Hendrik Verwoerd in an experiment he carried out in the 1930’s named ‘A Method for the Experimental Production of Emotions’ uses various combinations of colours and symbols to elicit in his test subjects various emotions. Verwoerd studied as a psychologist before ever entering into politics, even achieving a doctorate magna cum laude.

His highly mediatic experiment goes on to succeed in its ambitions in creating: “compassion, shame, embarrassment, malicious joy, anger and vexation.” Flatland emerges from research into this experiment and how its outcomes could be overlaid onto the propaganda and media manipulation during the apartheid regime.
Flatland takes the audience through a performance-lecture that traverses the research into the psychological experiments while overlaying juxtaposing them onto South Africa’s past and present.

Sound Production: Fabio Cachucho

See more:
http://eduardocachucho.com/?portfolio=flatland

Flatland

Randjeslaagte Sound. AAC encoded, 16 bit recording.

Contemporary Johannesburg is examined through mirror-recording- devices that capture reflected video footage of the city by way of performative walks that trace the early outlines of the city (a triangle named Randjeslaagte). These performances have taken place with three invited professionals in the field of art, architecture, urbanism and performance. Thireshen Govender, Stephen Hobbs, and Donna Kukama engage in a visual conversation while trying to build their own view on one of the three axes that formed the Randjeslaagte triangle, today known as Johannesburg. The so called Looking Glass is here the mirroring device through which these dialogues between past and present, experts and passers by, take the form of a video on a city and the representations that define its urban form.
Read more about it here: eduardocachucho.com/archives/portfolio/randjeslaagte

Eduardo Cachucho