untitled: or obsneerg y las cronicas marcianas | william cordova
untitled: or obsneerg y las cronicas marcianas, william cordova (North Miami Beach, FL; Saugeartise, NY; Lima, Peru)
Southern Constellations Fellowship. July 2017. Video, projection installation. 35MM slides, Polaroid 600 camera, copy of The Martian Chronicles, customized mirror, reclaimed wood, milk crate, plexi sheet.
untitled: or obsneerg y las cronicas marcianas is a short film project made in collaboration with Durham, NC artist/writer Hồng-Ân Trương and based on Ray Bradbury’s classic 1950 sci-fi novel, The Martian Chronicles.
An interpretive cinematic experience, cordova pairs still images with Trương’s narration to address relativism, temporality, and the North Carolina Triad region.
Cordova’s version extracts a short passage from a 1973 copy of The Martian Chronicles chapter, “Night Meeting,” in which protagonist Tomás Gomez, an earthling, shares a moment of contemplation with a local Martian.
Both characters struggle to acknowledge their own presence while at the same time negating one another’s existence. Transcendental themes contrast with 35MM slides from Elsewhere’s archives, depicting landscapes from Greensboro, High Point and Haiti circa 1979, 1982, 1986 and 1991.
Allegorical dates and charged geographic landscapes of our past and present tense are the driving force in this short piece.
“A great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves”-Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
“The past is more infinite than the future”
-Toni Morrison
