| | E-mail: Julia Winter
Prospero´s Library
Or
the elements and origin of myths
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
(William Shakespeare, Tempest)
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THE CONCEPT
We live in an era when the mythologizing of consciousness has reached an epic scale. On the one hand, pr-companies, advertising technologies and mass media propaganda, and on the other hand the practically unattended corps of network culture with uncountable obvious and implicit mystifications, reality-games and provocations. We live in an epoch in which we very often can´t distinguish fiction from reality. And, if the fiction supersedes the reality, then there is a question of the quality of the fiction, about its ethical and aesthetic advantages.
In this context the figure of William Shakespeare has a special importance because there are so many myths created about him, and timeless fictions created by him. We don´t want to solve the "Shakespeare question". But we want to take this great poet as a starting point of the project.
The second starting point of the project is the film of Peter Greenway - "Prospero Books". He created the image of a universal library covering the entire world in space and time on motives Shakespeares "Tempest".
Our project is collective of artists, poets, animators and musicians to create a library in reality. Making a start from Shakespeare or, on the contrary, coming nearer to him, we will create the microworld including the books, performance, videofilms, animation films and other works of art. We intend not simply to do "modern treatment" of Shakespeare´s poetry, but rather to play some kind of "jazz improvisation" on motifs of his creativity.
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Maybe, Shakespeare will remain in the project as only the original epigraph, historical tuning fork, point of readout. We take, from his huge heritage, a small episode concerning the books of Prospero, and we offer to make these books into a kind of a reality. We aim to create original mythologies with these books. The theme of each book can be limited only by our consciousness. We hope that in this library will appear the books of: Waters, Earth, Fire, Air, Fault, Snow, Consciousness, Space, etc., etc.
THE PROJECT´S REALISATION
The opening day is planned at 23.04.2007 in Moscow, 443 years after the birth of William Shakespeare and 391 years from the date of his death. The project will be presented in the Central House of the Artists in Moscow at the Open Book festival in June 2007. The organization of exhibitions in Amsterdam, London, Strasbourg, Milan, Roma, Switzerland, Canada, Czech Republic, St.-Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Saratov, and Tulia is planned.
The artists, who take part in the project, will be:
Gunel Yuran and Michael Pogarsky (Kras Max Marra nogorsk), Andrey Suzdalev and Olga Khan (Moscow), Anna Guillot, Mavy Ferrando, Max Marra, Evelina Schatz, Stefano Soddu, Fausta Squatriti (Italy), Gillian McIver (England), Nickolai and Tatiana Selivanov, Viktor Goppe, Vladimir Smoliar (Moscow), Aleksandr Svirsky (Stavropol), Aleksey Malcev (Krasnodar), Eugenij Strelkov (N.Novgorod), Julia Winter (Holland) and others.
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