Ludicy: An Evening of Para-Pandemic Liberation
March 20-21, 2021

Experimental Performance Poetry
In Machiavelli World on Mozilla Hubs
https://hubs.mozilla.com/HjUTRce/machiavelli-world

Directed by
Claudia Hart and Asher Remy-Toledo
Produced by Hyphen Hub

Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen
in defense of the wor(l)d (a través de Galeano), 2021
performance piece for a virtual room

Performers
Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen
Charlotte Kent
Jeffrey Grunthaner
Meredith Noelle
Morris Fox
Terri Kapsalis

In celebration of her second vaccine and the 26th birthday of the first edition of A Child’s Machiavelli: A Primer on Power, Claudia Hart created Machiavelli World, a social VR site on Mozilla Hubs. She then invited esteemed colleagues to read site-specific poetry reacting to her set and Asher Remy-Toledo, the co-founder of Hyphen-Hub (a non-profit focusing on media performance), to join her in producing and directing the event.

Hart reached out to a cast of writers and artists grounded in cultural practice, though not in digital art, as a means to retrospect - a way of returning to the art world of physical objects from which she exited as her Machiavelli entered, those 26 years past. Neither Hart nor Remy-Toledo had any preconceptions about what might happen, starting with a series of workshops with the members of the group. Both were thrilled by the outcome of what turned out to be a series of improvisations. The result of this process is a new form of theater in a halfway realm — somewhere between a fairy tale world of the imagination and the experimental theater of the avant-garde tradition, between Pixar’s Toy Story and the Theater of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud. Ludicy is an endgame. Its players so hope you will attend.

Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen are skulls. They work collaboratively and also separately to create pieces that pull from histories, literatures, and diasporic time travel, informed by an immigrant’s perspective of constant translations within multiple realities. Their projects operate on relationality — prioritizing inter/intra-connections, both spatial and temporal, between the work, the audience and the environment. In addition to their collaborative and individual practices, both are member founders of Black Mountain Project, an Austin-based contemporary art platform that rejects approaches of monolithic paradigms and embodies fugitive practices in pursuit of impossible freedoms.

Their piece for Ludicy is in defense of the wor(l)d (a través de Galeano), bringing to light a 1978 text by the radical Latin American journalist/poet/thinker Eduardo Galeano. Written in a context of dictatorship, censorship, and wanton abuse of Indigenous peoples, in defense of the wor(l)d (a través de Galeano) visualizes his still relevant call for a different wor(l)d, a wor(l)d deserving to be what the wor(l)d wanted to be when it was a different wor(l)d, a wor(l)d deserving to be what the wor(l)d wanted to be when it was not yet born.

"History never really says goodbye, history says, see you later." –Eduardo Galeano