#MemoryoftheUniverse (#2)
Personhood
2018. 7:58 min. color/blk & white. 3D animation with Maya
video: Alysse Stepanian
Music & sound design: Philip Mantione
See review of this work in Brooklyn & Boyle, by artist/writer, Kelly Blunt.
Read more about this work on Swedish artist, Tamara De Laval’s blog: “Requiem for the Lost Artefacts from the Ancient Civilizations”.
“Personhood” is the second edition of #MemoryoftheUniverse, a series of 3D animations and performances of speculative fiction combined with real life events. It examines the for-profit mass-incarceration system and its relationship to nonhuman animal abuse, slavery, colonialism, and the potential for the manipulation of collective memory in technologically advanced societies. The normalization of the abuse of nonhuman animals and the lowering of the status of colonized humans to the level of the non-person “animal”, has facilitated the denial of their right to exist and the ongoing obliteration of their histories. Steven Best has aptly stated:
Once humans defined animals as creatures devoid of reason, autonomy, and inherent value, they could use and abuse them without mercy or compassion. Various social elites then applied the same speciesist discrimination model to oppress other human beings. For once “rational” white, male, wealthy, privileged, propertied elites designated women, people of color, and other groups to be deficient in rationality, and thus in humanity, they declared them to be subhuman, “mere animals,” closer to nature and animality than to culture and humanity, and thus could be thrown to the dungeons of damnation where they could be exploited, enslaved, and slaughtered like animals.[1]
As the world looks away from crimes that are unmet with restitution, their aftermaths resonate in the dark recesses of our minds and metaphorically, continue to live in the memory of the universe, eternally recurring, until we find ways to change our consciousness and current state of affairs.
Historically, the bodies and reproductive organs of women and cows have been subjugated in patriarchal societies. The protagonist, MOTU, is a half-woman, half-cow mythopoeic superhero that is the embodiment of the memory of the universe. I like to think of her as the female version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Superhuman, Above-Human) – she represents hope amidst despair. The sunflower, a plant native to the Americas and a source of food and sustenance, is a recurring motif in my work. One of the fastest growing plants, tall and erect sun-like sunflowers reach for and face the sun, and are said to symbolize nonconformity, strength, vitality, loyalty, love, beauty, happiness and enlightenment.
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[1] Best, Steven. “The Rise (and Fall) of Critical Animal Studies.” LIBERAZIONI Associazione Culturale Antispecista. n.d. Web. 24 March 2014.
