It’s Already Happened, We’re Just in the Past imagines a thick present where bodies are suspended together in a prolonged jolt. In this unstable moment of crisis, time and physics become liquid, speculative, vulnerable materials: a boulder hurtles through time, we grow an exoskeleton, a building sheds its skin.
Working in collaboration, artists and time-travelers, Emily Parsons Lord and Shan Turner Carroll, draw from the temporal logics of cinema, geology and science fiction to create an installation that unfolds across several days activated by live performances and live sound score by Evelyn Ida Morris.
This work asks ‘in this moment of collapse, how do we fall safely, together?’ This new work lingers in this suspended jolt, when wordlessness and disorientation unyoke the boundaries between fiction and reality, so that time-travel, shape shifting, and portal crossing are possible.
This new work presents a slow-motion, looping, accumulating, durational experimental fight-dance using body-assist apparatus and analogue film effects scripted onto the gallery walls to illustrate a suspended unstable moment of crisis.
Film-craft allows us to examine disaster in close detail over time, and from physical safety. To watch, pause, and watch again, to appreciate the beauty of the spectacle, or the narrative of the occurrence, capturing what usually takes a shocking thunderous moment where adrenaline can hijack thought. This project seeks to expand the edges of the thunderous moment in a live performance, and dwell on the act of watching. Shifting to a geological or cosmic time scale, our thunderous moment is a suspended, prolonged jolt.
Using body-assist effects borrowed from film-craft, the artists’ achieve improbable movement, creating a space where time and physics are queer: it repeats, accumulates, loops. The fight-dance uses the spectacle of destruction of the gallery to examine the destabilising experience of witnessing and living-within multiple crises.
