The Butterfly’s Evil Spell by Lara Schnitger & My Barbarian (2012)
By My Barbarian
The Butterfly's Evil Spell is a collaboration among the three members of LA based collective My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade) and sculptor Lara Schnitger. Playing between the dramatic spaces of fantasy and realism, the piece uses a fragmentary Symbolist theater text from 1920 by Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, entitled El Maleficio de La Mariposa, as a starting point. The artists responded with a performance video and installation that re-stages scenes from the play in elaborate sculptural costumes. The group also generated original material drawn from the circumstances in their own interconnected lives, shot on location in their shared LA studio, extending a relationship between imagination and social reality. El Maleficio de La Mariposa, with a cast of talking insects, tells the story of a mother beetle whose son is "going to be a poet" against her wishes. The son, in another scene, abandons his girlfriend Sylvia because he is "in love with the butterflies," a wistful declaration that carries notes of both poetry and prohibited sexual desire, linking the two. The artists perform these scenes in the video, wearing masks and costumes that b…
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