Volcano Extravaganza 2018 - Total Anastrophes | Words by Diana Campbell Betancourt

“If influence is the flow of matter, ethereal fluid – of thoughts, sounds, meanings, bodies, and objects- and influence has become imperceptible or indirect action exerted to cause changes; then to influence migration is a tautological concept. It occurs between cause and effect: each incision, intervention, expedition, treaty, concession, exploit, and extraction.” Sharmeen Inayat [1]

Expanding on the relationship between tautology and migration, the artist Shuddhabatra Sengupta recently recalled the scene in Satyajit Ray’s iconic film Aparajito (1956) in which Apucarries a globe with him on a moving train. This image sheds light upon the fact that we humans, and indeed all moving entities on Earth, are vagabonds riding on the back on a vagabond. [2] The word planet comes from the Greek word planetes, meaning wanderer. While many of us in the art community can identify with the feeling of wandering, even those with the least mobility are also wandering around the sun via the Earth’s rotations. All of humanity shares a common movement across time and space.

Similarly connecting to Greek linguistic roots and the generative power of a turn of phrase, the 8th edition of the Volcano Extravaganza took its title Total Anastrophes from a figure of speech in which words are moved and placed in an unconventional location within the same sentence, reverting the usual order (of things). The form of this festival was an anastrophe in itself, shifting the magmatic energy of the festival from Stromboli, Italy to Dhaka, Bangladesh from February 2-10, 2018 and returning back again to Stromboli from July 27-29, 2018. Curator Milovan Farronato and Artistic Leader Runa Islam envisioned this itinerant program drawing upon their past layers of experience in Bangladesh and Stromboli, invoking a powerful collision of energies between two vastly different yet equally powerful and volatile contexts.

Walking into La Lunatica on July 27th, I was greeted by a familiar looking yet new map by the Paris based Madagascarian artist Malala Andrialavidrazana, Figures 1842, Specie Degli Animali (2018), leading the visitor across the seas on a path from Bangladesh to Stromboli via the artist’s hometown of Antananarivo, Madagascar. In the next room, other familiar characters, the leading cast of the Volcano Extravaganza in Dhaka with some supporting friends, were painted by Patrizio di Massimo in various scenes of arguments, quarrels, and battles across various iconic landscapes of Stromboli—capturing expulsions of energy that naturally happen within any closely-knit friend or family structure. Patrizio saw the process of being part of this festival as meshing artistic borders with fellow participants, and the scene of the fight brings out the harshest state of this kind of dialog. Many of these figures, including Patrizio himself, were painted by a Bangladeshi cinema banner painter in Dhaka earlier in the year on a massive canvas that previewed the roles they would play on stage at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy at the Dhaka Art Summit. This painted poster depicted each character in a dormant state, not imagining what kind of roles they could play off-stage in each other’s ongoing lives and creative processes. During our rehearsals in Bangladesh, Runa kept calling out,“Dormant! Active! Dormant. Active,” directing us to invoke the shifting states of a volcano. To this day, our “Anastrophe Totale” whatsapp group with 17 participants from around the world pulses, explodes, and goes back to a dormant state in unpredictable waves with no seeming end.

Outside of La Lunatica, the waves crashed against the volcanic rocks as the sky glowed pink in anticipation of the rising blood-moon and an impending lunar eclipse. The origin of the word lunatic found in the name of this house is derived from the late Latin word lūnāticus, aptly meaning moonstruck. Layered on top of the volcanic rocks below us ricocheted sounds from the streets of Dhaka, layered with Bengali mystic folk music, as well as my own voice delivering the opening speech of Dhaka Art Summit 2018, mixed by the acoustic alchemy of Alec Curtis. I began to think about people as volcanos; entities who are built from layers of experiences, subliminal memories, emotions, cathartic eruptions followed by the healing process of cooling down, only to build up and explode again. We aren’t static entities.The woman I was while speaking these words in Dhaka in February was still standing in Stromboli but buried under the last 5 months of seemingly seismic activity involving transcontinental moves and shifting priorities and perspectives. As I looked up into the heavens seeing the planet mars below the moon, Jupiter across the sky, and the big dipper falling into the ocean, I began to envision the constellations of people (both living and deceased, present and absent, real and mythical) that came together to create the extravaganza before us – be it Prometheus, the legacy of Roberto Rossellini and Satyajit Ray, the creativity of the curators and artists in the program, or the generosity of our host Nicoletta Fiorucci or Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani who hosted us in Bangladesh). Just because we see the big dipper doesn’t mean there aren’t other lines we cannot draw to see new ribbons in the sky.

Continuing with the idea of anastrophic interventions bordering on the catastrophic, Milovan and Runa attempted to erase the separation between the audience and the performers in both Dhaka and Bangladesh, aided by the sculptural temporary scaffolding structures of Tobias Putrih. Fabric draped over various parts of this installation created layers of screens, a labyrinth of surfaces upon which films that carry traces of Stromboli’s energy by Haroon Mirza, Runa Islam, and Anna Franceschini (carrying races of our time in Dhaka) were projected and through which dancers, singers, and the public intervened via the performances of Alex Cecchetti and Cecilia Bengolea, creating a volcanic theatre.

At the end of the evening, Alex invited us all to lie down and look at the stars to begin a collective sleep under the guidance of Strombolian whales. Listening to their calls performed by human voices, our consciousness fell from the sky to below the sea, a place also impacted by the presence of volcanos. Strangely we seem to know more about outer space than the deep sea of the ocean on our own planet, and the intervention of Lydia Ourahmane and Nicolas Jaar compelled us to dive into the sea and hold our breath for as long as possible to experience their underwater sound installation “Music for Two Seas.”

Continuing to blur the line between human and non-human, Osman Yousefazda debuted his new Capsule Collection heralded by 3 peacock forms created from the now cut up cinema banner painting from Dhaka. Milovan, Nicoletta, Haroon, and Osman’s painted likenesses moved through the majestic modernist architecture of Casa Falk on the backs of people who are recurring characters within the festival such as Maria Loboda, Anna Franceschini, and a representative of the local Strombolian teenage community. Occupying the rocks below the foundations of the house, Cecilia danced the Insect Train Performance with Erika Miyauchi, their movements mimicking the elegant gravity defying dexterity and shape-shifting of insects as they traverse seemingly unnavigable terrains with a multitude of legs. This process of transmogrification continued at Club Mega well into the next morning, led by Cecilia and her Jamaican Dance Hall collaborators.

Many of the moves in the dance hall happening were transmitted to us in our “Echo Chamber” rehearsals in Bangladesh– and it was a magical experience to see our informal “training” explode on the dancefloor. In Bangladesh, the term echo chamber was one evoked to think of a space of mounting pressure in a context without the presence of an active volcano. In colloquial English, speaking into an echo chamber has a negative connotation; it is a metaphorical description of a situation in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system. But with a volcano, there is no closed system, everything erupts to the surface and volcanos do not discriminate. I see the echo chamber of the extravaganza as an incubator of artistic processes, the festival is about process, not about complete or finished “products” for lack of a better word. It is a journey of accumulation of energies and experiences, and these might have begun in Stromboli or Dhaka, but influences and sparks from this time will explode in these artists’ expressions elsewhere long after the festival.

On our last night in Stromboli, following Alex’s phoenix inspired performance Tanam Shud at a graveyard at sunset, we rose up the mountain to the Fiorucci Art Trust’s property at the roots of the rising volcano. Entering the space, the Bangladeshi cinema banner painted Volcanic Theatre commissioned by Runa and Milovan served as a backdrop to close the festival under the credo of This Much is Uncertain, the title of the first film that Runa shot on Stromboli a nearly decade ago which was also the precursor to the future rumblings of Volcano Extravaganzas. This setting also debuted the raw montage for a new film by Runa, the first film shot in Bangladesh since her iconic work First Day of Spring (2005), shown in the context of a tautological anastrophe-inspired one-night performative intervention Eye >< Not Eye. A floor drawing comprised of black sands and blue pigments imagined the volcano as an energy source projecting into the universe, and as members of the core group walked through the space in the previously mentioned Osman peacock cinema banner capes, the sands dispersed into new abstract forms. Condensed liquids, tearing eyes, and shifting sands created a soul-mirroring environment, unleashing dormant and latent thoughts and dreams. As the extravaganza dispersed from Stromboli for the eighth time, this energy cooled down, creating a fertile and fresh crust to imagine what might happen on the island for the ninth time.

[1] This text on Influence from Sharmeen Inayat was included in the public program room of the exhibition Hello World at the Hamburger Banhoff (Apr 28– Aug 26, 2018)

[2] Shuddhabrata Sengupta, keynote lecture “Planetary Pursuits“ at the conference “Global Academy II, Examples of Transcultural Exchange“ at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (August 11-12, 2018).