Paradise: Rewired

In Paradise: Rewired, video recording becomes a vehicle for empirical observation as the artist wanders aimlessly throughout the back roads of Mato Grosso. There is no production team or script, only a very old map and the traveling cameraman determined to record his observations while searching for signs of paradise. He is in search of the Garden of Eden in the center of South America as described by Antonio de Leon Pinelo in his theory from 1650. To find the location of Pinelo’s paradise is the explicit purpose of the trip that is in turn employed to ponder the roots of the colonialist misinterpretation of the New World in situ. Thus, the work is constructed as a space of thought in which chronological time overlaps with the timelessness of myth, history, memory and literature. 

Paradise: Rewired begins by interpreting the western myth of Paradise as illustrating the constitution of the Lacanian symbolic order from which nature emerges constructed as an archive in the Aristotelian fashion. 

From the peculiar array of empirical source materials collected in the form of video clips, the artist draws in numerous artistic and philosophical references. A passage ponders the currency of Parmenides' conception of the nature of reality as an ontological condition irreconcilable with subjective interpretation and representation. This notion is then confronted with perception as a phenomenological stream of consciousness and what the artist calls the filmic act, an instance in which the interactions, associations, and decisions made at filming become the content of the film.

James Joyce's conception of the cognitive functions specific to the modalities of the visible and of the audible are considered in relation to the body (among other bodies) in contrast to disembodiment as in Joyce's notion of the diaphanous. The location of Terrestrial Paradise is thus presented as a mode of being in the body, derived from heightened perception and self-reflection while interacting with the multiplicity of life forms and cultures of the region.