Treatment Draft 15 October 2003
Matthew Barney and Arto Lindsay are collaborating on a trio electrico for the upcoming Carnaval in Salvador, Bahia. The trio will perform one night only on February 19th, on the Beach Route. Their trio provides a stage for Arto Linday and his band, and for guests Maria Monte, and the Cortejo Afro Drum Group.
Barney and Lindsay are structuring their bloco around the image of a tree. An enormous forestry truck leads the bloco with an uprooted tree held high in its front mandible. The forked tree top has no leaves or signs of new growth, yet appears to have been recently uprooted. The core of the tree and the center of its root structure are made of a pristine, milky-white plastic. A crystal clear plastic ruffle enwraps the tree trunk where the earth once held the tree in the ground. The body of the vehicle is splattered with fresh mud. Its massive earth-caked tires have been fitted with white plastic cleats which slap against the asphalt as the truck rolls slowly through carnaval, creating an audible, amplified samba beat with the spacing of the cleat pattern.
Five horsemen surround the sprawling roots of the tree. They are costumed in long red cloaks with high arching collars. Each horseman has a small flame emanating from the top of his head, and his face is shrouded behind a long beaded veil. Peering over the high collar of each horseman is a Golden Lion Tamarin Monkey*. Perched high on the shoulders of the horsemen, the monkeys will appear to be part of the flaming headdress.
A lone figure is suspended at the top of the tree between its two upright branches – this is Julia Butterfly Hill, an ecological activist who spent two years (1997-1999) living at the top of a two hundred foot Great Redwood Tree in California in efforts to save the tree and its neighboring forest from clear cutting. Both Julia’s character and the team of horses are out-growths of the plastic core, and will wear costumes of Teflon and prosthetic plastic.
Underneath the forestry truck lives a character who is situated around the moving hydraulics of the truck’s articulating midsection, and beneath its spinning drive shaft. He will be nearly invisible to the carnaval audience, but will be simultaneously filmed in private as the trio moves through the carnaval course. This character is a large-machinery fetishist. There is a small subculture of men with strong sexual affections for heavy machinery, who tend to give their trucks affectionate names, write poetry to them, and in extreme cases are physically intimate with the machines. A tinted glass compartment would be constructed under the truck where a single camera could privately capture this character as he is intimate with the truck in close-up while glimpses of the carnaval crowd will be captured in the background as the truck moves along the streets.