As part of the multimedia project Tulse Luper Suitcases, which includes films, performances, installations, and sites, the 16th Festival exhibits Tulse Luper VJ Performance, an open-air presentation commanded live by Peter Greenaway, this year’s special guest.
The images projected onto the side of the SESC Avenida Paulista building will be mixed in real time and show scenes from the fantastic life of Tulse Luper. Greenaway commands the opera by means of a touch-sensitive plasma monitor, an interface created especially for the project. Tulse Luper VJ Performance is another angle Greenaway has found from which to question the limits of traditional cinema, wrestle the power of narrative, and propose new models and situations for the public in its relationship with image and sound within the context of public space and collective experience.
Tulse Luper Suitcases is an ambitious work in progress that has been under way for some five years, a period in which the artist has taken various media as his vehicle while avoiding establishing hierarchies between old and new, traditional and experimental, common and noble within the art system. High-definition cinema, DVD, exhibitions in galleries and museums, a novel, a collection of short stories, a script, a play, a Web site, an on-line game, a Second Life avatar; Luper is viral action, a device of 21st-century man, contaminating and being contaminated, who does not halt his march for anything, but advances through the world—real or virtual, material or imaginary.
Whoever experiences Tulse Luper Suitcases in its complex totality (VJ performance, installation, films, texts, game, etc.) stands before much more than just an anthology of mediums and techniques, but an idea in constant mutation—which, in this uncontrollable and irreversible process, can incorporate, phagocytise, or even destroy the platforms upon which it rests. It is, in short, a concept so abstract and alien to categorisations as any artist could produce in the face of this contemporary world. Or, as Peter Greenaway simply states: “I am Tulse Luper”.
