• Sin Kabeza was co-founded, and is co-directed by Lissette Olivares and Cheto Castellano.
• Sin Kabeza Productions is a collective of activist artists dedicated to the creation and dissemination of experimental transmedia. Our current research is inspired by posthumanistic approaches to species intra-action, with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial epistemologies.
• Using a transnational
collaborative platform we have developed numerous projects that seriously engage digital cinematic production, postproduction, and distribution. We work across multiple genres, including experimental documentary, fiction, non-narrative, and hybrid productions. We are especially interested in exploring the interface between digital visualizing technologies and the live body, and we often work with simultaneous transmissions (projection, television, performance, installation). Our investment in transmedia storytelling allows us to envision the dissemination of our work across diverse media platforms that include performance, architectural design, multimedia installation, exhibition design, web interfaces, and printed matter. One of the greatest challenges in our work is to produce high quality but low budget special effects, using green screen, 2d and 3d animation and graphic design as a way of both citing, appropriating, and critiquing mainstream cinema’s technoindustrial methodologies.
• Some of the activists and institutions we have collaborated with (or are in process of collaborating with): Museum Sztuki (Poland), Mix Experimental Q***r Film Festival (NY), Sarai Exhibition Reader 09 (India), Donau Festival (Austria), dOCUMENTA(13) (Germany), Vozal de Perra (Spain), Roberto Meza (NYC), Ladi Sasha Jones (NYC), Mitch Joaquim-Terreform One (NYC), Jian Chen (NYC), Marissa Niño (Chile), Montserrat Niño (Chile), Elena Tejada Herrera (Peru), Atom Cianfarani (Canada), Esteban Cancino (Chile), Ivan Fuentealba (Chile), Marco Pizarro (Chile), amongst many others. IN PRODUCTION
Open TV (with host Coco Rico) (2013)
CoDirected by Lissette Olivares & Cheto Castellano
OPEN TV is a multimodal proposal that investigates creative and speculative approaches to the production of alternative television, uniting live performances, set design, digital cinema and animation, to create an inclusive, fun, colorful, and creative approach to media praxis. In contrast to mainstream television’s ideology of advertising, our approach encourages open access, so that the audiences have a greater opportunity to envision an alternate type of television experience. Seed: Visual Scapes from the Future (2012-2013)
Directed by Cheto Castellano & Lissette Olivares
The footage from Seed see was captured by intrepid documentarians that traveled through timespace to conduct fieldwork. This documentation uncovers a future world where animals are scarce and seeds are illegal, causing drastic relational transformations in homosapien society. From ritualistic performances to erotic multispecies encounters, the tension builds as the audience uncovers the aesthetics and erotics of co-evolution in a not so distant future. SEEDBANK (2012-2013)
Conceptual Design by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares
Architectural Renderings by Cheto Castellano
SEEDBANK attempts to meet with bacteria as actants and as bio-semiotic tropological figures. We draw from microbial theorist Myra Hird who argues that attention to microontologies might help us to move beyond the premise of human exceptionalism, enabling a symbiotic relationality where humans are “enmeshed in a web of co-domestication.”Hird argues that while most social scientists do not deal with theories of evolution, they do contend with the persistent social beliefs related to constructs such as altruism, fitness, selection, lower and higher organisms, which are framed as indigenous to nature. Hird claims that for this reason, social scientists need to be curious about competing claims within evolutionary theory, as they point toward potentially alternate accounts of the origins of sociable life.” Following Hird we extend the microbial organism’s importance in the rethinking of contemporary evolutionary theory to the realm of symbiotic co-evolution in knowledge production which includes art and culture. Just as DNA is situated with the bacterium’s organism, so SEEDBANK becomes an archival site for the display and dissemination of posthumanistic research. COMPLETED
La Zenaida (2012) 6:19
Directed by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares
Starring Ladi Sasha Jones & Coco Rico
La Zenaida is a remake of Colombian cumbia legend Armando Hernández’s music video of the same title. The video follows, “Zenaida” a black working class woman through NYC’s urban jungle, as Coco Rico’s trans animations pay homage and offer pleasure to working class women everywhere. Kiltr@ (2012) 24:54
Documented and Directed by Lissette Olivares and Cheto Castellano
Kltr@ is an emotive journey in search of alternate kinship approaches between people and street dogs. Through a series of interviews with artists, cultural institutions, and their companion species, as well as primary footage of dogs who live beyond the borders of domestic life in Santiago de Chile, we explore the co-evolutionary relationships between kiltr@s and “humans”, looking for clues about how they help each other to survive. Art Farm Revisited (2012) 23:00
Directed by Lissette Olivares, Roberto Meza and Cheto Castellano
Filmed by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares
Edited by Roberto Meza
In 2004 Belgian artist Wim Delvoye inaugurated Art Farm (Yishu Nongchang) a biological art project where pigs were tattooed in a farming village on the outskirts of Beijing, China. At the beginning of the project’s development Delvoye claimed that the pigs would be saved from the slaughterhouse to become living art. But by the end of 2005, the pigs were slaughtered and transformed into art objects, their skins and bodies exhibited and sold in prestigious contemporary art institutions. Highlighting behind the scenes footage filmed by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares between 2004 and 2005 this documentary and experimental approach to multispecies ethnography revisits Art Farm with a critical lens. Cheto Castellano becomes the film’s primary interlocutor, providing an emotive critique of Art Farm’s failure, its production of a colonial gaze, while implicitly critiquing white privilege and the neoliberal commodification present within the art-culture system. Editor Roberto Meza affectively organizes this archive of primary footage to uncover Art Farm’s social life, concentrating on the relationships built amongst pigs and workers while raising important questions about multispecies ethics and the consequences of treating pigs as commodities in the contemporary art market. This film is dedicated to the pigs who died on Art Farm. Multispecies Pooja (2012) 04.34
Directed by Coco Rico
Benares or Varansi is one of the world’s most ancient and holy cities. For many, this site in India is a chakra of the Earth, where the River and Goddess Ganga accepts people’s offerings as she washes away lifetimes of sin and offers renewed hope. Coco Rico travels to this charged site to perform her own shamanic and ritual offerings for multispecies webs of life. Coco Rico’s Magical Phurba (2012) 1:34
Directed by Coco Rico
This video parodies the aesthetic of latino infomercials, offering a magical shamanic tool called Coco Rico’s Magical Phurba, infused with the healing power of Rinpoche Luk, used to extract negative vibes, curses, mal de ojo, and generate positive energy. This magical phurba is part of Coco Rico’s multispecies consciousness toolkit, developed to prevent the end of the world as (so called) humans know it. Naturaleza Mu**ta (2012), 3:29
Directed by Cheto Castellano
Naturaleza Mu**ta (Dead Nature, or Still Life) is a filmic vanitas that explores the affect of inertia through a lens where speculative scenes build repetitious momentum and angst. The aesthetic of the film cites the photography of Richard Ballens and the art historical tradition of still life painting, in particular the vanitas, which was a representational methodology used from the medieval period through the 16 and 17th century, using symbolic elements to explore emptiness. Naturaleza Mu**ta was filmed during an important historical moment in Chile, when Sebastián Piñera, the first conservative candidate with ties to the dictatorship, was elected President in 2010. Castellano’s screenplay responds to the tension he foresees in the socio-political arena, asking what is to come from the political inertia of Chile’s current order. Filmed during a residency at Colectivo Mapocho, an artist space nestled within the colonial architecture of what was once Chile’s first hotel, and that is currently one of Santiago Centro’s most iconic urban centers, and neighborhood for the lumpenproletariat (drug dealers, brothels, poor immigrants, etc). Marx refers to the lumpenproletariat as the "refuse of all classes", including "swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggars, and other flotsam of society", however, in contrast to Marxist characterizations which frame the lumpen as a potential enemy to revolution, Castellano’s anarchist vision frames the anonymous lumpen in the video as potential catalysts. Aventuras Familiares (2011) 29:15
Directed by Cheto Castellano
Co-Directed by Daniel Benavides & Lissette Olivares
Synopsis of Family Adventures
In the near future, at the threshold of a political transition that seeks to transform the state of Chile into a private entity, a non-traditional family begins their adventure. Triggered by the discovery of a family secret, mother Trans (Carola Jérez), father Payaso (Samuel Ibarra) and porn-star wannabe daughter Jot (Aida Vera) begin a life-changing journey that takes them from the countryside to the apocalyptic urban center of Santiago, where they must battle against cyborgs controlled by the evil multinational Horsehead Corporation. As the family joins an anarchist battle led by Segundo Malatesta (Antonio Becerro) and Rata (Domingo Santamaría) they must struggle to keep their family united while fighting for a better future. Concept
Aventuras Familiares is an experimental film and trans media project that seeks to define and develop new audiovisual languages and possibilities. As an experiment in genre collage Aventuras Familiares merges science fiction, drama, and suspense, while citing and incorporating mass media communication aesthetics including the parody of Latin American telenovelas, reality tv, as well as exploring marginalized mass media forms like po*******hy. Conceived as a hybrid and interdisciplinary entity, each element in its production (story, photography, editing, genre, casting, special effects, etc.) attempts to exceed the structure of traditional film narratives. Furthermore, as a collective and anarchist endeavor, Aventuras Familiares sought to enforce an anti-hierarchical production structure and its creative concept was developed by three consultants (Cheto Castellano, Daniel Benavides, and Lissette Olivares) along with substantial input from its production crew. An important element in this project is that none of the cast members identify as actors -- instead, the characters are played by Chilean underground contemporary performance artists and by street performers. Similarly, much of the original “script” was drastically transformed during production since part of our objective was to blur the boundaries between performance and film. All of these interdisciplinary attributes interrupt the reproduction of the real and problematize frontiers between performance and film, visual culture and visual anthropology, documentary and fiction, fantasy and science fiction, creating what we believe is a unique experiment in trans-media. CURATORIAL PRODUCTION
Co-Evolution & Complementarity: Encounters between Multispecies and Transmedia Storytelling (2012) , Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin
Consecuentes: Radical Performance from the Americas, vol.1 (2011), Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
PRINTED MATTER
Consecuentes: Radical Performance from the Americas (2011)
(catalog)
Coco Rico! Artist Catalog (2012) (catalog)
