SXSW announced its art program for 2020 recently.
Among the nine international projects selected is “The Future is A Constant Wake,” a six-minute video that’s collaboration between two Austin artists: multi-media visual artist Ariel René Jackson and dancer/choreographer Michael J. Love.
Jackson and Love have been collaborating for a couple of years, creating intriguing performances such as “All I See Is Blue,” which activated Jackson’s sculptural installation, a fabricated U.S. flag dyed in blue, to translate Langston Hughes’ 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again.”
“The Future is A Constant Wake” explores the land and its dirt as the bearer of the vestiges of slavery and colonialism and also the site where recovery, restoration, and growth can happen. Earlier this month Jackson and Love presented “Carver’s Message in Blue” in the empty and disused community pool behind the George Washington Carver Museum, a site recently activated for pop-up performances.
https://vimeo.com/337845949
Not all of the SXSW art projects are as original and thoughtful as “A Constant Wake.” And sorry, only badge-holders will be able to experience any of them with badges now costing $1400 with the fest is a few weeks away.
The Dutch new media art collective DROPSTUFF MEDIA will bring its “Bumper Ballet,” four self-driving bumper cars “colored in the template of ‘De Stijl’, the famous Dutch modernist art movement of Piet Mondriaan and Gerrit Rietveld,” the promotional material says.
And the House of Scandinavia, a promotional consortium for tech intiatives, is exhibiting one single painting by Edvard Munch, “Mann og kvinne (Man and Woman)” (1898). And in 10-minute pop-up presentations, organizers everything you want to know about it.
Edvard Munch, “Mann og kvinne (Man and Woman)” (1898)
