PRESS TEXT - ENGLISH
Macondo - Life on Earth
CABULA6
“LIFE ON EARTH” is the third installment of the Trilogy “ON EARTH” by Performance and Film Company CABULA6 (under the direction of Claudia Heu and Jeremy Xido) - a Trilogy about travel, storytelling and the slippery search for home.
It all began in October 2006 when a night watchman, Ramon Villalobos led the artist, Claudia Heu, up to a cordoned off rooftop terrace of a public building. Empty champagne glasses and graffiti served as a reminder of the encounters that take place at the edge of legality, where the force of rules and regulations are often diminished.
CABULA6 visited Ramon every night for the next two weeks at his desk in the security office and „Asi es La Vida” (That’s Life) evolved - a piece for a single audience member. Sitting in Ramon’s chair, looking at images of MuseumsQuartier pumped in over security cameras, the audience listened to Ramon’s fantastical stories over the telephone about fleeing Chile in the 1970s, about the people he met and his new life in Austria. He talked about his home, a place he called Macondo.
Macondo is an unusual place on the outskirts of Vienna existing between the airport, freeway and imagination. Shaped by memory, forgetting and the hard realities of life, it’s a settlement where successive waves of political refugees arriving from the current headlining wars from around the world are thrown together with villagers who landed here in the wetlands of Simmering and reconstructed their lives as refugees up to 50 years ago. Macondo - named in homage to the fictional village in Garbriel Garcia Marquez novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” - is now home to 3000 people.
Inspired by the incredible tales of this place and guided by the question, “How did we get here where we are right now?” CABULA6 in co-production with Tanzquartier Wien developed “ON EARTH,” the second part of the Trilogy focusing on the hidden stories behind traveling. It began in Santiago de Chile with the final “yellow bus” ride - the bus lines which for years were a fixture of that city’s collective identity - and ended in Vienna in a “Wiener Linien” public bus on it’s way to Macondo.
For „3 Months on Earth,” the title of the Vienna leg of the trip, Ramon Villalobos invited an audience from Tanzquartier to a party in his garden in Macondo. CABULA6 shuttled everyone from the center of the city to the outskirts. Entering through a narrow slot in the yellow corrugated tin wall that separates Macondo from the Metro shopping center parking lot, walking right into this fantasy world as guests bearing wine and food, a first bridge for personal encounters between two worlds was accomplished.
–
A year and a half later, the party is over, the guests have all gone home and CABULA6 has stayed. It seems once you’ve entered Macondo, it’s hard to leave…
In November 2008, CABULA6 was granted a refugee apartment in Macondo by the Republic of Austria and secured a plot of land from the BIG company (Bundes Immobiliengesellschaft) where a Garden is being developed. A cargo container to be rebuild as a public meeting place was delivered onto the plot in January 2009 and now overlooks the soccer field and narrow slot in the tin wall by which we entered two years ago. These two sites, the Garden and the Apartment - one public and the other private - are the lynchpins to this final part of the Trilogy: LIFE ON EARTH.
“Life on Earth” is about living in a place. It’s about the encounters that happen there; the anecdotes and experiences of bumping into people - the tiny micro moments which resonate and make up our lives on earth. CABULA6 is initiating a series of projects in the neighborhood where these encounters can take place in an attempt to find new words and ways of seeing where, how and with whom we live.
The following projects are being developed as part of „Life on Earth”
- „The Garden”
- Container / Reconstruction
- Recycle-Garden
- Dinners in Apt. 32
- Application of Macondo as a UNESCO World Heritage Site
- Handbook / „Travel-guide” for Macondo
- A Film
- Blog / Dokumentation http://cabula6.com/macondo/
Life on earth is a co-production of CABULA6, Crespo Foundation, Tanzquartier Wien, Culture Department of the City of Vienna and the State office for Art, Culture and Science
You can find information about CABULA6 on the website
http://www.cabula6.com/ONEARTHindex.htm
2006: Asi es la vida (That’s Life)
2007: On Earth / 3 Months on Earth (Santiago de Chile, Wien)
2008: Life on Earth
Press Contact
Markus Schleinzer