THE HOUSE ON THE WASTE GROUND ▪️ LIVE CINEMA & BUTOH DANCE PERFORMANCE
In present-day Mexico City, architect Alejandro is trying to keep his small practice alive under mounting debt and a deteriorating marriage. An extraordinary client named Marta offers him a commission too lucrative to refuse: design a house of exact geometric proportions on the site of an abandoned landfill. She pays a huge advance in Swiss francs and vanishes, leaving almost no explanation.
Almost immediately the logic of the commission begins to spread into everything around him. Strange murders appear on the news. Architectural tracings, city routes, Mesoamerican symbols and fragments of occult geometry start to look like parts of the same design. At the same time the series seems to open a second film inside the first — the story of a young dancer, Natalia, who performs with mechanical wings and becomes entangled in a bizarre criminal investigation involving ritual signs, duplicated identities and a mysterious family history.
The two narratives move beside one another for a long time with no clear connection. Mexico City remains material and ordinary. The impossible appears inside the everyday. Alejandro does what an architect does: he tries to turn uncertainty into structure. The more frightened he becomes, the more desperately he searches for connections — without yet understanding that the decisive event has already taken place, and that the world he is trying to map is no longer governed by ordinary time.
THE PERFORMANCE
The House on the Waste Ground — Live Cinema & Butoh Dance Performance creates an unstable space where mimodrama, projection, live image, movement, music and physical presence begin to contaminate one another.
The audience does not simply watch Alejandro’s story.
It enters the architecture surrounding him.
Image becomes memory.
Memory becomes space.
Space begins to dream.
CREATED BY
Written, Created & Produced by George Morieli
Production - Videotravel Club LLC
Presented within NOUMEN ART Festival
SOMETHING ELSE WILL HAPPEN
A small part of the evening will remain deliberately undisclosed.
Expect a few sensory provocations inspired by Mexico — something to taste, something to drink, perhaps even a distant echo of Aztec cuisine.
No full menu will be announced in advance.
Some things are better encountered before they are explained.