Rocca Gutteridge

Jump

Jump: the urge to leave the ground for a moment

This video was commissioned by Más Arte Más Acción in response to the 500 year anniversary of Thomas More’s book Utopia. Published in 1516, Utopia is about the political system of an imaginary, ideal (for some) island nation.

In Jump, performance artist, Ife Piankhi – adorned with mythical wings – moves through a deserted island, in between structures that are both decaying and in the process of being built. The space she moves through could be, and should be, and might be. A poem, also written by Ife Piankhi, moves over the visuals describing the place: a place without time, where the people of the island ‘mapped the skies’ and observed the ebb and flow of both the wind and the moons. It becomes clear that the people of the land want to leave – even for a moment – but are caught, restlessly trapped to the ‘concrete, green and steel in-between’: the work that needs to be completed on the island.

It’s only in their minds that the people of the island can rise, even in death their bodies become ‘shadow monsters chained to decay’. The island is both a paradise utopia, and a looping repetitive dystopia.

Video best played: in a sound proof room, on loop.

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