Sexo Idiota Booth

antecedent

this is my previous experience on the building of a poetic text using interview like fragments for a final montage. This piece was called babylon and is centered only in the sound of different languages.

This is also a sign of how the project will look.




THE PROJECT

This project will be performed during the Sexo Idiota poetic recital in the Book Fair in Quito. It will happen on the 28th of November from 16:30 to 18:00. We will have some kind of sex-booth like the ones found in Times Square. People that attend the recital will be able to pay one dollar to get a poem of theirs filmed in a Bolex shot. Which means 24 seconds. The poems will be part of the mockumentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad, a film that will try to prove that there is no space for poets in today’s cities in general, but in Quito in particular. The people will be asked to give permission for using their poems in the film in the same way that Warner Bros. Studios was "notifying" the people walking in front of the MET museum in NY on monday the 13th of November of this year, that if they "were there" they were automatically granting permission for Warner Bros to have them in the "program pilot" they were shooting.

What the project dwells on is the idea of creating from the space that is given to one. There is this psychological theory that says that people are not inherently "good" or "bad" but that it is the "system" that shapes their behavior. From what I understand it has to do with behaviorism but revised. Behaviorism is sometimes considered harmful. The person that explained this theory to me, a psychology grad student said that this theory was developed as the digital revolution was happening, the silicon valley, the internet boom. The question that we want to arise is how to own our homes again, our cities, the cities we live in. It is a matter of property, it is a matter of class, it is a matter of education, it is something that is happening now and that is affecting a big part of the population.

Finding a spot in the city when one can “be heard” (be filmed) expressing oneself in such a free a powerful way as poetry will hopefully produce a catharsis in the citizen. Nonetheless, It is important to mention that the booth is modeled after the sex booths in which people can watch pornography (if you may, express oneself in such a powerful way as masturbating, would be the equivalent) which implies a certain mood to it that we will try to attain by: a curtain, the fact that the filmmaker who is shooting will be dressed as a male pornstar of the seventies, money being part of the citizen’s right idea (the more money you have the more you can express yourself) and the time constrain (24 seconds)

A nasty curtain
B male pornstar
C money
D time


The Sexo Idiota booth deals with the idea of the possibility of a public intimacy, which also links this project to the dynamics of today’s social networks as means of making business as well as spaces one can use (when actually one has no space in the real city).



filming the context-the city


The sexo idiota booth will be first installed in Quito. We will present this project, the 24 24-second films it will produce, as part of the documentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad. It is key for the project then to be able to establish a point of view of the city from the perspective of the poets, the artists. For this matter there will be two strategies to make the city part of the film.

a) We will follow 3 artists in Quito, filming each one of them in a 100 feet roll of film.
b) To shape Quito we will do the same process with 3 artists in NY, taking New York as the "model" for what a cultural city is expected to be.


Quito

We will divide the city in North, Center and South. Following one artist of each area.


The North: The project of mapping la delicia "new ways en la delicia" will be used as a scouting guide for the north part shooting. The artist to follow will be Jorge Gomez, one of the poets from the collective Sexo Idiota.

>I decided not to film¨"la delicia" as I had already made such map and document with the places I wanted to remember. Instead I decided to shoot a scene with Jorge Gómez and include Diego Ortuño, both being poets of the poetic colective¨"sexo idiota".

The Center We will follow Juan Carlos Donoso, or let him guide us through the center part of the city. He is an upcoming filmmaker that has worked with the spaces of his area in a critical way.

>Instead of following Juan Carlos I ended up articulating a proposal (filming) of his to document a avenue called "10 de Agosto", which is the main artery of the city. He shot a videoclip of one of the songs of my band "queen size bed" using us as a pretext to put the camera on the obscured buildings and businesses of this used-to-be-prosperous place. We were almost badly mugged.

The South For this area we will follow Susana with who I periodically shoot "domingos con susana" a photographic project of a portrait of the south. She will be the one handling the film camera and choosing the places to photograph (in film) as I drive.

>here some pictures of our sunday (there is the film coming up):







NY


The shooting of NY has already started as one weekend in October and a weekend in November have already been shot. This coming weekend of November and last one will also be shot.

The Characters we are following are:


a) Andres Noboa, a musician that lives in Queens and that is going to grad school with who we made this piece while shooting him.



-Last weekend we shot the final scene of the NY part in the Chelsea Hotel.



b) Maria Jose Viteri, an actress that lives in Brooklyn that is also going to grad school.

c) We will try to follow Danielle Bernstein, a documentary filmmaker that has worked in Ecuador and Gabriel Roldos, an organizer, a relational artist.



this is a call for poems i did. i have to make a new one now because there are new conditions in terms of dates. but i wanted to share the process.



this is the new one


LIST

so far by talking to people
we have appointed new facts for the project

1) the filmmaker that is inside the booth filming the people reading the 24 second poems after paying one dollar should resemble a male porn star of the seventies
2) it is really important that there is a curtain, in that it resembles the nastiness of the shower curtain
3) the idea we are working on is the possibility of public intimacy
4) the idea of making money part of the process adds to the nastiness feeling of attending a real sex booth
5) we are getting ourselves into somewhat of a greater poem dynamic as if it were an exquisit corpse exercise
6) we are still wondering how to make this poems fit the title of the documentary: Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad
7) the customers should be required to get a formal jacket on to resemble some of the customers of the real booths.