Magma Studio is an emulation of the circumstances under which a modern person can lose his civility for a short period of time and turn to their vitality. By using metal, wood, stone, custom made furniture, primitive graffiti and hard night lighting, we tried to put together a program that would allow the guest to quickly reboot. After rebooting, they experience only the essential fundamental feelings.
My name is Dima Prokhorenko. The body I was born in, is full of raging energy. For me, I can’t stand still in one place, I constantly want to move. I find it difficult to suppress my impulsive desire, I want to bring it into action. I walk fast and I feel good, but I still want to be faster. I hear the music and I want to get into it the same way you can enter a river and dissolve in it. The legend of Magma Studio is an illustration of the feelings that I experience from living in my body. Magma Studio is a space in which guests can experience the feelings that I experience.
Flight
An aircraft of the international airlines, flying over the ocean, goes out of control. Communication is lost, systems fail, so the aircraft captain decides to land the aircraft, planning to ditch it. But on the way down to the water landing, there is an island within sight with a flat area good for landing. The crew lands successfully on a table land, stopping the aircraft at the foot of the mountain rising above the island.
Communication and urgent alarm systems don’t work. Passengers leave the aircraft. Using the supplies taken from the plane, the crew and passengers start exploring the island and find it completely uninhabited. The foot of the mountain that they landed on turns out to be an active volcano. The soil around the mountain is volcanic with sparse bushes. In the southeastern part of the island they find a river, and in the southwest, a forest with fruit trees and animals. In the eastern part of the forest there are petrified trees. People start to settle down and to make plans for their rescue.
Magma
For several generations, the tribe lived on the island, resulting in all of their languages and cultures getting mixed up. Creating one single language, one single culture. The tribe takes water from the river, in the same place that they fish. Having discovered the edible crops on the island, the tribe grows plants, breeds domesticated animals and hunts the wild ones. They build light portable shacks from wood and leaves.
The volcano is the tribe’s neighbor, all these years not sleeping, belching fiery rivers from the bowels of the earth and affecting the culture of the tribe. For the tribe, the volcano became a deity, severe and self-willed. It depends on his whims, whether the tribe will have to move their huts to a new place, drive cattle, and whether they will starve or not. To survive, the tribe is forced to keep on moving.
The body of the device, on which the ancestors arrived on this land so long ago, has turned into a sanctuary, painted with ritual symbols and spells. Here the tribe brings the gifts and makes sacrifices on the stone altar, in an attempt to gain the stern deity’s favor. From generation to generation, the tribe’s priests pass on the knowledge, the culture of spells, symbols and dances, with the help of the tribe talking to the volcano.
But there is a secret hidden in the Magma tribe. Generation after generation living in such proximity to a volcano, consuming water and food that flows and grows on volcanic land, the tribesmen soaked up the power and the energy of their deity. And along with the fear and the worship to their god, there is an eruption rising in each member of the tribe, a desire to give a dare to a powerful deity. And then we here a wild cry and one or several tribesmen start dancing all together, unable to maintain the order anymore. This means that this person can no longer conquer the energy raging in him, and that he wants to give a dare to the volcano.
The same night, the tribe’s priests bring the ceremonial dye from the Skull Cave, which they extract from the plants growing in the dark. This dye glows in the moonlight. The tribe gathers around the sanctuary, makes a fire, and tribespeople paint themselves with magic symbols and start the ritual dance around a person, either woman or man, who gives a dare to the volcano, putting him into a trance.
Finally after shouting a spell, a painted person with witchcraft symbols rushes to the top of the volcano, jumps over the crevices, crosses the fiery rivers on pieces of rock, climbs the cliffs, and rises to the crater itself. Here he has to perform a dance of power, looking the deity right into the eyes, in the mouth of a volcano – right on the boiling lava. With his inner fire, man tries to control the will of the deity.
Legend has it that the one who manages to frighten a deity, and bend it to his will, will be able to control the power of the volcano and choke down its eruption.
Acknowledgement
A huge thanks to the artist Grisha, for the petroglyphs dug out on the stone, the pictograms on the studio walls, and the illustrations to the legend. Lastly, a thank you too Arina Tropinova for the books selection in the studio’s library.
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