032 Urban Songline (Excessive Machine), 2015 – 2nd Tbilisi Triennial, Tbilisi, Georgia

The score as it appears in Barbarella (1968) remade as pillows for a public bench in Tbilisi that resembles the organ in the movie that is played by the evil Doctor Durand Durand killing his victims by pleasure, danced and mapped in a graphical synthesizer and played live as new chords for this space.

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Barbarella, a 41st century astronaut, lands on the planet Lythion and sets out to find the evil Doctor Durand Durand in the city of Sogo, where a new sin is invented every hour. There, she encounters such objects as the Excessive Machine, an organ on which an accomplished artist of the keyboard, in this case, Durand Durand himself, can drive a victim to death by pleasure.

The score that is played by Doctor Durand Durand on the Excessive Machine in the movie Barbarella (1968) is made into physical notes that are reconfigured by local dancers forming new chords that are subsequently played by the artist on a graphical synthesizer underscored by a baseline drawn from the sulfurous matmos, temporarily surfacing through a huge red sewage pipe.

This extremely loud re-staging of the excessive machine is playing up to the amphitheater of palaces, one out-shining the next in the valley that Tbilisi is set in. The work intends to question the power structures of a place that is far behind in its emancipation of gender and racial equality.

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Part of the project Urban Songlines, a utopian/dystopian series of collaborative translations of buildings, urban structures and public spaces into music through site-specific sound-generation. These performances are a way of connecting to places by listening to them as well as a research into how we use and experience the public domain and to what degree we can claim ownership over it, discussing notions of inclusion, becoming and belonging.

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Dancers: Aaron Shikamaru Charles, Tako Kekelidze, Levan T Gelbakhiani, Irinka Andreeva and Ana Kalandarishvili

Production: Mako Kapenadze

Architect: Tako Valishvili