ABOUT THE PROJECT

Esperpento is a virtual space, inspired on the aesthetic vision of Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Specifically the War Paintings and his famous, Caprichos.

The project is a universe where tragedy, sarcasm, and comedy are portrayed as a deformed and apocalyptic mirror of reality; In this world, circumstance is the source of tragedy, and the grimace produced by this tragedy is what rules its form.

Esperpento is an exploration about the rejection of the different and the dehumanization of the stranger. Why the foreigner (who looks different) is often shunned, despised and criminalized?

This virtual universe will work primarily as an immersive interactive installation and performance its first iteration will take place on the all Fall of 2018 at 3 Legged Dog Art and Technology Center in NYC.

Esperpento (a Spanish literary term for “monstrosity”) is a digital performance event - a charged visual performance that allows the viewer to see through a monstrous lens. Rather than using the “monster” to critique societal ills, Esperpento embraces strangeness and deformity in order to challenge conventions of beauty, familiarity, and what is “normal” or “native” to the human condition.

Esperpento is a series of 3D digital events which explores the dehumanization of the stranger. In a vivid sequence of natural and manmade disasters, rendered through a real-time video game engine, victims and perpetrators collide with increasingly interchangeable ethnic, class and cultural markers. These "Esperpento Events" are a digital meditation on the rejection of foreignness, and why we shun those who look (or appear to look) different from the people in the US.

Goya’s War Disasters and Black Paintings are, in substance and form, a template for Esperpento. These paintings are a testament of genuine protest, full of style and piercing opinion, that simultaneously document and comment on reality.

The performance aspect of Esperpento is a play written by William Burns called “Two Red Lights and a Red One”. The play is a free adaptation from a spanish play “Luces de Bohemia” by Valle-Inclan. The show is about the vicissitudes of a blind Poet, Max Starpower,  who suffers through his blindness and the economic hardships of the “Esperpento” world. “Two Red Lights and a Red One" is a full-on digital puppetry extravaganza, utilizing new techniques specially developed for the show. It will be delivered by performers and 2 puppeteers. We are happy to announce that “Max Starpower” will be played by the great “Flako” Jimenez!

The Latino community and other minorities will be the main focus group for this production. The technology and the delivery of the animations are the major points for connection with these communities, basically promoting technology made by and for Latinos.