The Bruno Project
A digital video shot in three locations, London, Prague and Naples, featuring three walks through these cities; three psycho–geographical dérives through history + time; three dinners (which reference the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno’s dialogue, The Ash Wednesday Supper); and three variant groupings of Renaissance visionaries, artists and magicians, with Giordano Bruno as principal guide. The three cities are imagined as temporary autonomous zones, INTERZONES, of radical discourse, ecstatic envisioning, and alchemical resistance.
BRUNO UNDER: Sequence 01
School of Night – Materia Confusa (primary material of creative chaos)
Bruno in London: The “mad priest of the sun” and Marlowe. They meet to fire their own chaos. They are each in this zone more separately than in the others. They walk their separate streets, each one crossing through a different Interzonal portal. Bruno, amused by both duty and vice, a fevered mathematician of the religio–political, he is the only one really watching the clock. The sequence ends with a farewell on the bank of the Thames in Deptford – arrival and departure as a fever-scream duet – the shock blast of seditious thoughts, letting go of the ballast, now prepared to un–think the real and welcome the unthinkable.
BRUNO BETWEEN: Sequence 02
Angelic Desire – Realgar (powder of the cave, Pan’s Salt)
Bruno in Prague: He haunts or witnesses disenchantment, that characteristic Max Weber felt most defined modernism – and which is a characteristic between ecstasy and some one or several of its many opposites. John Dee’s ecstatic conversations, paired with his disenchantment, in pas de deux with a later visionary of Prague, Franz Kafka, drifting down from movie–going dandy to terminal ascetic. The sequence ends with Bruno’s forced departure – the inquisition and state apparatus for erasure and “border control” – as if the angel Dee loses is replaced by Benjamin’s “angel of history,” wheeling backwards through a storm of debris.
BRUNO OUT: Sequence 03
No Hope/ No Fear – Erroribus (catalogue of errors)
Bruno in Naples: no longer questioned, simply stored and tortured by the Church in conversation with a catalogue of past “errors”. A night of encounters between the aesthetic and the ruined. The project concludes as a kind of historical banquet, hosted by the famous Neopolitan femminielli, a “corporeal” banquet, involving delicacies of marrow and slight entertainments on the theme of massacre. (A renaissance banquet that is not an historical representation of anything “renaissance” except the politics inherited after.)
