This piece has been conceived in collaboration with the Vietnamese / Swedish group « The Six Tones ». This ensemble consists of two Vietnamese traditional women musicians as well as Stefan Österjö, guitar player. Instead of writing a trio, I decided to work on a electric guitar solo, with a video including the two women musicians. When I started to shoot the video, I became concerned with more overarching questions, especially how, we as occidental, consider the oriental culture.
I started to see those two women as some archetype of Asian culture and I decided to look deeper into this subject. I did some research on the status of women in Asian countries, investigating their role in industrial production, army, entertainment etc… Some of the pictures I found on the Internet were totally scary, and I had this impression of a « post-human » world. The complex editing of the film is therefore based on some alternation between the two musicians who are treated as « neutral characters », simply looking at us and those pictures from the network demonstrating a critical statement of woman condition. In the film, we can observe also two slow motion landscapes showing the outside reality in a strange way. The first landscape is a view of an abandoned factory in Detroit, a symbol of economical collapse. The second is a montage of a devastated village after the tsunami in Fukoshima, a symbol of ecological collapse.
Disaster here creates another disaster there… maybe these are now the relations between occident and orient ? The musical layers have been composed as a counterpoint to the rhythmical patterns created by the imagery. The music can be minimalistic or very dense, sometimes quite independent from the video, sometimes precisely synchronized. All along the piece, the figure of the « guitar hero » is present as a self-icon, progressively damaged by the reflexive context (video). After the final sequence (Fukushima) a very cheap plastic guitar has replaced the sophisticated traditional instruments : a pathetic relic of some post-human world
