Chimera Project

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In this last year I have been developing a transmedia science fiction film project called Project Chimera, which addresses how to recover memory and feelings in a world that view them as outdated practices.

In 2055, as a consequence of the technologization of life, a global government system applied a memory and feelings erasure device to facilitate order and generate the energy that posthuman communities need to live on the periphery of the large territories in which the world is divided.

Proyecto Chimera is a cinematographic, curatorial, artistic and pedagogical experiment of writing and screenwriting.

This Wednesday, November 20 at 6:30 p.m., we are hosting a new presentation of the colaborative scriptwriting, one of the platforms of Chimera Transmedia Project.

We invite you to the Agora on the second floor of the Technology Laboratory El Rule.

This is an ongoing project that include scriptwriting workshops, conversational and performative writing and presentations in different locations to speculate about memory and feelings in the future using the film apparatus to produce site specific archives to write expended scripts.

María Berns is a filmmaker and sociologist. She completed postgraduate studies in Mexico and the United States in sociology, film, and creative writing. Her films have been screened at festivals in the United States and Europe. She was awarded the prestigious Kodak Prize for her movie The Bride. In Tijuana, she directed the first children's film workshop in Baja California. She was a visiting filmmaker at Istanbul Bilgi University film school and Rochester Institute of Technology where she filmed Rome, Jamaica in Winter and Black Ice. At the University of Texas at El Paso, she wrote the novel Deer and Butterflies that she is adapting to film. She worked as a screenwriter in Channel 11 of Mexico City and Telemundo. During 2008-2009 she served as the Correspondents Coordinator in NOTIMEX. With a scholarship granted by IVEC, she developed the transmedia project Visit as Art in the Port of Veracruz. There she made the feature film So Long. She is the director of Axolotl Cinema, a studio for the production of expanded and transmedia scripts.

www.proyectoquimeracdmx.com
https://cineexposemariaberns.weebly.com/

Brief description of the project
Chimera Project is a science fiction, psychological thriller film that explores how remembering and feeling are transformed into outdated practices in a post human world.

At present we are witnesses, and sometimes part, of the international and national migrations by which women, men, children, old women need to leave their past lives which remain in their places of origin or as ruins along the roads to be able to migrate. More often than not, they need to forget everything to be able to integrate into their host countries.

In this context I wonder what and how we will remember in the future. What will happen to our past lives? What will the memory consist of? What will be the form of memory? That's when I came up with this story of a future where people do not remember and time has stopped because of its constant repetition. When everyone lives a kind of life that only happens as mechanisms that are functional to a global system of domination that uses the memories of humans as energy to operate a new invisible and silent new society.
And, I also wonder, what happen to the feelings associated with such memories? How can they recover, understand and experience themselves? Is it that these feelings can´t be shared?

It was clear to me that this kind of project required another way of writing the script. It was pertinent to think of an open script that proposes unexpected and provocative interactions between times, spaces, characters and stories, points of view and perceptions, emotions and thoughts, reflections and reactions extracted from a database following a logic characteristic of cyber culture to create narratives that vary according to certain patterns.

The script needs to integrate different forms of representation that are transformed and changed. In the context of digital culture, the script would not establish a single route but a range of possibilities. Its characteristic modularity is presented as collections of texts that, despite their dispersion and movement, allow them to exist as different versions of a list of thematic and gestural figures.

The script of forgetfulness is perhaps an artifact that articulates textual materials, somatic experiences and metacognitive materials and demands to be linked with other texts to detach from the narrative and promote an accumulation of fictions that create another kind of history.

The script becomes a structure and a narrative strategy that fails to materialize more than at times, which have no beginning or end, it is a constant flow, without past and without future, a structure that is repeated in one and a thousand versions of itself, an open narrative and in constant process of updating the writing itself.  

Thus, I have been writing, along with people that participate in the scriptwriting workshops that I  am organizing for that purpose. The scriptwriting workshops take place in some of the locations of the film, enabling participants to write from the memories that they have oaf these sites.

Narrative structures make contact with the fragments of the central script. At times, they worked as modules that move and re-assemble with others, breaking the unity of space, time and action. They are developments that connect with other narrative structures. Plots that intersect, start a sequence with one and continue with another plot. Dream, memory, desires of the different characters.

The scripts that people write in the workshops are extensions, expansions of the central script. The scriptwriting takes into account the experiences and narrative structures of people who inhabit certain places and carry specific experiences that can not be transferred to other areas of public and private experience in the city.

The film is the mythological journey of Helena and Martinez through a space of dreams, desires and memories as they confront feelings they do not know. They move stories from the past that they do not remember, and seek to repair something deeply damaged in them.

Venue: 

Laboratorio de Tecnologías El Rule - Ciudad de México, Mexico

Dates: 

Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - 18:30

Category: 

Dates: 

Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - 18:30
  • Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas 6
    06000   Ciudad de México
    Mexico
    19° 26' 1.284" N, 99° 8' 28.842" W