The Future Is Behind You

‘The future is behind you’ creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930’s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. I am looking, as always in found material, for the story below the story. Here there are at least 3 levels: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Germany near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy. Unusually, the mother is main cinematographer; 2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities—the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised ‘bride,’ the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult.

At once biography & fiction, history & psychology, ‘The future is behind you’ excavates gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private & public histories. Music by John Zorn, arranged and played by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman.

A.C.