the Paradise project
mala voadora + Third Angel
As What I Heard About The World approaches 100 presentations in countries like Portugal, United Kingdom, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brasil, Finland, France, Greece, Lebanon and Poland, and before it heads out to Belgium and the United States, Lisbon's mala voadora and Sheffield's Third Angel collaborate again on a new show. It is, quite literally, a project.
A year's work that passed through the Warwick Arts Centre (and through interviews with seven academics from Warwick University), Lisbon's ZDB and a Sheffield residency lead us to build a small place.
Two persons - one Portuguese, the other English - carry out an experiment. They build things. They assemble parts. They guarantee their survival. They create rules that can regulate the way they act. They are involved in an experimental construction and they speculate about what they are doing. These are people of their own time doing tasks of their own time between the time that precedes them and that which will come after them. There is a time that they relinquish as they achieve their tasks and another one that they manipulate according to the outcome of those tasks. Chronologically, these times are the pass (what is before) and the future (what comes after). But: what if it was exactly the opposite? What if they were reversing the course of events? History as they know it would become the future that awaits them; it would become what inevitably results from their actions - their project. And what preceded them would be unknown to them. But in fact, faced with the possibility of putting facts in a chronological order... we would rather not.
Walter Benjamin wrote: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. (...) This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.