Brutology. An Oline Road Movie

Montserrat Gardó Castillo & Petr Hastik

Brutology is conceived as a virtual road movie, where the lack of direction that used to define existencial road movies is brought to the forefront. However, this time the passengers wil not be misfits or young rebels without a cause, but 12 spectators that signed up for participating in an online performance. The rich heritage of Brutalism in the Czech Republic, Catalonia and the German Ruhrgebiet serves as a starting point for a participatory experience that draws inspiration from the contradictory architectural, social and political dimensions of brutalism and projects them upon an unusual and ghostly road trip. The rawness of the concrete architecture of highways and bridges embodies what Michael Truscello has coined as “infrastructural brutalism”: a specific relation to the materiality of infrastructures that goes beyond brutalism as an architectural style as it directly shapes our subjectivity and experience of community.

The spectators are guided into a fiction, being invited to reenact film scripts and situations. The deep and mysterious voice of a narrator guides the entire road trip as if it were a group hypnosis, and shifts our perception of the passing buildings and landscapes into ever deeper layers of consciousness. Brutology deals with the progressive dissolution of presence, the alienation of the subject and the similarities between architecture and the unspoken, yet scripted, protocols of virtual experiences. Even if it is not made of concrete, the Internet still counts as an infrastructure.

Concept/ direction/ video/ performance Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Petr Hastik
Concept/ dramaturgy Marc Villanueva Mir
Concept/ performance René Alejandro Huari Mateus
Concept/ performance John Rowley/ Richard Morgan
Music/ sound design Nicolás Kretz
Production manager Linda Pilar Brodhag
Costume design Marc Aschenbrenner
Technical director Jörn Nettingsmeier

A production by Montserrat Gardó Castillo & Petr Hastik in co-production with FFT Düsseldorf, supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste.

CAT/ EN/ ES




With
Montserrat Gardó Castillo & Petr Hastik

Upcoming dates

Emscherkunstweg | Online
15.04.22 20h
16.04.22 20h
22.04.22 20h
23.04.22 20h

Previous dates

FFT | Düsseldorf
08.12.21 20h
18.12.21 20h