graphic, and video artworks that engage in magic, ritual and imagination. Toying with the ideas of fortune, the tarot, manifesting abundance, ‘Instagram witches’, and consumption, we begin to ask — what can magic offer us in our current political moment? Is belief in the unbelievable just what we need?
In this exhibition we aim to situate magic in our lived world by asking how it can feed us. How does magic nourish? How does magic harm? Can it be used as a method to practice unlearning?
The exhibition concludes with a live performance artwork and digital dance party over Zoom on October 30, 2020 from 8:00pm-10:00pm PST. The performance is followed by a cyber dance party hosted by Society Visual Music, with a DJ set by Eliobeth Aguilar Vazquez and visuals by Mia Glanz. This will be an opportunity to bring together our research creations, and your concerns and revelations into a fun, critical, and magical time!
Society Visual Music is the artistic collaboration between Eliobeth Aguilar Vazquez and Mia Glanz, based out of Mexico City. The project combines the mediums of electronic DJ set and video installation, for the purpose of creating a new and immersive experience out of collections of familiar materials. Society Visual Music broadcasts live on the last Thursday of each month. It begins at 9:00pm Mexico City time.
Tune in to their monthly Livestream at:
https://www.facebook.com/eliobeth
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjTSo0YZXmmrMmtwO665NA
Director's Note
Feasting Fools at the Foot of the Mountain begins by referencing the 1973 surrealist fantasy ‘The Holy Mountain’ by Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky. The film follows the journey of ten characters who decide to embark on a spiritual quest towards the Holy Mountain where they will encounter mystics who grasp onto the secrets of enlightenment. Led by the thief, who represents the Fool card in tarot, this group of eccentric characters undergo various trials leading towards enlightenment. Once they pass enough of these trails, the group comes to the foot of the Holy Mountain. There, they are sidetracked by the Pantheon Bar where others, who have abandoned their spiritual journeys, engage in hedonistic pleasures of consumption, party, and poetry. The climbing of the Holy Mountain is revealed as a ruse - the mystics are dummies and the mountain is a mountain.
The Fool card in tarot is symbolic of fresh beginnings, exciting new potentials, and the wonderment of the unknown. The Fool indicates an urgency to leap into new adventures, and explore the revolutionary potential that faith in the unknown carries. The artists in the exhibition embody the Fool card -- they explore the usages of manifestation, fortune telling, and introspection as a form of sustenance in a time where intimacy is challenged by isolation. These Fools invite viewers to have fun, explore, and play with the magic of their lives.
However, when the Fool card is reversed, it offers up a warning. The reversed Fool indicates fear of the unknown, recklessness, and misguidance. The Fools ask how magic can sustain us, but they are also considering how faith in magic can be ungrounding, or emptying. The show critically analyzes ‘new-media spirituality’, which has gained popularity on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Through jest and hyperbole, the Fools poke at the dangers of this spoon-fed spirituality. They begin to consider where the spiritual can go sideways -- where it can be co-opted by the logics of capitalism from which it is meant to free us.
Feasting Fools at the Foot of the Mountain oscillates between the upright and reversed Fool, it explores the region between the states of wonderment and caution. If magic can offer us potential to revolt against the linear logic of capitalism, what are the dangers of letting it take us elsewhere? What is lost in the translation of spiritual practises to the contemporary moment?
When we reach the foot of the mountain, do we faithfully climb? Or reverse back like a fool?
Watch Recording of Feasting Fools Closing Zoom Performance & Online Dance Party:
FRIDAY, Oct 30, 2020 8pm-late PST