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‘SOH29 The Epic’: A fusion of time and culture
Through his latest project SOH 29 The Epic, Dutch artist SOH Alex Vermeulen envisions a harmonious intermarriage of east and west, the past and the future.
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In the dark: 'Lunacy Leads to the Carnival of Souls' is one of the photographs on display at the 'SOH29 The Epic' exhibition taking place at the Dutch cultural center, Erasmus Huis, until March 15. (Courtesy of Syndicaat Alex Vermeulen/-)
R
emakes and reimaginings of old media is an ordinary thing these days, from video games to movies “loosely” based on something released years or even decades ago.
Something extraordinary can come out of an original work that blends influences from two venerable sources while managing to slip in psychological themes – all done in a format that most people may not expect, given the contents.
That’s precisely what Dutch artist SOH Alex Vermeulen did with SOH29 The Epic, a multidimensional media artwork that took him three years to complete.
Loosely based on the Sanskrit epic Ramayana and William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, SOH29 The Epic is described as “a culmination of a series of ‘imaginary’ films” Vermeulen had begun directing in the 1980s, bringing to mind the old format of film-books that are made to document an existing film.
The SOH29 The Epic showcase, on at the Erasmus Huis cultural center in Jakarta from Feb. 28 to March 15, consists of 32 photographs alongside costumes conceived by Dutch designer Rien Bekkers.
The latest exhibition marks the third time SOH29 The Epic has been made available to the public. It was exhibited in the TONYRAKA Gallery in Bali and in Kerta Niaga in Jakarta last year.
The storyline of SOH29 The Epic takes place in the far future of 2088, set in a futuristic megalopolis called Raksasa Kota, which loosely translates as the giant city. Time is a central theme in the story and events from the past and the future sometimes show glimpses of a parallel universe.
While visitors might get the gist of the story through the photographs and costumes, the full extent of SOH29 The Epic can be experienced by perusing the interactive web-book available in the website soh29-the-epic.com.
First launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali last year, the web-book consists of 32 chapters, featuring both narration and text alongside the images, which have been enhanced with animation and music by American composer David Shea.
While the story itself feels quite complex, keeping in mind the source material, it becomes much more striking when you consider that all of the parts are portrayed by a troupe of Balinese dancers aged from 6 to 10 years old. Vermeulen told The Jakarta Post that this was indeed a deliberate decision.
“It has two stories actually. First of all, [Bekkers] made his costumes while staying in Bali. He introduced me to the costumes and asked ‘Can you do something with them?’ I told him that he would need to make them larger, but then he suggested that Balinese children would be perfect because they learn Balinese dancing from a young age and that they would fit the costumes,” Vermeulen said.
“I said, ‘Okay, that’s nice, but they’re actually a mixture of eastern and western Shakespearean costumes’. I thought it would be awkward to have Balinese kids playing in Shakespearean costumes, but then I thought, nobody did it before.”
From there, Vermeulen looked into what the Balinese kids were taught, which included Ramayana, in essence an age-old love story.
Vermeulen then looked into Ramayana’s relation with the West, finding it in Othello because of Shakespeare’s penchant for tragedies and love stories.
“I looked into both stories and they were quite similar, so I wrote a new story based on both. The names were also quite similar and I translated them into Esperanto, which was designed to be a common language for everybody,” Vermeulen says.
Alongside the literary classics, Vermeulen also injected psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of archetypes, elemental categories and iconography as a way to unite SOH29 The Epic’s influences.
“The reason for that is because I think envy, jealousy, competition, love and respect are human behaviors. I integrated them all into the story and metaphorically into the images.”
The characters themselves were written with the Jungian archetypes in mind, with each costume tailored specifically down to every minute stitch to describe each individual character.
“For example, one costume has a black-and-white theme. The character is part of a gang that expresses itself in black and white, as they are the protectors of good and bad. So we designed the leader of the gang to be in white and black and the followers to be black and white,” Vermeulen said.
Bekkers said of the costumes that he was given the characters’ information as background, allowing him to discuss with Vermeulen the symbolism behind each outfit.
“In all of my career, in all the works I’ve made, is a mix of cultures. I think that’s very important because if you speak about dramas like Shakespeare’s, it’s not for Finland or Denmark, it’s worldwide.
“The relationships between people and the problems he describes is worldwide, so you can make Asian-looking costumes for Shakespeare, no problem,” Bekkers said, adding that the costumes also combine contemporary and historical influences.
For Vermeulen, he sees the costumes as not from the past or present, but rather they are timeless.
“It’s how we create this whole story. The background looks like retro science-fiction, the children play and behave like adults and the subject can be said to be heavy, but the children are the future and children are getting smarter and smarter.” (ste)
