Meeting in the Cave
Awareness is a light, when it shines the world is transformed.
Great confusion under the sky …
Within and around us the world is changing, approaching its turning point. Technology is engulfing us, at the same time driving us apart. Great confusion under the sky. Disconnected, the entire fabric of natural, national and international systems, political, economic, cultural, and social appear increasingly fragile, no longer making sense, devoured by time and programmed obsolescence.
We need to lay down markers
As these changes emerge twit by tweet, the polarised human community is increasingly looking to make sense of a world constantly losing ground, in need to lay down markers for what is to come of humankind. Humans are multidimensional beings, not aligned most of the time.
Towards collective awareness
However, what we observe as changes on the sensory plane are mere symptoms of the deep transmutations in the evolution of consciousness becoming self-aware, of the awakening of the individual to a collective awareness emerging as a new value system in culture and society.
A multi-stakeholder artwork to explore the human self
Meeting in the Cave. From Polarization to Inclusion by the Italian artist Sahlan Momo is a timespace-specific operatic installation performance in both worlds across two continents. A multi-stakeholders awareness play seeking to place the meta-change into context.
The conceptual framework is centred around a performance area determined by the extension of its orthogonal structure located at the intersection of the vertical axis mundi and the horizontal axis eventis. The former represents humanity’s original source and the ultimate destination of all forms and understanding of the nature of reality, a space free from the illusory veil of perception that allows individuals to enter or return to a state of heightened consciousness transcending time and space constraints, and from which one can descend and ascend into the horizontal axis eventis, representing the territory of perceived linear reality characterised by the passage of time, flowing from left to right, embodying the concept of yesterday transitioning into tomorrow within the daily world of events.
The narrative features the interaction of the polarised co-protagonists, the duality, the split Royal Couple, She and He, exploring the dynamics and spaces they inhabit in their relationship on an itinerant journey to unity on the ladder of consciousness unfolding the awareness play on the territory across the US and Europe. The play is interactive, hybrid, performed both in-person and digitally across a one-year-long sequence.
The work unfolds over a one-year cycle in three Acts, 12 in-person scenes, 7 virtual scenes, and 3 mixed scenes.
Act 1 premieres on the spring equinox, marking the balance of day and night. This performance is staged in New York City along a straight line connecting Midtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, with the action moving between two conceptual spaces, “The Eye” and “The Cave” metaspaces. It is performed across seven designated “Nodal Partner” locations: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as The Eye; Rockefeller Center; Morgan Library; School of Visual Arts; Orpheum Theatre; Tenement Museum; and Jane’s Carousel as The Cave.
Act 2 takes place six months later on the autumnal equinox, at the United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in Turtle Bay during the General Assembly (UNGA), and in Queens at MoMA PS1 and both JFK and LaGuardia airports.
The cycle concludes with Act 3 on the following spring equinox, with performances spanning the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, staged at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, completing the time-site-specific operatic installation.
Shifting the Paradigm
Act 1 – The Eye & the Cave
Synchronic, yet spatially displaced.
Act 1 builds upon the sevenfold paradigm displayed on the territory, with the seven nodal points — the Nodal Partners — placed in succession along a straight line on the urban area, and with She and He at the endpoints. She, namely the Eye … the eye, the I, and the third eye… metaspace, the centre, the establishment, the lunar, esoteric, feminine polarity is located at the city centre and displays the livre d’artiste Meetings with Remarkable Women. While He, namely the Cave metaspaces, the masculine, the solar, the exoteric, the margin is sited at the periphery, wherein the opera Cave 3.0 is being performed — the two polarities in inverted order to the traditional symbolic representation.
Synchronic but spatially displaced on the territory, the Feminine and the Masculine and all other binary endpoints are challenging the spacetime continuum and the dualistic paradox by exchanging quantum data in dialogical non-linear mode: She, in a downward flow; He, in an upward stream, connecting and innervating in the intervening urban area the other 5 Nodal Partners, each with a Virtual Matrix, rearranging the syntax of the territory into an inclusive, immersive environment at the juncture of a multidimensional system of representation and perception, and awakening the community’s consciousness to a higher synthesis giving rise to the collective intelligence on the mesoteric membrane[1] stretched between the esoteric and the exoteric dimensions.
Indeed, the human dimension catalyses both worlds in the Self, yet, the Self is not the object of this work, which is merely a reflection on the sensory plane of finer energy taking avail of different historical, artistic, textual and material sources, with contents, processes and phenomena drawn from cognizance and empirical wisdom. Imperfections are here to assess their presence in an unperfected sphere.
#MovingBeyond
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Meeting in the Cave is a non-profit endeavour
of cultural philanthropy of the Spanda Foundation.
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[1] An analogous mesoteric membrane can be found in the artist’s installation Eco, for 47 church bells and ringers in the old Rome city centre, in which the topographic placement of the bell towers on the urban area shapes up a ‘sonic’ tensorial membrane across the intervening territory.
