Libidinal Lake
2022, June, premier at Teatro Municipal do Porto
team:
Direction, Music: Jonathan Saldanha; Dramaturgy: Catarina Miranda, Lendl Barcelos, Francisco Antão, Letícia Skrycky, Jonathan Saldanha
Choreography direction Catarina Miranda; Performance: Aurora, Daniela Cruz, Deeogo Oliveira, Só Filipe; System architecture: Francisco Antão;
Lighting design: Letícia Skrycky; Multi-channel sound system José Arantes; Voice: Frank Desire; Scenography Alexandre Mota; Prosthetics Júlio Alves
Multimedia technician João Ferreira; Executive production: Joaquim Durães; Management: Pé de Cabra
Production: SOOPA; Co-production: Teatro Municipal do Porto, Centro Cultural de Belém; Support by: Direção Geral das Artes, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, gnration
What else lies in the depths of the libidinal lake?
Excerpt from the text Homogeneity, Determinacy, Scalability by AMY IRELAND
The Libidinal Lake is a scenic installation and a vivarium for humans and sound, built around the fluorescent and pulsating surface of a toxic lake. This temporary zone is filled with micro- scopic systems, bacteria, fungi and other networks which make up a larger organism where light, sound and color interact with the human body.
The soundscape is influenced by the synaesthetic works for Light Organ by Scriabin, Messi- aen’s colored chords, the pulse of south africa Qgom and Psytrance acid stabs, making use of multichannel sound diffusion and electronically expanded instruments to create the spectral density of the lake’s sound.
The lake itself is built from fluorescent materials, bioluminescent organisms, smoke and vapors, and a robotized lighting system, all of which are part of an artificial, self-regulating network. This network takes the time based information of lithium extraction coming from Wall Street’s fluctuations in the form of real-time data, processed through an Artificial Intelligence, a model of a fungus that eats the peaks of extration (like sugar) and expands its shape in a tridimention- al invisible mesh, informing the electrical and vibrational modulations of the system, creating an environmental alterity stemming from the future. An alchemy that transforms the invisible into visible, and renders audible the temporal modulation of the lake’s surface.
Libidinal Lake is both an enquiry and a visual and sonic synthesis of the interactions between humans and alterity through the surface mechanisms of a lake that thrives on the data of capital, the vibrations of light and sonic synaesthesia, allowing the audience to interact with the system’s behavior, thus becoming a part of its relationships, its intelligence and its spirit.
This work is a development of the research carried out by scenic pieces and installations like O POÇO, a scenic piece which developed a vertical, acoustical exhumation machine through the use of petroleum and human bodies, VOCODER & CAMOUFLAGE, an installation made of carcasses of floral debris, activated by sound and light vibrations in a lymphatic network, and RED MERCURY, a scenic piece which is an oracular mono-drama based on a mineral, organ- ic testimony.
The libidinal lake is a chimera that appears in the interaction between sociality (norms, desires, institutions) and matter-energetic forces. The images there are apophenic projections, not gateways to the real but oneiric echoes and contorted specters of our own desires. It is responsive, but turbulently so. It churns and glimmers, it seethes and quivers. The market is not nature but it grips and manipulates nature.
What they call negative externalities includes pollution, noise, resource depletion and risk. The competitive activi- ty of value extraction is literally destructive of the pool from which value is derived. The lake may look beautiful but it is toxic. The worshippers at the lake are energetically committed to cutting off the branch on which we all sit.
There is a ritualistic maintenance of the libidinal lake. Every now and then a sacrifice must be made to maintain the semblance that the house is a fair system. One of the players is singled out and denounced as a rogue trader. But there is a continual mass sacrifice that is much larger, and mostly unnoticed.
The libidinal lake is where erotics and necrotics meet. But it is not the only way they can meet. If value is not reflected there, but constructed there in the price process, this means that value and values can be otherwise. Money and the market are not in themselves malignant, it is the hypercapitalist form of social organization that makes them poisonous. A different pact with death can be made, a regenerative embrace that favors the collective construction of futures. Rather than complying with the logic of the casino, or trying to smash down its walls, the players could transform it into a dancefloor. That might seem like an impossible dream but it’s the other way round: you are sleeping in the noxious fumes of the libidinal lake and if you don’t wake up now you may never do.
Excerpts from the text Mirror Mirror, to be released in the publication Libidinal Lake, by Inigo Wilkins
