BEDfellows
Screening
2021
Museo Maxxi
Rome Italy
Director & Animator
Frances Adair Mckenzie
Prose
Maya Khamala
Poem
David Armstrong
Voice
Colette Arsenault
David Armstrong
Producer
Livia Filotico
Sound Design
Benjamin IV
Recording & Sound Mixing
Pascal Desjardins
Cello
Tyr Jami
Title Design
Jayme Spinks
3D Animation
Brandon Blommeart
Translation
Venetia Gittes
Frances Adair Mckenzie’s Bedfellows (2021) operates as an exploratory rumination, which solicits its narrative arc as a type of fever-dream, meandering through the protracted stasis of our current moment in time. Through the cumulative manipulation of on-hand materials and practical effects, this new video work indexes an inventory of cascading gestures as morphic displacements, to explore possible realms of ulterior existence. Drawing upon the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Ursula K. Le Guinn, Bedfellows evokes an archaeology of the future through the known research of natural processes: growth through mutation, sexual mimicry, and the collaboration of inter-species evolution.
Specially commissioned in collaboration for Bedfellows, Maya Kamala's poetic prose speaks to this potential of the present moment and inter-generational thinking, while reflecting on our colonial past towards the invocation of holistic lessons for eternal learners. While David Armstrong’s poem, which operates as an addendum to the main corpus, sinks us further into the quagmire of a horizonless space, calling forth the limbless void of the other.
This all combines as the abstract record of perceived temporality to form a necessary landscape: one that can be seen equally as a form of deterioration and construction.
By way of insistent experimentation, with an emphasis on staging as form, Frances Adair Mckenzie’s Bedfellows pays tribute to the urgency of poetic narratives through durational patterns of magical production and historical desire, which inevitably may conspire to thrive beyond any notion of a stable ground or presumed commodity.
sostenuto dall’Ambasciata del Canada in Italia
Special thanks to the Fonderie Darling artist residency program, Chili & Juju
& the Canada Council for the Arts
*Artifact footage shot at the National Roman Museum Palazzo Massimo alle Terme
* Gulax font by Morgan Gilbert/Velvetyne Type Foundry
Pilowlava font by Anton Moglia & Jérémy Landes/Velvetyne Type Foundry
* Photo Credit Flavia Rossi
