Cécile B. Evans: Amos' World

Cécile B. Evans: Amos' World
Degrés Est : Juliette Mock
October 25, 2019–January 26, 2020

Opening: October 24, 7–9pm

Cécile B. Evans: Amos' World
October 25, 2019–January 26, 2020
Amos' World is a fictional television series that combines puppetry, animation, and live action across three episodes to follow a hyperlinked narrative about a progressive housing estate, its architect, and the tenants. The architect’s ambitions for the perfectly networked individual-communal housing structure are disrupted as the tenants become increasingly alienated from the building’s promises and begin to negotiate their own agency within their real and rendered contours. A cataclysmic event forces a change on the protagonists and the format of the series itself. Together, they reorient their focus towards finding a solution. The rebellion of the characters’ emotions against the technological, ideological, and physical structures that aim to contain them unfolds an allegory for our existence within constructed realities.

Amos' building is a composite informed by the massive social complexes built after the second World War, derivatives of Brutalist ideology in which the individual exists within a purpose-built community, a networked system that aspires to tackle all areas of living and being. Inhabitants of these estates had their own individual living spaces interwoven into a larger infrastructure and social system: perfect communes for the Capitalist age, and yet they nearly always failed. The tenants often took most of the blame, being cited as not having conformed to the behaviours envisaged by the architects. In the exhibition, the visitors view the series from physical structures that extend the changing conditions of the series and situate the body within the familiar paradox of being "alone, together."

Cécile B. Evans draws on these references as an allegory for the networked age, presenting a stage on which the person-to-person power dynamics are played out and deconstructed through technological infrastructures. Through the narrative of Amos' World, Evans alludes to the top down architectural systems that pervade our digital interactions, subject to a similarly inevitable entropy that forges a fierce divide between the intention of its architects and the reality of life within these systems.