Wild Wild Beast is a four-part audiovisual series, co-produced with ArtyčokTV, an online platform for contemporary art. Drawing inspiration from the horror acid-western genre, the series explores the collapse of Western civilization. It is the result of a collaboration between the D'epog collective and filmmaker Marie Šprincl and set designer Matěj Sýkora. The fictional documentary self-referential framework of the actors' backstage life is interspersed with a trash retro-aesthetic. Through this cinematic mini-series, the work raises questions about the limits of humanity and what distinguishes human institutions from the atrocities they can perpetrate.
The project is co-produced with the contemporary art internet platform ArtyčokTV.
WILD WILD BEAST /PART I/
"A milkshake made of road movie, acid western, soap opera, queer fantasy and mockumentary. Blended as smoothly as the finest tomato juice in a Bloody Mary, sipped by the fire in the evening by TOM OF FINLAND, seated on the Moravian Sahara.
Blood, love, sex, tears, dancing, lipstick, booze, country, axes, Stetsons and gold mines, white wigwam in the dark night, gender-balanced cowboys and cowgirls, CENTAUR GIRL BOSS, immaculate conception, pregnant Radim, Zuzka chopping wood, Magda's hips swaying to the rhythm of hula hoop, Janeta casting pearls before swines, Lucie's tears, Zdenda's PowerPoint, Matyáš on the lawnmower.
Another Alvin Straight story. The power of stillness. WE'VE GOT THE POWER. The last straw. A pearl from a grain of sand. A never-ending story.WHERE DID YOU COME AND WHERE DID YOU GO, COTTON EYE JOE? Who will save this world? An immaculate centaur cub.
HOWGH.”
(c) Zuzana Janečková
WILD WILD BEAST /PART II/
Filled with objects at every turn
„The second part of the video series by the theater group D’epog, called Wild Wild Beast, was entrusted to the filmmaker and editor Marie Šprincl. Its title evokes Peter Handke's Three Essays, with the subtitle About a Pencil, Chair, and a Plate. Personally, I would add Jesus to this list of subheadings, whose story is also powerfully captured and told here. A title that belongs to the category of grace itself.
Five wild beasts (at least in this video series) from the Brno based squad, known for jumping between forms, languages, spaces, and media but primarily a theatrical strike force, take on almost Warholian solo performances in front of the camera in what could be called 'screen tests on a theme.‘ Their testimonies were assembled into an overlapping narrative about objects and cruel histories associated with them. Objects that seem innocuous—domestic staples of everyday life—are woven into stories where violence, struggle, trickery, and perhaps outright sadism prevail. In a setting resembling an abstracted western, five anonymous characters in cowboy shirts engage in imaginative storytelling without direct depiction. Nothing is shown literally; instead, the viewer's imagination is richly stimulated. The statements, or perhaps interrogations, lack clear connections, as the director employs several powerful tricks—cutting off statements before they reach a conclusion, digitally distorting the actors' faces into monstrous forms, and avoiding clear motivational links between the segments. Each segment is steered into a void, ending somewhere around a bend or corner, leaving us unsure if the narrative is blinded or continues on a long journey. We are only given a glimpse, a cut-out of something larger. That's enough. Or not enough."
(c) Lukáš Jiřička
