SSB is proud to present Artist/Writer Arturo Vidich as the first SSB Away Artist in Residence at our PLAZA BLANCA location in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Vidich will be in New Mexico throughout July and August to work on his first novel, Stage Fall, as well as its screenplay and storyboard for feature animation. Stage Fall is a literary science fiction novel, an interspecies love and loss story set in the perilous wonderland of 1950s Soviet Union—redubbed the Motherland. Stage Fall employs biting satire, fantasy, and alternative history to deconstruct the obsession our contemporary cultures have with self-reinvention, performed identities, and the suppression of memory.
The story follows the misadventures of Pushkin the Dog, an amnesiac canine scouring the cratered post-war landscape for a forever home. His blunt inner guide, Voks, speaks to him through mystical Puzzles, dredging up the past, urging him toward his personal truth, and away from his charismatic travel companion, Dasha. She is a former Motherland war pilot who deals in subversive contraband for the outlaw Underground movement; she is good at running away. Together they tour a bizarre Living Newspaper performance called, “The Universe Is A Totalitarian Regime!” that lampoons State propaganda using science metaphors, and Dasha screens her kinoizdat—cutups of smuggled Hollywood KinoReels—out of her ZIS-155 bus decked out like a rocket ship.
About Arturo Vidich:
Arturo Vidich (1981) was born and raised in New York City. Vidich’s work interrogates human-animal relationships, and the historical, poetic, and visceral narratives therein. These relationships provide a context for exploring mortality, ecology, and what it means to inhabit a body on biological, cognitive, and metaphysical levels. Artworks are primarily staged multi-media productions, but often cross over into non-performative standalone sculptures and video. Recurring media include the body (dance, theater, and performance), text (written, or spoken), sculpture (wood, steel, and electronics), video (live, or cinematic), and sound (live, or pre-rendered).
His work has been presented by performance venues and visual art spaces throughout the New York City, and elsewhere, at AT1 Projects in Los Angeles, Wesleyan University’s Zilka Gallery, Princeton University, Dublin’s Red Stables and the 2013 Fringe Festival, and Moscow’s ZIL Cultural Center. Vidich has been making performances in New York City for 14 years, and received several notable grants (Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, DTW Suitcase Fund), and institutional commissioning support (Jerome Foundation, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, Chasama, Danspace Project). His performances have been reviewed or mentioned in various online and print periodicals such as the New York Times, Culturebot.org, Wall Street Journal, Gazetta Kommersant, The New Yorker, and others.
SSB AWAY provides crucial time and space for artists to germinate ideas that might otherwise be marginalized during the intensity of public life and artistic production. For more information about SSB Away take a look at the SSB AWAY page, or email us at ssbaway@someseriousbusiness.org