WASTELAND UTOPIAS Screening
Sunday May 7th at 6pm Pay What You Wish
The screening will be followed by a live-zoom conversation with director, David Sherman facilitated by Reich-inspired Therapist and artist, Rose Kaplan-Bomberg
(strobe warning: video contains stroboscopic effects)
In conjunction with our current exhibition "Painting is Frozen Music," Vox Populi will be Screening "Wasteland Utopias" a film which explores the intersection of two radically different utopian thinkers: mega-developer Del Webb and outsider psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich. Each found his way into southern Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the late 1950s-Webb building his colossal, panoptically-planned retirement community Sun City and Reich conducting his weather manipulation experiments using Orgone Energy. This unlikely pairing provokes a hallucinatory, magic-conceptualist examination of the disintegrating fabric that connects man with nature, evoking questions about both ecological and social sustainability. Using found footage, documentary interviews, and narrative tableaux, the film interweaves contradictory narratives and critically poetic observations. By juxtaposing these two thinkers-who represent ostensibly opposing visions of a still-undefined future-Sherman asks viewers to consider a multiplicity of perspectives on our endangered natural and social environments.
"Masterpiece" - Craig Baldwin
"It's rare to see a film whose aesthetic principles so elementally parallel the subjects they intend to depict." - Owen O'Toole
Screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Echo Part Film Center, Documental, California Institute of the Arts
Rose Kaplan-Bomberg:
Rose is in training to practice what is now generally described as “somatic therapy,” a type of psychoanalysis pioneered by Wilhelm Reich, who believed that the “pysche” (mind) and “soma” (body) were not just connected, but actually functionally identical — yin and yang. She is interested in Reich’s “Jewishness,” particularly as opposed to that of Sigmund Freud, with whom Reich initially studied before being excommunicated from the psychoanalytic world, and what this narrative of exile has to say about Jewish assimilation in the 20th century and today. Broadly, she is curious about 20th-century “western” thinkers who bridged mind and body in their work, including Reich, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Ray Peat, and in what ways they drew on, or broke with, older holistic traditions in China, India, various Jewish communities, and indigenous cultures past and present. She is a writer, musician, and photographer.