NOVEMBER 2015:
- Isabelle records voiceover for New York-based visual artist Jen Liu's new video installation The Pink Detachment. Isabelle contributes original
material to the project by improvising on a theme Jen Liu gives her.
The artist’s statement, from Jen
Liu’s website: “The Pink Detachment is a reinterpretation of The
Red Detachment of Women (1970), a Model Opera ballet from China’s Cultural
Revolution. In the original, a peasant girl joins an all-female military
detachment, takes revenge on her despotic landlord, and produces Revolution.
This ballet and its many variations was a ubiquitous propaganda piece in its
day.
Can such a fraught archival document be
re-motivated, beyond kitsch?
This piece proposes that re-motivation is possible,
but only through major revision. First, the peasant girl is replaced with an accident-prone,
inefficient meat worker. Second, the wise martial leader is replaced with a
ballerina-manager that provides the solutions to the worker’s problems. She
provides new tools – for meat and bone grinding – while resolving the
inequities of wealth and resource distribution through the factory-produced hot
dog. Military overthrow (Red) has been replaced by manufactured equivalence
(Pink).
Within this revised framework, portions of the
original music and choreography have been preserved. It has been re-engineered
to fabricate continuity between the brutal fantasy of the past and the resource
problems of the present. Parallel positions emerge from the color equation, Red
+ White = Pink. The first position is the old term “pinko” – a Communist (Red)
who has assimilated Capitalist bourgeois models (White), to create a
“watered-down” compromise (Pink). The second position is a speculative solution
to China’s crises in meat supply, by valorizing the integration of
“undesirable” pig parts with the “desirable” portions in the hot dog. And the
third position proposes the pink of femininity not as a “natural” fleshy
softness, but rather as a synthetic, potentially violent, hybridity.
[…]
Isabelle
Zufferey Boulton Imagines A World Full of Pink: edited narrative improvisation,
2015”
