Adorable Big Brother
Eisa JOCSON
1986/Philippines
〈Zoo (Archive)〉, 2020.
Archived videos of durational live-streamed performances installation
Five-channel video, color, sound
Dimensions variable, video 8 hr
Performed by Eisa Jocson, Russ Ligtas, Bunny Cadag, Cathrine Go, and Joshua Serafin
Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
Courtesy of the artist
Zoo is a shape-shifting sonic durational performance-research by virtual bodies. The creation, situated in conditions of the pandemic and ecological crisis, explores relations between man and animal, systems of labor and confinement, politics of gaze and the spectacle within the Disney empire, the Zoo and one’s own room.
In Disney’s happiness empire, animals are anthropomorphized; formatted with US-American values and ways of being. Lions are kings; monkeys, cricket, and fish are sidekicks to humans; and zoos are utopias. Animals are transformed into human puppets and co-opted into the Family Spectacle.
The animal zoo in parallel serves as a physical monument to animal marginalization. Animals are captured to live in small enclosures, observed for “educational” purposes, for science and species preservation. In this forced confinement, animals suffer from isolation, stress, depression, anxiety, helplessness, and boredom symptoms that mirror conditions found in humans living in densely populated cities. Animal experiments have been precursors to modern human social conditioning.
Both in Disney parks and Zoos, animals both real and representations are reduced to empty spectacles. Distracting people from the systemic violence on which these two institutions stand. We have been conditioned for isolation since childhood. As most of the world’s population is experiencing a form of lockdown, we resemble animals in cages with our leaders as zookeepers. In this pandemic ineptitude and opportunism runs rampant in systems ruled by authoritarian and corrupt leaders.
Zoo confronts the psychosis shared by both humans and animals in isolation. How can we perform our collective rage in a time of extreme isolation? The work aims to hijack the Disney-Zoo-Quarantine system—to corrupt exercise and entertainment routines with our desire for radical change. Resistance training in the time of pandemic.
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