videoart.ch

MONTEWOOD HOLLYVERITA’

Una Szeemann - MONTEWOOD HOLLYVERITA’ (30'' Preview)

2003
SD NTSC, 4:3, Sound, 26'

Montewood Hollyverita’ is a video film combining Monte Veritá and Hollywood. Monte Veritá, the mountain of truth, was founded in the early 1900’s in Switzerland by reformers, vegetarians, writers, musicians, dancers, revolutionaries, psychoanalysts, emancipators, architects, theosophists, and anarchists, people who wanted to make the world a better place.

I relocate the Monte Veritá in Hollywood to give it a real star attitude, play with the myths, place it in today’s time and recreate various characters from Monte Veritá using different artists.

The founders of the Monte Veritá Ida Hofmann and Henri Oedenkoven will be interpreted by two major bodybuilders. The physically intense dancer and dance teacher Rudolf von Laban will be played by Jason Rhoades; Elisar von Kupffer, the homosexual writer, painter and lover striving for an androgynous paradise, by Paul McCarthy and Hugo Ball one of the founders of the Dada movement by Henri Vincent, just to name a few.