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TRANS-CAPITAL

Trans-architecture, or Moving Monuments, is a trans-gender, -cultural and -national performative practice of critique on systems of oppression used by human, animal and environmental rights activists at sites of memories and monuments celebrating these systems of oppression. 

 

The stone architecture becomes a ritual space where the performing body and mind, in a fluid state, are reinstated as the Trans-capital, the main site of oppression, memory, critique and liberation.

 

Trans architecture uses a similar ritual framework to rites of passages and spirit possessions to safely guide the performer through an intensive and intrusive ritual generating critical reflection, critical life choices or solving life crises. 

 

Trans-architecture ignites a phase of liminality or fruitful chaos from which new medicines, visions, perspectives, identities, realities, and futures emerge. Chaos is the prelude to healing.

 

Trans architecture provokes the self-revealing spirit and awakes the self-revealing new ego.

 

Life is structured by the paradigm of healing.

NOTES ON THE SOUNDSCAPE

I developed the soundscape of Trans-Capital during 5 improvisation sessions while watching the images of the ritual.

The soundscape aim at densifying every air molecule in the ritual space in order to create a mould around all human bodies. It creates a dens infrastructure of human flesh, an organic based social and spatial architecture disconnected from the concrete and iron architecture. This act of dissociation from an oppressing mega infrastructure that serves Capitalism, reveals a self-sufficient organic system where the human body and mind is reinstated as the Trans-Capital, the true epicentre of life and change.

Production: John K Cobra Institute of Videoartfacts with the support of Calouste Gulbekian Foundation Paris 

Concept, direction, editing and soundscape: Roland Gunst / John K Cobra

Performer: Smangaliso Ngwenya 

This research is also inspired by the works of Prof Koenraad Stroeken and Prof Johan Lagea from the University of Ghent.

 

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