This video work is the film version and was largely used as part of the live version of Extraordinary Aliens, performed in Month of Performance Art Berlin and Ausufern Festival 2013.
The title refers to the O1 artist visa for America called "Extraordinary Ability" and the title for a foreign resident as an 'Alien'. This work explores cultural, physical and emotional 'outsiderness' and cultural belonging in a cross-disciplinary performance art, dance and video piece spanning Germany, America, New Zealand and China. It questions the elitism of power structures deeply embedded within our global and communal society in relation to the identity and economic exchanges between bodies and cultures.
Influenced by Zizek's cultural theories and Wolfgang Suetlz's Transart Institute lecture on Cultural Translation, as well as personal cross-cultural friendships and relationships, moving between borders, it is a reflection upon relationship to community, self, body, the Earth, institutions and cultural identities. It questions the current economic investments within a 'globalised' milieu in allowing the other in and keeping the other out.
The film version layers a series of interviews with people across the globe who have migrated between countries and how this process was for them, over video footage shot in various parts of the world using a series of activist gestures, exchanges and transformations. Footage continues to be filmed, including in Beijing as part of the Red Gate Residency in 2014, where more interviews and film will be shot. It explores questions of belonging, cultural outsiderness, inclusivity and connection, what it means to belong and why as stories interweaved - as all Extraordinary Aliens on this planet.
The film will be completed during the Red Gate Residency in Beijing, China 2014.
A short version so far without interviews https://vimeo.com/77577956
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