IT AIN’T GONNA FLY
EPISODE I
The insect television broadcasts the live show It Ain’t Gonna Fly, featuring a special guest – Fly Me, known for her famous performance in Yoko Ono’s Fly (1971). In the film, Fly Me performs choreography on the body of actress Virginia Lust. Alexia High, the host of the show, opens a conversation about cleanliness and hygiene as instruments of generating and maintaining power.
The interview draws on philosophical, sociological and aesthetic concepts that question the legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian dualism associating the corporeal or natural with that which is „wrong” or „primitive” – hence dangerous and in need of control. How can we upend the prevailing social and political order, in which our own unique and special bodies are less and less our own, despite the neoliberal illusion of democratic freedom? What risk to our future functioning as a society is posed by the necessary sanitary regime, which can be instrumentalized by the authorities? What do our bodies become in such circumstances, how do these metamorphoses proceed? We evoke the most well-known anti-purist concepts, including those by Mary Douglas, the author of Purity and Danger, Alexis Shotwell, who wrote Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, as well as Zygmunt Bauman’s theories about the present time.
The project conceived as a series of performative actions modeled after TV talk shows that take place in the world of insects. Its protagonists are always two houseflies: the hostess and an invited guest, different in each episode. The show has its permanent setting and music, including a number of characteristic jingles. The flies conduct conversations while sitting on tongues. By exploring the form of a talk show, a quasi-journalistic format in which the interlocutors do their best to provide live entertainment to viewers. The public merges with what is allegedly private, while gossip becomes a carrier of knowledge. As the title suggests, it will not turn out well.
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