Every fragment in this universe contains the whole.
Three realities of 9:
New Vague City is a tv show in the US: a micro-reality.
Corpus Enigma is a film-myth in Roma: the meta-reality.
A is the macro exploration of human civilisation
and its evolution, distortion and amnesia.
All three works are interconnected, they hold and feed into each other through the missions I undertake in 3 different geographies and timelines. I am poised on, stripping off the estrangement, abstractions nailed on the core faculty that is present in every human being, yet, which also remains distorted or even unrecognised: the spirit.. true manifestation of the individual.
The spirit, I speak of is not a given. It’s not a religious contract. It must be formed and nurtured in the cauldron of life through resistance. My life is a film, yes, the camera is my pen and cinematographic medium is where I unite all my powers of the image, sound and words. Moreover, the film is the very plate upon which I form my spirit in the immediacy and simultaneous complexity of its meta-language, in the speed of life as we experience and open endless footnotes of insights. Nothing is random on there.
These 3 dimensions I refer to above, with these different filmic works, are the roads that lead to 9, the child messenger. At this moment in time, I have configured the Map of the Universe; a revolutionary tool that is serving me to put together a complete picture of history and prehistory. What do I do with this knowledge, with my contribution to humanity? It can be seen as a vital update to epistemology, forming a new territory of knowledge with a lexicon of mathematics and language combined; a system that removes speculation, dogma and abstraction from every aspect of the human being and its doing across history.. it’s a linguistic and semantic revolution that enables one to process enormous amounts of data and dissect truth-origin of anything from falsity on the axis of what is humane; the gold standard that must replace every contrived cesspool of interest at this point in history, all roads lead to this moment. I am effectively purging the very definition of what it means to be a human being, up till now an notorious entity under evolutionary steps. Map of the Universe enables me to revise and debunk concepts that have hardened the view of ourselves as a collection of vague reflections flying about against a transient background. Map of the Universe provides the gravitational ground upon which the vagueness is split from certainty. At the crossroad of my journey now, all that remains is going out with it.
This 1 minute long film is a testimony to the apex of this moment and works as a hieroglyph. In fact, I can conjure up and present the Map of the Universe entirely from this tiny segment in a lecture. In its economy of poetic composition, it has all the data, layers and dimensions represented. Yet, all you can perceive of it is its soul. You could hardly explain why you like it. It is because, you are looking at a series of hieroglyphs. A glossary. This is how this myth is made and although film communicates its glossary, the text remains on what happens outside. The film is just an engine.
For instance:
The segment launches out of Corpus Enigma in Roma, at the Teatro di Marcello. We hear the steps and cry of Anna Magnani from the the ending of sequence of Roma Città Aperta, 1944. It is the film that crystallised the Italian consciousness in the aftermath of the WWII. It showed reality, thereby forming a healing mirror for the figureheads of the time who sprung out of it creating the golden age of music, cinema, arts and social movements. Actually, I consider that time as the true Rinascimento (Renaissance/Rebirth) that effected and enriched people, not the feudal elite or chapels that rose on the backs of the medieval folk. It was vital for a country to reconcile with her darkness, recognise its true face and try to move forward.
“Roma Città Apertà depicts a wide cross section of Romans who, despite their obvious social, economic, and religious differences, are united in their suffering during the hosted Nazi occupation.”
It’s a film about resistance… to fascism. And I mean to every form of fascism, the blackhole that is still very much so in power and perception today.
I define fascism, primarily as an imposition… days of costumes are far gone.
Fascism is a mentality; the will and management of insular networks of power and their economic and social interests. Capitalism is the most successful form of fascism. However, fascism cannot be limited to economy, politics or religion, it attacks art and thereby defines it, outlines it by non-endorsement and subjects it to ferocious attack while pimping
ornamental art, graphics, music and films that are merely commercial tokens without a single grain of truth about the state of things.
Art is resistance… to keep projecting and polishing the self-reflection upon the mirror of conscience. It’s the sole agent of survival for a society. Therefore, art is spiritual. It is the sacred imprint of the care of a human being dying to save his brethren, children.
A person is %50 bliss and %50 tragedy. The same applies to millions of people forming whatever nation together. There is no patch of land that is not overrun by stupidity, greed, murder and a procession of other negative deeds for the pursuit of a transitory clutch devoid of the vastness of life and meanings to be found at the quarry of thought ruminating its marvels.
I’ll say it again. fascism primarily is an imposition… setting up a road deliberately by blocking, sabotaging, not developing, not mentioning, not showing the reality and not addressing the full spectrum of human intelligence and emotion. Fascism is the pan-cult of control and brainwashing, it banishes an individual from their spirit; the true definition of freedom.
As the revolutionary Poet of Sound and Image, I equate this core tenet of fascism as main characteristic of Hollywood in the context of the 20th century history.
Roma Città Aperta solidified the colossal arrival of Neorealism in 1944. A revolution in cinema history, when a handful filmmakers rejected making commercial ‘movies’ that catered to the shallow and mediocre bourgeois reality, having just come out of the hell that was World War II.
They went out of the studio, turned the camera on real people, to the cracks of poverty and the dismal conditions inflicted by the destructive muscle of subhuman qualities of armed fascism and its bloody economy of war and terror.
Historically, after the Nazis left, a new enemy advanced straight to the neck… Hidden fascism. To this day, apart from a tiny percentage of independent theatres across Europe, at ubiquitous cineplexes you have no choice, but to watch the filthy imposition of absolute bullshit from Hollywood. And by Hollywood I mean, all the production houses that idolise the aesthetics, celebrity and at large the cult of fame. Consequently, there are no local film industries to speak of, all reduced to producing copies of this bullshit in their native languages. Apart from the festival circuit, Cinema is pretty much invisible in public domain. This has serious, serious implications!
After 1944, within two decades Europe was colonised culturally by Hollywood and its business plan. — Not all exports from America was bad surely, the nurturing and propelling aides of youth culture, particularly music and fashion made a lasting effect in the European psyche. It was a relief from the heavy burden of the struggles of a rigid, wrought iron society. There was a long list of what you couldn’t do back then. And great films that came out of Hollywood during its heyday, when the art was still developing in the hands of all sorts of auteurs; Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Hitch, Otto Preminger, Orson Welles, William Wyler, Samuel Fuller, totally opened the eyes of most serious heads of European cinema; from Godard to Tarkovsky.
All of these notions are chiselled into stone only in the first few second of this teaser. I personally receive all the bullets from the fascist machine gun that kills Pina in Roma Citta Aperta, as I hold her iconic image in my bosom. Because, I personally am attacked by all forms of fascism that stand between me as the poet whose sole purpose is to guide the youth under the bombardment of dehumanising attacks in a world that is
set up to keep the masses in amnesia and away from self-awareness, alienating individuality from the foundry of spirit.
In New Vague City, Corpus Enigma and A, I am actively in the process of dismantling the insular network of power that controls the contorted perception of the world; its image-reality, down to its atoms.
The film I aspire to be is the one that shines on the screen not to lull people into a morphine dream, but to dispel the morphine from lucid reality of now. The most important transition since the agricultural revolution that happened in Central Region 10000 years ago: the transition from Analogue to Digital.
And finally, the last part of the film shows 9 in the deep antiquity of Anatolia that predates the Roman Empire, history of Europe, Greece and China by eons. Catalhoyuk was an egalitarian proto-city with a population of 8000 people that lasted for a few thousand years, 9000 years ago in Konya, Turkey. Think about that perspective for a second. Catalhoyuk can be seen as the matured foundation of the World as we know it and yet there was no trace of class, hierarchy, military, government, no gods, no imposition that could be seen as a shadow of fascism. Over the years, I found a lot in Roma that comes straight from Anatolia, including myself. As if by fate, from Catalhoyuk comes the oldest map, the first of this medium, depicting the image representation of a manmade world. And where else, I had to come to formulate the Map of the Universe but where it all began; the Central Region.
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