Something Happens

MFA thesis University of Cincinnati
Video Installation
NTSC
Color, sound

Something Happens is a video installation that plays with the ideas of nonsensicality and emotionality by questioning what forms a consciousness of the emotional aspect of perception.

Something Happens is divided in two parts. The first part corresponds to a spatial performance of a classroom that has become a storage room for hundreds of chairs. The chairs had been in this room for years. My intention was to reactivate the room, the chairs, transforming the objects in spatial elements. The classroom thus became a playground. The end result of this play was an installation where chairs would pile-up in a way to form a sort of mass that would top a structure lifting from the ground. This structure would be a screen for a video - the part II of this project.
The second part of the project consists of the making of the video where I play with moments of split reality and daydreaming. For this video I used two identical classrooms: one very ordained, the second, at beginning alike the first, turning out to be a messy, chaotic, surreal classroom (corresponding to the actual room where the installation of chairs and video were set). The intention was to create a strong sense of split reality.

Video plot:
Inside of a classroom different teachers act as if they were addressing students in the classroom. A certain sense of frustration builds up and suddenly they start singing (an adaptation of Purcell's Dido's Lament: When ___ laid ___laid ___ May __wrongs create no trouble, no trouble in thy breast; Remember ___ remember __ but ah! forget ___fate. Remember __ but ah! forget ___ fate).

My interest in editing song this song was to pick from the desolation element but put it in context where it could better stress the role of memory in opposition to random expectations.

Something happens from Andre Alves on Vimeo.