The second in a series of events that New Models is hosting at Berlin’s Trauma Bar und Kino, SimCity 2020 will consider the ways in which the world’s physical urban centers and internet “cities” of sorts—the clearnet metropolises and dark forest neighborhoods where we spend perhaps even more psychological time—interface now, in a time of public unrest and contagion.
Featuring: a lecture-performance by Pierce Myers, Philip Maughan, and Bryan Wolff of Strelka’s Terraforming; and the premiere of Richard Kennedy’s new opera Fubu Fukú, 2020.
Due to limited capacity, please reserve tickets (€10) in advance.
SIMCITY: FUBU FUKÚ
Fubu Fukú is an opera that collapses the 579 years since the initial Portuguese abduction on the west African coast to the present into 60 minutes . The queen of the 7 faced Swaggots watches Portuguese explorer Antoine Gonçalves on the beach hunting for seals where he first sees Sugar, a dynamic and heroic African man. Exploring the tension between the exotification and festishization of the black body through a journey from sugar to ketamine, Fubu Fukú offers an alternative queer version of the history of conquest and the desire to control and exploit the black body. The curse and fury unleashed onto the world after the murder of the African Queen has come to heed in 2020, by dissolving time and erasing borders , the opera bridges the gaps between now and then and creates a vortex within a painting that will transform and transcend the colonial project into the post plague future .
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SIMCITY: THE NEW PERIPHERY
We speak of quarantining cities, of putting them in “lock-down,” and yet where, really, does the city end? Whether for agriculture, mining, energy or data, cities have always drawn resources from the periphery: vast territories that change so that the center doesn’t have to.
As COVID19 arrived in Moscow this spring, researchers from Strelka’s Terraforming program PIERCE MYERS, PHILIP MAUGHAN, and BRYAN WOLFF relocated to Berlin where they’ve been examining the infrastructural transformations that enable city life to continue almost as it had pre-virus — and what possibilities there may currently be for forging a more ecologically viable “city” in its expanded sense. Meeting up at the club for the first time since March, now in the middle-period of virus time, we ask: are we merely larping the before or already starting to embody the post-pandemic new?
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All guests attending this limited event are required to follow house rules put in place to limit contact between guests and the potential spread of COVID-19. Trauma Bar und Kino uses recommendations of the Robert-Koch-Institute and guidelines set by the Berliner Senat for its hygiene rules, which will be strictly enforced.