GIPCA Fellows consider man and the (Cape) environment at ITC 2013

Donald Gordon Creative Arts Fellow, Michael MacGarry, considers the real and imagined, with regard to relationships between man and his environment at Infecting the City Public Arts Festival 2013.

Visual artist Michael MacGarry’s period film, As Above, So Below concerns a philosophical re-imaging of Darwin’s brief visit to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1836, following five years at sea around the world aboard The Beagle, British naturalist Charles Darwin visited the Cape of Good Hope. He was 27 years old at the time. The film, shot in black and white, questions what might have ensued had Darwin never left the Cape, had he in fact died there (the result of a vain wager with his valet, and the in-compatibility of his egotism in the face of the infinite); killed by his own invention and ambition. Presented as the culminating project of MacGarry’s Donald Gordon Creative Arts Fellowship, the work is foremost a philosophical play about entropy; the breakdown of rational, ordered systems in isolation. It focuses on notions around 19th century industrial progress, the absurd, colonial taxonomy, the uncanny and the quixotic nature of humanity; all within the mode of narrative cinema.

MacGarry’s, As Above, So Below will be screened at the Festival Centre (6 Spin Street) at 21:45 on Tuesday 12 and Thursday 14 March. It is presented by The Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), as part of the 2013 programme for the Infecting the City Public Arts Festival. For more information on the ITC programme see www.infectingthecity.com or www.gipca.uct.ac.za

URL: http://www.gipca.uct.ac.za/
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Author: Fiona Gordon from The Famous Idea Trading Co.. Originally distributed by MyPR.co.za.