Maggessi/Morusiewicz: Wormhole Stories

Wormhole Stories” is a multimedia performance by Maggessi/Morusiewicz, who present a slew of stories of draining frustration and of never-ending pleasure, inspired by films and their own daydreaming(s). Some of the stories originate within various wormholes, while some others resemble wormholes through their spiral shapes, or they evoke wormholes through the use of light, sound, and material objects. Some of the stories share protagonists, themes, and moods, mushrooming from and converging into one another. Some appear as strange encounters to others, bouncing off of them like spaceships that lose control of their peripheral vision, while they are about to set out on a scarily unpredictable trip through a black hole. What all the stories have in common is time: expanding, sprawling, and rhizomatic. Their time is one of a detour, of a meantime, and of a process. This time slows down and pauses at what may pass unnoticed on the way towards a climactic final destination.

“Wormhole Stories” are crowded with protagonists, some of them non-human. One of the latter is a screen that, through the use of colorful textile, queers the idea of a cinema screen: white, placed front and center, surrounded by darkness. There’s a phone and a microphone. There’s a yoga-ball that is in its own wormhole of becoming a spaceship. There’s a poem-long T-shirt, repeatedly taken off someone’s back during a sexual hook-up, and revealing, inch by inch, a wealth of visual information about the lover’s body. There are take-away pizzas, used to being discarded upon arriving at their destinations: such pizzas come from gay adult films, where they are a narrative trope and a never-to-be-eaten meal, ordered by men whose voracious appetites don’t focus on food and delivered by other men who aren’t in a hurry to swiftly return to their workplace where they would pick up another order. All of the protagonists are entangled in a post-cinematic performative relationship, one that distills and expands kernels of multiple films and remixes them into new or newly revisited characters, phrases, scenes, and dreams.