Image from the performance of The Art of Change: A Libretto (2024) | Courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Chiara Bottici, and Matteo Procuranti
Synopsis: A community decides to pursue its revolutionary dream by adopting the principle of accelerated change, and applies it to every aspect of social life. The result is a utopian (or dystopian) world that may (or may not) turn out to be ours.
Event 1. Prologue
Flutist in dialogue with video projections and images from an angel of desire stitching.
Event 2. Video: Hartmut Rosa
Hartmut Rosa: It’s not just increasing the speed of transport, of communication, and also of production—of producing things—and then also of consuming things and throwing them away. The world changes at a higher pace, right, talking about change again. The rates of change increase. It’s not just the rates of change with respect to transport, or traffic, or communication; it’s the patterns of association, who interacts with whom, and how we interact. It’s the forms of practice, and therefore it’s also the forms of knowledge, the knowledge about everyday life, with, where, and who does what—all these things change at a higher pace.
ACT I
Scene: A townhall, during which a revolutionary leader addresses his audience. Images of a mass mobilization and of the New School Orozco room in the background. In a dark corner, the angels of desire do shadow work, stitching old clothes by hand.
Event 3. Quotation: Flutist and Philosopher in dialogue
Philosopher: I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. (From: John Cage, 1987)
Revolutionary leader enters the scene.
Event 4. Act I.1.
Leader (speaking with Italian accent): Comrades, companeros, y companeras,
Welcome, and thank you so much
For responding in such a great number to our invitation.
If you are here, I think that you think what I think,
And that is that we need new ideas!
Done with the past! Let’s borrow from the future!
I see you are perplexed, but please, follow me.
Where is the revolution? Have you given up on that?
Change, my beloved comrades, has been too slow.
We need to change change itself!
To do this, firstly,
the labor force should be separated from the means of production
so that they increase incrementally, exponentially, incessantly—
continuous investment in technological research.
Transformation is coming!
The change of change will bring progress,
the progress of progress will win the market,
And just a little instrumental use of the market will increase productivity ……
ACQUISITIVE DESIRE SONG
Flutist joins Leader:
Will increase
Will increase
Will increase
Event 5. Video: The Great Dictator, directed by Charlie Chaplin, 1940
The Dictator (Charlie Chaplin): You, the people, have the power—the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill that promise! They never will! Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world—to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness!
Citizens in the audience whisper in each other’s ears: “Did he say ‘men’s happiness’?”
Student with backpack runs through the scene, then stops, looks around, then points to the video projections and asks: “Wait, is this the White Men’s Studies Department?”
Event 6. Act I.2.
Leader: I know it’s not easy. I am not a visionary,
But I believe the produce we eat should change,
The crops we plant should change,
The commodities we sell should change.
Nothing should ever be the same—again.
The commodities we sell should change every five seconds,
The produce we consume should change every five minutes,
The genes of our food should change every five months—
It’s progress! We can do it!
Event 7. Doc 3. Video: Angela Davis, 2014
Angela Davis: The lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world. We don’t go further than, you know, what Marx called the “exchange value” of the actual object. We don’t think about the relations that that object embodies and that were important to the production of that object.
Event 8. Act I.3.
Leader: Since nothing shall change unless you change, you should change too.
You should change your ideas every month,
You should change your partner(s) every week,
You should change your clothes every day.
Citizens from the audience take their clothes off and bring them to the stage.
You should change your body,
You should change your habits,
You should change your phone number.
Just do it!
A citizen from the audience takes off her just-bought-sweater and brings it to the stage, along with H&M and other fast-fashion shopping bags.
Every contract will automatically expire within a month,
Every relationship will be consensually dissolved after a week,
Every screensaver will be randomly replaced at the end of the day.
Change your settings.
Everything shall change!
Event 9. Videos
Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon): Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi. (If we want everything to remain the same, then everything has to change.) (From: Il Gattopardo, directed by Luchino Visconti, 1963)
Lieutenant S.D. Bob “Snake” Plissken (Kurt Russell): The more things change, the more they stay the same. (From: Escape from New York, directed by John Carpenter, 1981)
Repeated by all onstage, who clap hands and invite the audience to join.
Event 10. Doc 5: Video, The Warriors, directed by Walter Hill, 1979
It’s morning., Tthe Warriors have fought the whole night. The metro arrives in Coney Island. Noise of the NYC metro. He gives her flowers. They look at the squalor of the city around.
Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh): What’s this for?
Swan (Michael Beck): I just hate seeing anything go to waste.
This is what we fought all night to get back to?
Dimmed lights. Angel of desire picks up wasted clothes from the floor and leaves a vase with a baobab plant on the scene.
ACT II
Scene: Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Long Island. While the revolutionary leader is playing golf, pesticides used to care for the golf club are polluting the ecosystem from which the Shinnecock people derive their livelihood. Plants that have been brought from Africa with the ballast from the Transatlantic Slave Trade are growing in the interstices of the golf club.
Event 11. Quotation: Philosopher and Flutist in dialogue
Philosopher: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned … (From: Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)
Philosopher: A blade of grass is as much Usen [force, spirit] as is a human, a mountain, or a molecule of oxygen. (From: Viola F. Cordova, “What Is It to Be Human in a Native American Worldview?,” 2007)
Event 12. Act II.1.
Leader enters wearing the same clothes and a baseball hat.
Leader: You look skeptical; you don’t believe in change. I see … You think they are just words, just theory—a mere utopia.
So, I’ll give you a practical example. Golf! Leading a ball into a very small hole …
Does the movement, pretending to have a golf club in his hands.
It’s a professional thing. You cannot improvise a golfer, like you cannot improvise social change.
Repeats the gesture.
One shot, one hour of work; two shots, two hours of work; the third shot is the most important one—it takes a lifetime.
Stops the pretend play and looks at the sky.
The revolution is not a trivial thing. But it will come!
Event 13. Act II.2. Recorded Voice: Revolutionary Leader
The recorded voice of the revolutionary leader comes from the outside, while he keeps playing golf as if the words did not belong to him.
We feel the heat,
We feel the cold,
We are all on the same boat …
… and the boat is sinking …
Event 14. Act II.3. Video: Previous Recording
LAMENTATIONS
All that is solid melts into air
All that is solid melts into air
All that is solid melts into air
Citizens from the audience repeat “All that is solid melts into air”
And comes back to us as acid rains
And comes back to us as carbon dioxide
And comes back to us as greenhouse gases
Event 15. Act II.4: Recorded Voice: Revolutionary Leader
An asphyxiating mixture of molecules
Keeps depositing all around us …
The rain is wet, the rain is dry;
We need more studies,
But they must change, too …
Event 16. Act II.5
Leader: Golf is not just relaxing! It’s a mental training and a spiritual exercise … (stumbles) Oops … a shin. Golf is unpredictable—you can trip over a shin or a skull! Yes, because, as it happens, this perfect and well-kept turf stands on a cemetery, a mass of bones, the remnants of a dead culture, an outdated civilization, one that was unable to understand evolution.
Event 17. Act II.6. Video: Previous Recording
LAMENTATIONS
All that is solid melts into air
All that is solid melts into air
All that is solid melts into air
Citizens from audience repeat: “All that is solid melts into air”
And comes back to us as sulfur dioxide
And comes back to us as nitrogen oxide
And comes back to us as their endless combination
Event 18. Act II.7: Recorded Voice: Revolutionary Leader
One and many, many and one:
NOx, NOy, NOz
The rain is wet, the rain is dry;
We need more studies,
But they have changed, too …
I did the change!
You did the change!
It did the change!
Who did the change?
Leader hears for a moment his own voice, but then brings his gaze back to playing golf.
Event 19. Act II.8, Video: Previous Recording
LAMENTATIONS:
All that is solid melts into air
All that is solid melts into air
All that is solid melts into air
Citizens from audience repeat: “All that is solid melts into air.”
And NO comes back to us as nitric oxide
And comes N2O back to us as nitrous oxide
And comes back NO2 to us as nitrogen dioxide
And comes back to N2O3 us as dinitrogen trioxide
And comes back to us N2O4 as dinitrogen tetroxide
And comes back to us as CF4 tetrafluoromethane
And comes back to us as hexafluoroethane C2F 2
And comes back to us as sulfur hexafluoride SF6
And comes back to us as nitrogen trifluoride NF3
GREENHOUSE GASES SONG
NF3
SF6
C2F2
CF4
N2O4
N203
NO2
N2O
NO
Event 20. Act II.9
Leader keeps playing golf.
Leader: Do you understand its beauty now? Replacing a dead, finished thing with something alive, pulsating, full of meaning …
Some will say, “But how?” A cemetery is a place of memory, a place where we remember who we were in order to understand who we are becoming… Someone will be scandalized. But only the ignorant are scandalized, this is progress! The cost of the new world—breaking the chains of the past so we can build a new and bright future—isn’t this what we’re talking about? Freedom! We are no longer waiting for well-respected intellectuals to write our history from behind a desk; history belongs to those who make it, and I will make it!
Revolutionary leader breaks the vase with the plant. Exiting, he murmurs the following words:
Sorry, WE will make it …
Golf … to be able to play and relax … while we change the world …
Event 21. Doc 6: SodaStream Advertising
I’d like to live in harmony with every living thing.
To spread love and cherish all that planet earth may bring.
How many bottles would it take before we face the cost?
We can’t keep using all this plastic or soon we’ll all be lost.
Now it is time for a change. It’s in our hands.
Now it is time for a change. Come on people, less singing, more doing!
Now it is time for a change. Let’s do this!
Event 22. Doc 7: Brecht’s Song “On Suicide”
In such a country and at such a time
There should be no melancholy evenings
Even high bridges over the rivers
And the hours between the night and morning
And the long, long winter time as well
All these are dangerous!
For in view of all the misery
People just throw, in a few seconds time
Their unbearable lives away.
Event 23. Video: Naomi Klein, 2022; Kyle Whyte
Naomi Klein: Climate change isn’t an issue to add to the list to worry about next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinction, telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet, telling us that we have to evolve.
Kyle Whyte: For Indigenous people, we’ve already been through the apocalypse. We’ve already been through the dystopia, and we’re living in a dystopia right now. We’ve already lost hundreds of plants, animals, and insects, and habitats we’ve relied on, and while the actual, you know, “save the planet” itself may not be extinct globally, it’s extinct to us when it’s no longer accessible, and so in that sense, we’re not making decisions based on the absolute dread of, you know, losing an iconic species; we’re actually trying to figure out how to rebuild our societies given that we’ve already lost so much.
ACT III
Scene: Rural village. Natives witness a celebration of the Madonna’s ascension to paradise. A statue of the Madonna is in the middle of the scene, while images of her ascension are on the screen. Images of Natives puzzled by what they see. Revolution has now become The New Economy.
Event 24. Philosopher and Flutist in dialogue
Philosopher: The difference between the American Indian and the Western ways of perceiving reality lies in the tendency of the American Indian to view space as spherical and time as cyclical, whereas the non-Indian tends to view space as linear and time as sequential. The circular concept requires all “points” that make up the sphere of being to have a significant identity and function, while the linear model assumes that some “points” are more significant than others. … The Christian attitude toward salvation reflects this basic stance: one can be “saved” only if one believes in a Savior who appeared once and will not come again until “the end of time.’’ (From: Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop, 1986)
While a recorded voice reads the Tocotín, the Madonna enters, carried on a pedestal:
Tla ya timohuica,
totlazo Zuapilli,
maca ammo, Tonantzin,
titechmoilcahuíliz.
Ma nel in Ilhuícac
huel timomaquítiz,
¿amo nozo quenman
Timotlalnamíctiz?
In moayolque mochtin
huel motilinizque;
tlaca amo, tehuatzin
ticmomatlanelíz
Ca mitztlacamatí
motlazo Piltzintli,
mac tel, in tepampa
xicmotlatlauhtili.
Tlaca ammo quinequi,
xicmoilnamiquili
ca monacayotzin
oticmomaquiti.
Mochichihualayo
oquimomitili,
tla motemicítá
ihuan Tetepitzin.
Blessed lady,
Do not go,
Mother, do not
Cause us woe.
If to heaven
You ascend,
Will you still
Your love extend?
All your people
Will lament.
Do not add
To their torment.
Your dear son
Will heed your word.
Let your prayer
For us be heard.
Now let him from
Want be free;
For once he fed
From your body:
He drank your milk,
The little one,
Now to dreams,
Let him succumb
(From: Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, also known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Tocotín, English translation by Margaret Sayers Peden, 1676)
Recording of the Tocotín ends. Madonna is standing on a speaking podium.
Event 25. Video: Christen Clifford
I want an end to rape; I want an end to sexual violence. I want an end to rape and I want an end to gender-based violence. I think we are all the same inside, regardless of color and class and sex and sexual orientation and gender. I don’t know if I believe in equality, per se, because I think that is just trying to get everyone to want the things that white men have had all the time, and I think that we need new structures. But equity certainly, I would like; I would like an equitable world free of sexual violence. We are all PINK INSIDE!
Event 26. New Economy, Christianity Dialogue
The New Economy enters on a scooter, dressed in a white T-shirt and black jacket, singing Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria:
Ave Maria
Gratia plena
Maria, gratia plena
Maria, gratia plena
(Coughs, to clear his throat) Hey, Hail Mary … How are you? I see you well, so, so, how can I say? . . . so full of grace … (laughs) Oops! Sorry, I didn’t realize you don’t have much of a sense of humor … It must be omniscience—it kills it.
That’s what I like about you! Silence. You’re good at that, Mary, you’re very good … you are a master at this. I, on the other hand, I actually do things. What do you need? I’ll bring it home to you in half an hour. No need to get off the couch. The future is the next ten minutes. Conveniently within your reach.
Why an afterlife? “If you book and pay for two or more consecutive nights at Paradise Island Hotel (in Bahamas) with your American Express Card, you can save 10 percent off the room rate!”
Do you understand, Mary? You’re no longer useful—out of fashion. Because like you, or even better than you, I can now give birth to value, without any labor, without even touching the sweaty, stinky body of the laborer! Ahhh (exhales) … Immaculate conception! What more can you do?
Ah, of course, ascend to heaven thanks to that special trick of yours, the Holy Spirit …
True, but, now … I ascend, too!
Thanks to ammonium perchlorate, aluminum, and iron oxide, I will touch the moon! I will take everybody to the moon—actually, I will be the moon! And you, you dear Mary, you will remain a finger pointing to it.
Here I am and I go; I have to make my destiny, and yours, and you should thank me, because—let’s face it—I have freed you. You can now finally rest in peace and stop all that back and forth from heaven. Tiring, right? But now you are done!
Unveils the Madonna. It is a Black woman.
And I ascend …
The New Economy exits on the scooter but briefly comes back to say: Ah, I love you mom! Arcordt’l, mà, ch’a t voi bén!
Event 27. Doc 9: Madonna Space Shuttle
Video merging a Madonna statue with Elon Musk’s space shuttle being launched to the moon. Followed by silence and darkness.
Event 28. Epilogue
Full lights return to the scene. Angels of desire get up, bring repaired clothes, leave them on the floor, and start repairing the vase—in silence. Philosopher and flutist join them with dustpans. Revolution brings brooms. Noises from New York City subways fade into the scene. Philosopher, flutist, and revolutionary leader ask for help from the public. All joined in the work of repair and exchanging brooms and dustpans. Angels of desire put repaired clothes onto each other. Lights are dimming while the repair work continues. Philosopher and flutist go to the podium:
The dream is gone, human waste is all that’s left, so now it’s time to take it back.
All: Revolution against compulsory occupation!
The old to create the new,
Restitution as reparation,
Drop after drop, until it rains.
Revolution against compulsory occupation!
A line, against the phantasmagoria of commodities.
The world, against the constant flux of capital.
Cosmic love, against mortgage romance.
Revolution against compulsory occupation!
The new, through the same.
Eternal return, against empty difference.
Touch, against the excess of seeing.
A mountain against the sea: next to the sea, made by the sea.
Event 29. End of the Prelude
All exit, walking backward. This continued as an invitation to various speakers to share their thoughts.
