Битеф
Fighting against the domination of official history, determined explorers would nevertheless always find a way to discover traces of personal histories, those that would reveal new facts on the hierarchy of significance and sense of events in a certain period, thus becoming parts and particles of a mosaic of parallel history/ies. This was so until recently. If one imagines from the presentday perspective the forensic investigation that some future detective-archaeologist would have to perform on the sample of our reality, one might also imagine a somewhat different outcome: exposed to acceleration and expansion, the lives of today's individuals remind more and more to a delirium thick with excessive drives, unrealistic dreams, unfulfilled desires, burning ambitions and even more burning frustrations. They are similar to an ailing tissue, helpless in its efforts to resist the furious metastasising of everyday life. Even personal information succumbs to the overall inflation of information, while the personal time for processing them disappears by geometrical progression,The paradox is almost painful: there have never been more opportunities for recording and distributing personal views of reality; yet there has never been less possibility for them to become relevant, inflation of information + time déficit = entropy of relevance criteria and sensible substance. Amid this diabolic equation, how should one shape his/her personal history - one that, in the sum of a multitude of personal histories, provides with utmost certainty a different view on an époque - so that its criteria overcome this entropy? The price paid for seeking an answer to this question is not lower than the one paid by Franz Kafka who sought to find answers to this and similar questions. The trilogy process_city, inspired by Kafka's Trial, is an endeavour of Shadow Casters to speak of this question through Kafka's work (paying an adequate price naturally comprised) from at least 3 different viewpoints and in a nonchronological sequence. Thus the third part of the trilogy was at the same time the first to be realised as a synthetic interpretation of the entire corpus of Trial on the crossroads of two media - theatre and film - submitted to multiple live editing spanning from VJ'ing to spectator's gaze. Having the Parable on the Law as its starting point, the second part. Ex-position, opens the gate of journeys into personal histories and the subconsciousness of The Other through a series of one-on-one encounters that promote spectators into sensators, exchanging their institutionalised passivity for compassion, exposing them to public view in moments of their utmost dedication to the intimate, offering them also a bird eye's view of the situation lived moments earlier, all this accompanied with the possibility for the sensator to pass through all positions, stories and phases. At the end of the trilogy, which is in fact it's beginning, stands Vacation From History, which tackles directly the mentioned question. Behind the transparent title there hides an onyric voyage through a kafkaesque day yet deprived of clichés on kafkianism and even on history. Kafka's metaphysical distance that deprives the tragic dimension of pathos in a humorous manner consists of a paradoxical blend: on the one hand, the categorical rejection of the imperative to leave a mark for eternity; on the other hand, the cheerful complying with the imperative if it proves to be truly inescapable. Indifference towards history makes it irrelevant in a way that preserves the relevance of personal experience. From this perspective, personal experience travels through time and space by unrecorded trails, leaving its trace as a view that inevitably alters that, which is being observed; as a thought that, spoken or not, alters that, which is being reflected upon; as an emotion that gives birth to a tone
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VACATION FROM HISTORY