L'Almanach 16 : Tobias Madison

The entirety of Tobias Madison’s project is caught inside a historical, uncertain, fractal movement that is neither utopian nor dystopian but rather depends on an alternate history, meaning it allows for multiple narrative variations, for an openness to possible worlds based on contrasting points; as if we were in a time before the orgy, before the melancholic collapse of postmodernity. In a parallel world where everything remains into play, where the liberation of productive, destructive forces is still a possibility, where the indefinite reproduction of ideals, fantasies, images and dreams would still be ahead of us. As if it were possible to reenact the history of critical thinking, of ideological crises, to retrace the narrative of sexual revolutions and anarchist counter-revolutions, to give Marx and Fourier the means to succeed, to forget the non-event of the end of art, or rather the end of the idea of modern art. 
As if we were eternal children who would be playing sex, politics and war games, passionate children playing with all their power to act, their power of desire and freedom. Here is all the history, the fictional knot of Tobias Madison’s new video presented at Le Consortium Museum, the history of a revolt by a gang of preteens armed to the teeth against the adult order and its morals. This dislocated dramaturgy is based on a remake of Emperor Tomato Ketchup, the 1971 cult movie by moviemaker and poet Shuji Terayama, a strange fantastic tale that caused a scandal at the time for its transgressions, its sexualization and its satire of leftist Maoist movements that were then emerging in Japan. In this adaptation by Madison, the political question moves onto another territory: the educational institution where children have been trained, the family structure and  its authoritarian and hierarchical logics.

Furthermore, this questioning builds itself more subterraneously in opposition to the original movie’s narrative conventions. Each element of the video, the actors, backdrops, costumes, lines, follows an independent score evolving outside a framework or general agenda, as is the soundtrack realized in collaboration with Stefan Tcherepin. It is a way of excluding the possibility of constituting a linear narrative, of identifying with characters in a state of eternal transformation, of writing again the history of “becoming-children,” of the mad people and poets of 1970s experimental cinema.
–Stéphanie Moisdon
 

Born in 1985, Tobias Madison lives and works in Zurich and Los Angeles