It opens with a silvery hourglass of a tower, and then cuts. All movement slows in its hyper-real, Anthropocene world born of cyberspace, where time is halved and the once-parallel evolutions of humankind and the animal kingdom have long divorced beyond reckoning. A team of shameless, metrosexual oil riggers orchestrate a spill, holding pipes gushing with a computer-generated black fluid that floods the stairwell in the shadow of the lone, flat-topped skyscraper. Dressed in the reflective vests of street workers, they are next seen tossing trash about until the flung pieces lose gravity and float, revolving around the cylindrical building wherein a corporate, executive board meeting sits air-headed and ponderous.
The introductory music bursts with a powerful interpretation of the late 19th century composition by the French composer, Leon Boellmann, a sweeping opus of Christian mysticism, his most popular work, titled "Suite Gothic". Together with the inexplicably unsettling, crystal-clear menagerie of images, the Suite rises with a cascading intensity, as its evocative sound then rushes fast to a halt as the camera looks down to frame just the feet of the executives for a curious close-up. It pictures the ideal heights of the 21st century workplace representing a comprehensive spectrum of global, human diversity.
Inverso Mundus, Still #1-03 2015, pigment InkJet print on FineArt Baryta paper (Photo Courtesy of AESF.Art).
Blinking with the faces of the continents, from Eurasia through Africa, they seem to be passing time in utter boredom. One fiddles with a fountain pen. Another stares into space. Behind them, the glass elevator is raised, and out walks a stream of people of an entirely different kind of diversity, a bounty of mixed economic and faith orientations. Entering the boardroom, they are not mere suits, but a turbaned man, a scantily clad woman, a New Age priestess, a robed monk, and they have come to assume those most enviable, high, brown leather seats, to replace the corporatized with an ease beyond nonviolence. It is an almost mechanical change of the guard, where nothing actually changes.
A worldly underworld
There is not the slightest hint of animosity between the divergent groups. It happens simply as a play of musical chairs, and to a grand, ingenious soundtrack. Maurice Ravel's virtuoso "Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major" bubbles to a froth, as it blooms with a shuddering magnificence, contrasted with the plain, undramatic acting of the people who stand against the omnipresent green screens of "Inverso Mundus." Lev Evzovich, an artist at AES+F, explained the idea behind the film in a 2016 interview with Barcelona's SENDA Gallery. He said that its metaphors are steeped in the European tradition of engraving, especially in the medieval era with its characteristic fantasies, where both in the film and in the age-old art, to imagine a donkey riding a man is not entirely out of the ordinary. In collaborating with Tatiana Arzamasova and Evgeny Svyatsky, the artist collective AES+F drummed up a categorical overthrow of both the contemporary and historic mind.
Inverso Mundus, Still #1-02 2015, pigment InkJet print on FineArt Baryta paper (Photo Courtesy of AESF.Art).
"Usually, a number of different short stories can be seen on one single sheet narrating the tale of how the order of everything in the world, the entire world order, has been disturbed," said Svyatsky, as he detailed the filmmakers' adaptation from a particular genre of 16th century engraving known as the "World Upside Down" in which social roles are reversed and the fairytale imagination steps onto center stage. "We have brought some of them to life. We have realized them in today's world," said Arzamasova.
The film continues, and to some of the most inventive classical music ever conceived, exemplified by the choice of Franz Liszt's "Mazeppa," from his unthinkably complex and startlingly beautiful Transcendental Etudes. Its range stretches the limits of pianistic technical ability to almost pure abstraction, and to the visual theme of total contrast, as those who were posed on high descend to those littered below. A most gorgeous and powerful businesswoman upfront lavishes herself with a selfie.
They languish on the street, as they had in the office, and show themselves baldly, without pretense, as every stripe of color and expression that issues from the human mind through choice of clothing, and all forms of outward belief and guise of personality. The motion never quickens, it is always to cut time, and filmed with a glossy sheen, before backgrounds fished from the digital void. The actors are fully lit, silent, moved by some great power beyond. And the opposing peoples mix as the music transitions into a down tempo feel with Tchaikovsky's meditative piano work, "The Doll's Funeral." It is at that point when floating composites of fictive animal creatures fly from the gray, overcast sky to mingle with the people. Bat-winged and octopus-legged dogs, and eagle-winged rats descend in the wildest agglomerations of vestigial external organs of fins and feathers, scales and snouts.
Next, the film turns upside down, literally, as a scene begins underground in a room of green tiles and glimmering hooks. A standing pig flays a man hung by his feet. And a surge of red liquid dyes the sparklingly clean floors. Meanwhile, on ground level, between massive cargo shipping boxes painted in subdued greens and blues, a host of men are prodded behind individualized prison cells made of wood. The women poke at them with conductors' batons, docile and innocent. Everything ensues with the delicacy and lightness of a ballet, as ladies dressed for polite society then patiently fix the men into upturned stockades of wooden planks. Industrial pincers are waved over them, and no one flinches. It is a human world devoid of human emotion.
A real unreality
Everyone is beautiful, dazzlingly dressed, and sharp as nails. The men are rolled back along the exterior of a kind of hamster wheel, to graze against cartoonish, metal spikes. Ever so deliberately, they are turned around the mechanical device. Yet, no one has the look of torture, nor of pain. It is with a completely numb subservience that the men allow themselves to be stockaded again and again, as the women mechanically lower the shackles that could very well fit in a sleek, boutique furniture showroom. Suddenly, the women are distracted by gently disarming moments of grace with the flock of crossbred animals whose hybrid bodies are fetched so far into the netherworlds of unreality as to prompt unrestrained cackling.
The music picks up again, from the famous adagio to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major the "Casta Diva" aria from the Bellini opera Norma, set to a farcical boxing match enacted as a conflict of the generations, where the old and the young face off, forming opposite fronts. The people seem to act in slow motion, not merely from the effects of post-production, as the children win by a show of deadpan force, observed by a global community of onlookers. Only a single child is defeated, laid to rest against the wood floors as the white-haired, wrinkly victor places her foot on his chest. But an older group of youth, adolescents then storm through, invading a gilded, red palace crawling with police in multiple units, in riot gear and street uniforms. Instead of confronting in a violent altercation, they together commingle as in a harem, over a plush, curtained bed in the middle of a royal room furnished with polished stone busts and glowing chandeliers, but the light never changes throughout the entire film. A woman in sports apparel is caressed by a twosome of older policemen. Gender, race, occupation, every last distinction that exists within humankind dissolves.
The romantic scene ascends into the clouds, on a flying bed, as the highly evolved, composite creatures circle in an acrobatic dance in the sky. The music becomes heavier, more dramatic, furnished with sound design by Dmitry Morozov aka VTOL, when a totally novel class of otherworldly beings come down to earth, digital renderings shaped into schools of massive, airborne jellyfish. Increasingly, the peopled cityscape is revealed as a zero-gravity environment when a woman opens her hand to see that she is finned. The film ends with rapt in an apocalyptic ambiance, as figments of cybernetic alien life rain down on what remains human of the deceptively human world.
"Why has this become interesting?" asks Evzovich of AES+F. "Maybe because this is a contemporary topic of questions about the world's values, which can change very rapidly. And they are changing as we understand them." To which his colleague Arzamasova adds: "All the joys of rampant capitalism, consumption, multiculturalism, etc., are receding and are being replaced, not by something reminiscent of the splendid baroque, but rather the medieval period."
