We are Sky-Breakers

YEAR: 2024
MEDIUM: Live-action essay film, 20:00 mins
FUNDING: Deep Futures Research Group, Design Lectorate at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague

We are Sky-Breakers explores the connection between puppets, Tricksters and riddles.

In the form of a ‘live-action essay film’ performed at a symposium, it encapsulates my research conducted through the Deep Futures Research Group at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Through this fellowship, I theoretically deepened my practice of making extinct bird puppets by researching and making connections to the mythological figure of the Trickster. I set out to ask how a revival of the Trickster figure can help to tell stories of extinction? And how Trickster qualities, such as disruptive imagination, can contribute to contemporary discourse around climate collapse? These questions brought me to the Tricky linguistic world of riddles.

In Trickster spirit, in its form, We are Sky-Breakers prods and pokes at the medium of lecture, performance and film, pulling them apart at the seams. By hooking up a camera to an auditorium projector, I created a live ‘film’, watched in real time. In lecture-style, I translated a PowerPoint into a script and choreographed movements, performed as a physical slideshow. It included printed research images, activation of my puppets, cue cards, handwritten notes, glossary definitions, and books that informed my research. This scene was framed in the camera and projected on the wall. The audience could also see me performing in the foreground, revealing the mechanics of the filmmaking process. They could choose which perspective to look at: the whole picture, or the frame I wanted them to see.

Credits

Video documentation: Alkaios Spyrou.

Camera for performance: Alex Wight.

Developed for: Fault Lines symposium at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

Speaker-respondent for symposium: Dr. Filipa Ramos.