Our lives are determined by a whole array of things and driven by various
motivations. One of the most powerful drives is that connected to SUCCESS
and FAILURE. Deeply embedded into our inner automates, it determines to a
large extent our social and emotional behaviour, our actions and, most
prominently, our social status. It is, in fact, the society -- and the
family as its cell, and the Èpoque as its umbrella -- that injects the
formula of SUCCESS and FAILURE into our system and nurtures it according
to the zeitgeist. Many of us spend our lifetime obeying the social
formula, faced with two possibilities: to desire SUCCESS and fear
FAILURE; or the reverse.
Yet, what is often forgotten is that SUCCESS and FAILURE are relative
notions. There is no such phenomenon or action that are an absolute
SUCCESS or FAILURE; there is only a social consensus about them. Birth is
not an absolute SUCCESS; nor death an absolute FAILURE.
The series of four performances by 42 - TRANSBABEL - explores the idea of
SUCCESS and FAILURE through this third perspective. The all-encompassing
image is that of SWING: SWING as an ever-moving, ever-changing figure;
SWING as a dynamic form that relies on relativity; SWING as a tool for
placing us in a NON-PLACE dimension. These are the sources of images,
sounds and live actions that interweave, collide or run in parallel.
Together they build a journey; the vehicles for this journey are
audio-visual media, the Internet and the human computer. Through the
constant trial of in-between translation, the data accumulates, ferments
and grows into new forms. And this is how TRANSBABEL lives.
The fact that 42 TRANSBABEL is an artistic project can be taken with
healthy irony. For, art is the field where SUCCESS and FAILURE are at
once most powerful and most fragile.
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