Pastoral Drama comprises two simultaneously played videos that use allegory and animation to think about what might constitute “progress”. Drawing from the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and from Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio—a 17th-century opera in which the titular male character stands in for Eurydice, and achieves a different fate—, the video work emphasises the cleft between boy and woman, and envisions the collapse of a mythic past.

Filmed chronologically over the course of a year, Pastoral Drama uses intricate drawings, speckled clay, encrusted plasticine, agglomerations of lichen and glitter, and weeping ink to construct the parallel narratives of Eurydice and Eumelio. Both of their characteristics are modeled on those of the artist at the age of 21, with masculine or feminine attributes exaggerated respectively, while other characters are modeled on classical statuary.

Informed by months of shifting thought over the course of the work’s production, themes of rule-setting, documentary ethics, abominable half-people, the body as hell, transgender subjectivity, gay exile and representational ambivalence churn through the work’s double narrative. Upon reaching the end of their tales, one story fades to black, while the other lurches into nonsense and disaster.

Pastoral Drama explores forms of vision and knowledge that trigger disaster or the erasure of a vulnerable subject. But at its most hopeful, the work also tests how a vulnerable and delicate thing might move forward, into the future.

Lichtspiele: Bucolic Coda at Pogo Bar, KW, 1 November 2018

Bucolic Coda was a special evening of animation, film, and reading programmed by KW Production Series artist Jamie Crewe. Comprising an eclectic body of materials that informed Crewe’s commissioned film Pastoral Drama, 2018, this evening presented journeys, returns, violent changes and disenfranchisement, united by an interest in experimental animation. Work includes films by Margaret Tait, Suzan Pitt, Jim Blashfield, Eugene Salandra, and Curtis Harrington, and writing by Marie NDiaye. [Read full programme notes]