Alexander Carver

A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.

The adolescent sons of an expatriated Chinese physicist visit her in the United States, while she and her colleagues pursue the development of a massive particle collider with which to understand the origin of the Universe. A queer Science Fiction, that engages the utopian impulses of the genre, not through the imagining of another world, but through the rendering of this world as Other. All subjects are treated as alien, or as radical others, who search for, or advance different ideological, psychological, or sexual ideals of belonging. Subjects oscillate between the contemplation of past societal traumas and idealizations of futurity that refuse to synthesize or resolve, but instead reveal a troubling satire of the present.

Mallard Gibson and Singuz Gumpfree have disowned the society of men: they have instead long conversations with a hare named Jackrabbit, with whom they share a shack on the banks of the East River. Amongst mystic visions, dark humour and anarchic associations of heterogeneous elements, Abrantes stages a post-modern, urban, completely delirious Alice in Wonderland, with a twist in the tail in store for the unsuspecting rabbit.

This lyrical work adapted from a two-channel installation traces parallel histories of colonial power dynamics in Puerto Rico, the pillaging of the land and people in the 16th century, and a shift toward concerns about public health in the 19th century, all refracted through the lens of contemporary neurosis and erotic comedy.