EDIBLE EDIFICE: VENICE BIENNALE 2008/ AVATAR ARCHITETTURA+PTL
AVATAR ARCHITETTURA + PTL PRODUCTIONS
THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BEARD AND THE TALE OF THE EDIBLE-EDIFICE
A CONTEMPORARY TALE ABOUT EATING, SLEEPING AND LIVING THE ENVIRONMENT.
What will it be like to live the Zero Kilometer Footprint?
Avatar Architects +PTL PRODUCTIONS presents:
a vision of evolution, global warming, metamorphosis, regeneration, devolution, recycling, degeneration, legends, liquids and food.
Featuring the eternal storyteller, “The Man who Ate his Beard” and an original fable on the future of humanity.
(Critical Overview: The project, a homage to Superstudio’s “Ceremony” a film produced for the Milan Triennale in 1973, described a tribe emerging from their underground home, leaving all their belongings behind. The film introduces the all-knowing Guru who is the “Man without Objects.” This fatalistic ritual presented by Superstudio presaged the decline of the natural and manmade environments and told the fable about people giving up their old beliefs and customs to embrace the rituals of a simpler life. The Man Who Ate His Beard and the Tale of the Edible Edifice takes up again this theme of abandonment and initiation first explored by Superstudio and presents, in a single channel video short, scenes of a near future environment when humans are back to the survival basics: in other words living the zero kilometer footprint.
This is not a just a story about another kind of architecture, but more about another kind of lifestyle. The Edible Edifice (EdEd) is a Complete Inhabitation System, an Environment for Collective Existence, an Urban Survival Kit. It grows, it glows, it waters, it collects, it connects. The EdEd’s main mechanism is organic, designed to become symbiotic with its users. It is meant for cities, rooftops, terraces, abandoned buildings, empty lots, balconies, abandoned highways, restored brownfields, empty factories, parking lots, entropic parks, moribund airfields.
It grows, you and your family or clan live in it. That simple, don’t take our word for it, get it from the “Man Who Ate His Beard.”
Excerpt from the tale as told by the “Man Who Ate His Beard”
(Piero Frassinelli, Superstudio)
…………………………….
The Video will include a guest appearance by Piero Frassinelli, a member of Superstudio since 1968 and part of the original cast in the 1973 16mm film “Ceremony”.)
Title: THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BEARD AND THE EDIBLE EDIFICE
1 Channel Video 3 minutes loop?.
Production:
AVATAR ARCHITETTURA: Pier Paolo Taddei and Nicola Santini
+PTL: Peter Lang
played by Piero Frassinelli, Superstudio
CAST: (TBA)
Video production: Eva Sauer, Michela Franzosa and Rachel Selker
Concept: Taddei, Santini,+ Lang
Script: Peter Lang
Premise: “life on the Zero Kilometer Footprint.”
TIME: in a near future when transportation is reduced to necessity.
PLACE: A middle sized city like Florence.
SOUND: water drops.
Part 1
Scene 1.A: (ANIMATION SHOT: Google Earth fades to real Earth)
Scene 1.B: CAMERA SEQUENCE, MORNING: Several people walk into a building from the street and climb the stairs to the roof. They begin to assemble a tubular Edible Edifice. They bring plants and flowers and make basic furniture.
Part 2
Scene 2.A: (ANIMATION SHOT) Farmlands, irrigation canals, birds, sheep, garbage, waste, etc.
Scene 2.B CAMERA SEQUENCE EVENING MOVING AROUND the Edible Edifice, a House of Red Tubes emerging in and out of the ground. Water is spilling out like fountains, seeds, fruits, hoses, bugs, sun, rugs tents, sleeping bags, dirt.
Part 3.
Scene 3A: (ANIMATION SHOT) the sea, lakes, water, rain, desert, soil, hard earth, rock, stone, bones, empty buildings, abandoned spaces, ditches, holes, pits, volcanoes.
Scene 3B: CAMERA SEQUENCE NIGHTFALL: As the evening sun sets the people gather round the Man Who Eats His Beard to hear stories of the past and future. The Man Eats His Beard illustrates the stories with drawings on large sheets of paper. The people gather round begin to eat food, drink, and then they begin to eat the house, the tubes, the ground. (homage to Superstudio: “Ceremonia”).