STAR MAGNOLIA: THE VISUAL ALMBUM

Is another seed of the theater production «Star Magnolia», an interstellarnovela by choreographer and performer Jeremy Nedd.
It consists of five tracks that are based on the thoughts of Octavia E. Butler’s «Earthseed. the books of the living», a belief and thought system, which she developed in her two novels «the parable of the sower» and «the parable of the trickster» and which are taken and brought to after the year 2094.
These tracks take the notion of «earthseed» to space and allow it to time-travel. they stay true to the understanding of humans and humanity as being seeds, which to grow must take root among the stars. the visual album gives glimpses in to the cosmos of both octavia e. butler and our future speculations. they open the imaginative field from a human-centered perspective to extra-terrestrial encounters. the images mingle and morph real people and places with images generated from an ai, which imagines what this new outer space ‑never «discovered» by nasa– would be.
The videos in the visual album were thought as seed-capsules to travel online, traverse the vast digital space across all boarders, appropriating advertisement spaces, business spaces, shopping spaces etc. – but all with no clear objective of selling or promoting anything, but rather to plant seeds for change in all territories.

The most prevailing idea of «earthseed» is to embrace the idea of change equaling what religions named god. the ability to adapt to the everchanging of everything, which one shapes and changes constantly, to transform and be transformed, and allow differing perspectives is key to be-in-the-world, to become-with, to exist-further, proteus-like, so we can grow.
«all that you touch, you change. all that you change, changes you.»

This text was developed and written by Edwin Ramirez, where they reflect about time and space, trying to find an approach to the differing scientific ideas and theories about time and space vs. their personal point of view. What if thinking about space and time, thinking about sci-fi-futures would include diverse bodies? What if there was no retro-topic nostalgia based on normative anthropocentric world views? Edwin proposes to try to overcome the normative anthropo-centered ideas of time and dive into non-linearity, which breaks with notions of past, present and future and which follows the «Earthseed»-idea of diversity: «Embrace diversity, or be destroyed.»

This text is based on the the text «Quercus» by Emanuele Coccia, philosopher and botanist. He considers humans from the point of view of trees, questioning our sense of dominance and how much we as humans are interdependent from and with trees. The text proposes an important shift in perspective to find new ways of living together and protecting our ecosystems that we are destroying. The idea of entanglement, the connectedness of everything can be linked to thoughts found in Octavia E. Butler’s «Earthseed». The question of humans being earth-seed that still need to grow so they can take root amongst the starts, i.e. transform, adapt and bring the project humanity to the level of adulthood, are shining through these thoughts. The notion of overcoming terra-centrism to save terra is the key thought.

In these verses coming from Octavia E. Butler’ Earthseed about ignorance and power struggles, the political notion of the book’s truisms come as warnings. While in the two novels of Butler, in which she also describes the rise of a corrupt, oppressive, dogmatic political worldview that subjugates everything to its exploitative ideology and divides humanity into those who dominate and those who must be persecuted and/or oppressed, these verses are also meant to raise awareness for the power of ignorance, which can be understood in terms of postcolonial thinker Gayatri Spivak’s «sanctioned ignorance». These verses also unmask the idea of competition and colonial/capitalist idea of growth and proposes rather to collaborate, to learn, to think.

Written by the performer Kihako Narisawa, this text was developed as a ship log – a video-message sent to a very close person that might still be somewhere on earth.
Kihako describes how the notions of a distinct worldview in binaries, like e.g. normal-special have been mixed and don’t make any sense anymore and how the things that were regarded as being normal have become so rare that they can be considered special, extraordinary from her now. Normal things like being human, empathetic, the feeling of being together in something.
So here, again, the prevailing ideas of octavia e. butler’s «earthseed», i.e. how we as humanity can work on being human and humans, on real connectivity and response-ability with earth and humanity become only visible when you leave the terra-centrist worldview and project it into a future. We have never had reached normalcy.

Video: Juan Ferrari
Text & Dramaturgy: Hayat Erdoğan