Courtesy of CROSSLUCID.
In a contemporary world obsessed with the notion of “progress” it can be hard to imagine anything but moving forward. Even more so, it’s nigh on impossible to consider the radical possibilities of some sort of “pre-state”, when capitalist ideology dictates that forward advancement is the only route toward knowledge and liberation. Berlin-based cross-disciplinary artistic duo, CROSSLUCID are challenging that ingrained concept in their latest work, an 8-minute short film called Primer—made in collaboration with fashion designer Don Aretino—which they describe as a “meditation on our turbulently fragmenting, transitory times.”
Through a series of strange, mismatched scenes, found footage and meditative sequences in elaborate constructed environments, CROSSLUCID, which consists of artists Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth, put forward a quasi-manifesto for what they describe as “a wireless pre” based on an essay by Romanian academic Ion Dumitrescu, published in the essay anthology, Black Hyperbox. Zybura and Toth tell SLEEK that this concept of a “wireless pre” is paradoxically one of an alternative future that makes it “partially possible to return to certain pasts, a gradual reconnecting with a pre-binary.” In short, it is a parallel existence that has not been cordoned off by the stultifying norms and binaries of capitalist progress, offering instead “unconstrained thought processes, a way of re-thinking and/or overturning the status quo and the seemingly undefined future.”
For CROSSLUCID, who ordinarily work in image-making (their first book Landscapes Between Eternities was published last year by Distanz) and for whom Primer marks their first foray into moving image, the ‘pre’ provides an opportunity to shed the constraints of the present and explore the multiplicities of a radically different past. In the film, a high eerie voice posits that where ‘post’ is “the agony of structure”, ‘pre’ is “the ooze of potentialities”. It is a charged and thought-provoking idea that is illustrated through wildly imaginative and futuristic visuals—complex space-age machinery, swirling bodies, weird hybrid forms and natural species rendered alien through CROSSLUCID’s lens. Of course, for the duo, the film was also a necessary chance to explore non-linear storytelling, to subvert monolithic narratives and to collaborate with Aretino, whose designs they believe embody the “potentiality of a more inclusive multitude of tactile and intuitive futures.”
Courtesy of Cross Lucid.
One of the film’s most memorable soundbites, is the query “Is gender-neutral ancestral and cis-gender the glitch?” Integral to CROSSLUCID’s thinking is an undoing of the hegemonic position occupied by binary genders in Western thought. They believe otherwise, and that there is potential for a new future that draws on the fluid ideologies of other pasts (the collective point to theories of “multinaturalism present in Amazonian tribes” as an example).
When asked whether they think a “wireless pre” is possible, CROSSLUCID is emphatic in their response. “Absolutely,” they reply optimistically. For the duo, they attribute this to the hardships of the present—”a generation that inherited nothing more than a collapsing societal reality and an increasingly hostile climate”—and from this precarious position, they believe progressive new ideas can bloom and flourish. As they note, “There comes a certain freedom with having nothing to lose.”
Primer can be watched in full here. Watch the trailer below: